Comment by sillysaurusx
3 hours ago
That's also a reason the big labs stopped. Publishing is most valuable to people who have no other way to get the attention of smart strangers. Once you can hire nearly anyone and everyone already returns your calls, the main remaining effect of publishing is to tell your competitors which things worked.
This is what happens to every field as it turns from a science into an industry. Chemists published freely until dyes started being worth money, and then the interesting work moved into company labs and stopped coming out.
Which is a very ironic and selfish situation when your business model dependent mostly on model training based on available published data, academic and non-academic.
That's why we should enforce copyleft
That has nothing to do with anything. If you publish a copyleft paper, that doesn't compel someone who makes a product based on your paper to publish more papers.
4 replies →
> Chemists published freely until dyes started being worth money
Notably this is exactly what patents are intended to combat. And while US IP law is clearly very broken it does at least largely accomplish this stated goal. Much (but certainly not all) industrial chemistry has made it into the academic literature.
Not that the same logic necessarily applies to AI research (ie algorithms aka math and their implementations). And I'm actually happy about that because the cost of doing the research is so much lower. There's a long list of reasons that the average person living in a residential area can't do industrial chemistry as a hobby.
To your dye example, yttrium indium manganese blue was the first commercially viable inorganic blue pigment discovered in ~200 years, is the only known environmentally safe one, and was openly published in the literature. It's also under an exclusive license. (TBF though unless the chemical is unusually difficult to synthesize not publishing would be rather pointless in this day and age given the utterly absurd capabilities of modern analytical techniques.)
It depends on the field, and to some extent on the particular patent officer assigned, but one of the failings of the US patent system is many patents don't actually provide enough details to reproduce the result. And even if they do they don't (usually) include ancillary information like the discovery process, properties of the invention etc.
i wish more people would publish the things that didn't work. i'd like everything, but the exploration of searched negative space is so wasteful.
There are other reasons. One is for career development of your researchers. Another is to be good citizens, in good standing, in the community of scientific researchers. Another is to flex on people and buy class and respectability - to comport oneself as the “old money” does.
This academic publish and industry doesn't is an incorrect view. Academics also hold off from publishing groundbreaking science in order to protect their research edge. You shouldn't see this as industry bad as driven by profits and academia is free from career incentives and money.