While open-access journals have grown rapidly, researchers still have to read the paywalled articles in commercial journals.
I always assumed scientists were free to ask any question, pursue any line of inquiry without fear or reprisal.
We have to overthrow the idea that it's a diversion from 'real' work when scientists conduct high-quality research in the open. Publicly funded science should be open science. Improving the way that science is done means speeding us along in curing cancer, solving the problem of climate change and launching humanity permanently into space.
Science doesn't have flags. Science doesn't have borders.
Elsevier operates by racket: if you do not send money, you will not read any papers. On my website, any person can read as many papers as they want for free, and sending donations is their free will. Why Elsevier cannot work like this, I wonder?
Science knows no boundaries, and efforts to create barriers – whether to keep new ideas within or to prevent new ones from entering from the outside – have universally proved harmful to progress.
The lecture was a tribute to the Russian Physicist & Dissident, Andrei Sakharov
Workers must root out the idea that by keeping the results of their labors to themselves a fortune will be assured to them. Patent fees are so much wasted money. The flying machine of the future will not be born fully fledged and capable of a flight for 1,000 miles or so. Like everything else it must be evolved gradually. The first difficulty is to get a thing that will fly at all. When this is made, a full description should be published as an aid to others. Excellence of design and workmanship will always defy competition.
Our lab had always refrained from keeping our studies secret.
Most scientific revelations happened after the pursuit of knowledge quit being secret and hermetic.