Next, it would be great if published standards were freely available. It is astonishing to me that they are not.
THIS. Especially for things like the NEC and other building safety regulations. Then move on to ISO/ANSI/IEC/etc standards.
I don't accept the idea that copyright provides value here.
You are advocating for "secret" laws, which are pay to view, but must legally be followed. I don't think there's any possible ethical argument to be made that's an acceptable state.
You could say the same of literally any other aspect of society. Why can't it be free? Well, someone has to pay. It's a nice thought, until it meets reality.
Regulation has a cost and a benefit. Compliance has a cost and a benefit. Non compliance has a cost and can have a benefit. People using/complying to standards usually benefit and are therefore good people to have pay the compliance cost, rather than shifting the tax burden onto society as a whole (someone else can pay)! It's not free, we just need to pay.
(If you're not paying, you're the product)
I'm literally paying those folks to do the job anyways with my property taxes. Then I'm paying them again to actually file a permit. Then I'm paying them again for the inspection.
The costs of standards development is a pittance compared to most other expenditures these entities make.
Your approach leads to de-facto guild systems where inside knowledge is transferred within a legally permitted group, and then used to extract more tax from people through the form of elevated service prices and reduced competition. Further compounded by the fact that this inside knowledge is, quite literally, just the legal requirement.
Frankly - no. I cannot disagree more strongly. I don't believe secret, pay-to-view laws should allowed. Full stop.
If ignorance of the law is not an excuse - the law damn well better by publicly displayed and accessible for all.
My county doesn't even have the modern NEC codes available for library checkout (the latest edition they have is 2001).
---
I don't mind paying for the regulation, I think the current closed source and copyright protected payment structure is unethical. Frankly - I also don't think it's working very well.
Is it that the taxes are already high enough, and we feel that the existing tax base should also cover the cost of standards development, maintenance and distribution? By what mechanism would individual government bodies levying taxes direct the appropriate funds to standards related activities?
If you think that the regulatory and building code system isn't working and want to act to change the status quo, you should travel to other jurisdictions that don't have a robust system of standards. Then it would become abundantly clear that standards development and adherence is expensive and worth every penny.
Yes, a guild system, it's called the building trades, we have this where I live and it works pretty well.
As for secret laws, well, welcome to the western world. No one ever told us what all of the laws are that we're expected to follow. We are never issued a little book. We are expected to learn, read, ask, and pay for resources required in order to live as functioning members of society. There are other things we have to pay for. Clothes, for instance, are not issued for free by the government, but wearing them is a legal requirement in many jurisdictions. Do we consider that governments should provide those for free?
Standards aren't free to publish and update, and currently the only revenue source is Pay-To-Access which most agree is problematic. The problem with government funded (e.g. funding the ones with legal enforcement), is that then we're picking winners and losers, and it may cause stagnation (or monopolies).
I don't like it. I also don't have a better idea.
The government funds libraries and the grants for NIH research. It's already in the business of funding both sorts of institutions. Why, then, shouldn't it also simply self-publish results for the research it paid for?
The winners would be basically everyone, the losers' publishers. Publishing is already just a parasitic artifact of over-privatization of what should be government ran systems.
It isn't as if publishing has a large cost in general. In fact, the government already runs a huge publishing operation in the form of PACER. Further, anyone taking grant money is already heavily working with the government to convince it to fund them.
If you'd like the public to somehow pick up the tab for drafting them, sure.
I've been doing some work with colleagues at Cambridge and Imperial over the last year on using LLMs to improve evidence synthesis, primarily trying to find papers on the effectiveness of certain Conservation interventions. It's becoming clear that you really need to move beyond screening papers only by title and abstract - there's often information buried deep within papers that can only be found with access to full text. My colleague Anil Madhavapeddy has written a bit about our adventures in trying to ingest full-text academic papers: https://anil.recoil.org/notes/uk-national-data-lib
But for something like that you need full texts to look into results sections. I'm very curious how you're dealing with information contained in tables, or if you're dealing with snippets of text from the full-text alone. Have you poked around Elicit yet?
Most of the papers are constructed from their latex sources so there's an easy way to undo it i guess.
As others pointed out reviewers often aren't compensated.
Pubmed is an amazing resource.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/
The annotate a lot of the papers with this “Mesh” terms, which is a controlled vocabulary used to help index all those papers. They update with new annotations daily.
The peer review process is almost entirely coordinated by unpaid associate editors. They make initial manuscript assessments, solicit reviewers, and moderate the review and response process.
"journal staff moving papers through the peer review system" may happen at a small number of prestige journals such as Advanced Materials, but for most Q1 journals it is all volunteer work. That is the business model that makes companies like Elsevier billions.
Also, are publishing monopolies like Elsevier really all that necessary?
the subscription fees are a parasitic joke in the first place. science should be free, now and forever, and peer review is generally done on a voluntary basis anyway
- the govt (i.e. taxpayers) and universities pay for research to be done
- once the research is done, the universities pay journals to review and publish their work
- the journals then get academics to review the work
- the journals do not pay the reviewers for this
- the journals then charge exorbitant fees for the universities and members of the public to view the work that they as a collective paid for
- from which exactly none of those fees go back to the original creators or funders of the research
-- so in conclusion, the journals get paid from both sides, supplier and consumer, at no point paying anything to the funders or creators of their product, except perhaps in tax. their sole costs are administrative, and maybe some printing, if they even still bother to do that
these institutions deserve to die. they are cancerous parasites leeching the veins of science, extracting money at every opportunity, taking funding from research, all for the sake of a service that can largely be boiled down to prestige for a price
>if journals ceased to exist tomorrow I doubt anyone here would volunteer to do the task of what the journals do now
this simply isn't true. there is a growing movement where academics do this very thing, founding their own fairer journals that aren't owned by Elsevier
And they tried their hardest to kill it because journals believe they're entitled to extract a century of rent from work they did not perform.
Glad to see better policy happening -- even if all too slowly and only in some areas.
Anyway, the warning is: liberal free countries can stop these things if they want to.
So… it’s up to us the public. Why can’t university libraries make their books and journals properly accessible in a digital format, like libgen and sci-hub? Why can’t they make their whole collection RAG retrivable, for that matter?
But I agree, countries should not allow this kind of authoritarian practices.
I am still unable to find any news about court orders relating to Sci-Hub in particular. The biggest ISPs appear to not publish their block lists unfortunately. I did find that Delta publishes their list[1] of blocked sites which includes only sites for which I can also find news about court orders, and does not include Sci-Hub.
I queried the KPN DNS servers and they return a KPN IP address for LibGen, but a DDOS-Guard IP address for Sci-Hub, so that leads me to believe KPN doesn't block them either at least.
I don't think I've met any other researchers who prefer paywalls. The problem is the most prestigious journals (Cell, Nature, Science, etc) have extremely parasitic business models - you pay a bunch of money to publish in them, and then other people pay them to read. But in return you get a CV boost.
They charge out the nose for open access (the researcher pays). With funding as tight as it is these days, maybe we'll see a shift to more a ethical publishing model as researchers start questioning whether it's worth it.
This statement begs the question, though I understand why it seemingly 'makes sense'. Your tax money also funds lots of things you don't have access to or visibility of, and it's not clear how far your logic should extend. Should you have access to intelligence assessments, or the ability to purchase any technology developed with government funding? What about licenses to patents developed with the aid of government funding? How about access to government or external labs, or the use of their equipment?
https://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-25-1...
>Effective with the date of this notice and until the details of the new foreign collaboration award structure are released, NIH will not issue awards to domestic or foreign entities (new, renewal or non-competing continuation), that include a subaward to a foreign entity.
No more collaborations for US researchers.
> The 2024 Public Access Policy, originally slated to go into effect on December 31, 2025, will now be effective as of July 1, 2025.
Even if it originated with the previous admin, Jay Bhattacharya has decided to accelerate it. Seems like a good policy that both administrations agree on.
They effectively ended research they didn't want to release, wasting funding already provided, while counting it as wasteful spending.
They provide little to no real value beyond a CV trophy and only carry out the bare minimum to coordinate peer review. Their largest impact is siphoning tens of thousands of dollars from labs, and millions from cash-strapped university libraries.
Even if the current administration wasn't attacking university funding, the publishing system is in desperate need of reform.
Though arguably orthogonal with their goal of financially starving the research institutions, too.
He has already fired over a thousand NIH employees and frozen or cancelled billions in grants in his first couple months on the job.
While we're talking about NIH, here's a fun game: try going to https://www.nih.gov/ and putting gender in the search box. Play around and see how many Forbidden Words you can discover!
Spanish is uncensored: Not censored: 'diversidad', 'equidad', 'genero' Censored: 'inclusion' (ha, same word as in english, duh) (Also 'inclusión', surprisingly)
It really doesn't seem to be a broad sweeping thing, mostly just 'DEI' terms forwarded in apache or something, which makes sense. That gender is included seems to be an outlier. (Though would be curious to see if you found any others)
And voilà, I just got 1666 (heh) results free from the censors!
Compared to their other actions of censorship, this is such a small thing, but for some reason this in particular makes me distressed. Possibly because it shows how paranoid they are about letting out any information that goes against their narrative; that they're willing to do stupid, reckless things to control the narrative; that they enforce obedience to their ideology at all levels. It just seems like the entrance to a dark future.
It feels like they're trying to rewrite history... Which is a term I searched the Internet for, and funnily enough the first result was a blog post from the current White House administration. https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/03/rest... (My other worry is that everything they accuse of others is a projection of their own intentions onto others. This seems less absurd every passing day. Otherwise this would be laughable.) So I guess the White House is explicit in they they're rewriting history to the True history. Thank you so much. Finally, we can be united under ONE Nation, ONE Truth, and ONE God. Sorry, I got a bit over-excited there.
For time travelers: searching for "gender" just directs you back to nih.gov, instead of directing you to the search results page.
> when they censored and thrown all their weight into suppression of [the lab leak theory]
Can you state plainly what you mean by this? What precisely did the NIH do that constitutes "censored and thrown all their weight into suppression" in your mind?
What happened is that scientists who believed a theory advocated for it over competing theories... which is how science happens. Granted it so happened that some of those advocates were very notable and well-regarded scientists, but again: this is literally the story of science. It's constantly a question of when someone's prior success and credibility hits a wall and gets successfully challenged — which is always difficult.
And yes, one consideration was their (IMO entirely legitimate) concern that statements on the generous end of true rather than the cautious end of true (i.e. "we don't know but it looks zoonotic" vs "we don't know but it doesn't look synthetic") would have gigantic negative consequences including prompting military action against China.
The funding note toward the end would be a bit worrying except that NIH also didn’t fund any study examining the zoonotic origin.
Scientists publishing a paper with their assertion that they find the lab leak theory implausible is not "censorship" or "throwing their full weight" behind squashing alternatives, lol. Anyone else was free to publish their paper arguing the opposite.
‘As director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), Anthony Fauci oversaw grant R01AI110964—channeled through EcoHealth Alliance to the Wuhan Institute of Virology—that financed experiments creating chimeric bat coronaviruses whose enhanced growth in human-ACE2 mice met the federal definition of gain-of-function, a fact NIH conceded only in an October 2021 letter after Fauci had publicly denied such funding . A 2023 HHS-OIG audit later found NIH “did not effectively monitor or take timely action” on this award, missing chances to mitigate its risks . On 1 February 2020, e-mails show Fauci was warned the pandemic virus might have leaked from WIV; he then “prompted” authors of the influential Proximal Origin paper and worked with NIH leadership to “put down” the lab-leak hypothesis—actions that, if successful, would deflect scrutiny from his own institute’s funding decisions . A 2024 House Select Subcommittee report further concluded that EcoHealth “used taxpayer dollars to facilitate gain-of-function research…contrary to previous public statements, including those by Dr. Anthony Fauci,” underscoring his personal and institutional stake in suppressing the lab-leak narrative .’
Inline sources are provided in the result, but missing in the copy.
Would you have preferred that they have their grant applications cancelled after having published a paper?
Let's dig in a little bit to the weasel words here.
========
> Fauci "prompted" authors of the influential Proximal Origin paper
Here's the source email that mentions this nefarious "prompting":
> There has been a lot of speculation, fear mongering, and conspiracies put forward in this space and we thought that bringing some clarity to this discussion might be of interest to Nature [sic]. Prompted by Jeremy Farrah [sic], Tony Fauci, and Francis Collins, Eddie Holmes, Andrew Rambaut, Bob Garry, Ian Lipkin, and myself have been working through much of the (primarily) genetic data to provide agnostic and scientifically informed hypothesis around the origins of the virus.
What a smoking gun! Err... I guess not...
=====
> worked with NIH leadership to “put down” the lab-leak hypothesis
This refers to Francis Collins asking Fauci whether there was more that could kill momentum behind the competing theory. It's important to note this momentum was driven primarily by media attention and not growing scientific consensus or any new scientific evidence.
That is entirely consistent with someone who does not want what they see as an incorrect explanation to become the public's consensus view (especially when concerned about the possible ramifications of that consensus forming without sufficient evidence).
This happened after Fauci had "prompted [a team] to work through much of the (primarily) genetic data to provide agnostic and scientifically informed hypothesis around the origins of the virus."
Fauci's response: "I would not do anything about this right now."
====
Again: No one prevented any scientist from publishing their competing theories. They may have had a hard time getting taken seriously, they may have not been accepted to Nature, they may have been called a quack: but that is often what it means to go up against the consensus view.
That is not censorship. That is the imperfect system of science as it always works in every domain.
I don't understand what you're saying here. We know that Kristian Andersen and Robert Garry were concerned that the virus was not of natural origin because Andersen wrote to Fauci and Collins on January 31 that “some of the features [of SARS-CoV-2] … look engineered” and that he, Robert Garry and others found the genome “inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory.”
The next day they joined Fauci's emergency teleconference and 11 days later they submitted The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2 to Nature. Five weeks after the paper appeared in Nature, Fauci's institute (NIAID) awarded Andersen and Garry a new $8.9 million grant, naming them co-principal investigators of the West African Emerging Infectious Disease Research Center.
One might argue that each link in this chain of events is in principle explainable in perfectly innocent terms, and that's true. But to do so would be ironically concordant with the sort of reasoning and argumentation exhibited in the Proximal Origins paper. Specifically, at each turn the original concerns of Andersen and Garry are addressed in a manner emphasizing that in principle the anomaly could be explained in innocent terms. So for example, the poly-basic (RRAR) cleavage site could arise by ordinary insertion or recombination because similar sites appear in other coronaviruses and even evolve during serial passage of influenza, so its presence is “compatible with natural evolution,” and the codon context and flanking O-linked glycans would be an odd choice for a genetic engineer but fit with immuno-evasion seen in naturally evolving viruses, and the genome is “not derived from any previously used virus backbone”, and so on.
What they don't do is adduce any evidence that these theoretical natural pathways actually obtained, they don't systematically weigh their joint probability, and they don't seriously address the possibility of inadvertent lab adaptation and escape (they label the scenario as "improbable" in a single paragraph).
All of which is to say that it seems implausible that they themselves were actually convinced by their arguments. And if they weren't convinced by their arguments, then it seems likely they didn't actually change their view, just publicly voiced the opposite view. Why would they do that? I can think of 8.9 million reasons.
The grant for the West African Emerging Infectious Disease Research Center was $1.8 million, not $8.9, and it was granted exactly on the schedule outlined in the RFA: https://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/rfa-files/RFA-AI-19-028....
No, it is not surprising nor even suspicious that eminent infectious disease researchers both wrote a paper on the biggest infectious disease in a generation and also were given money to lead a research center on infectious disease.
> What they don't do is adduce any evidence that these theoretical natural pathways actually obtained, they don't systematically weigh their joint probability, and they don't seriously address the possibility of inadvertent lab adaptation and escape (they label the scenario as "improbable" in a single paragraph).
Sure, and if you've never seen how science is done you might think this raises eyebrows. But as I have mentioned elsewhere, science isn't conducted by each individual researcher remaining unconvinced and coldly calculating all possible explanations — however they may try. People buy into the theories they find most plausible (often mistakenly), they advocate for those theories, and other people do the same thing for their preferred theories and publish competing papers. As anyone was more than free to do.
> All of which is to say that it seems implausible that they themselves were actually convinced by their arguments. And if they weren't convinced by their arguments, then it seems likely they didn't actually change their view, just publicly voiced the opposite view
The emails to me clearly show people unconvinced of either side but genuinely leaning toward zoonotic. I agree their ultimate publication of it being "implausible" was a bit too strong. But I can think of another reason, which is the one they actually mention: the political system apparently foaming at the mouth looking for a reason to — it appeared — go to war with China. Given that the [lack of] evidence allowed for a very broad scope of interpretations, as they debated, it is completely understandable that in what they published they'd want to fall on the opposite side of that ambiguity.
It's all imperfect and totally human, as science always is, which is why it is other scientists' responsibility to publish their competing arguments.
>to provide agnostic and scientifically informed hypothesis around the origins of the virus.
you can't do this if you don't include the viruses created in Wuhan, and they intentionally hadn't. Of course they couldn't find anything definitive because they outright excluded the real source - the lab. That is dishonest manipulation which in particular killed the NIH scientific credibility.
If you listen to his testimony about that testimony, he goes on to explain that if he were to take the more expansive laymen term of "gain of function," then the other side of the boundary becomes meaningless. E.g. Using e. coli to produce insulin is gain of function.
> you can't do this if you don't include the viruses created in Wuhan, and they intentionally haven't. Of course they couldn't find anything definitive because they outright excluded the real source - the lab.
No they didn't. You can read the Slack messages and emails. There are literally hundreds of pages of the Proximal Origins authors debating the lab leak hypothesis... obviously. Unless you're talking about these private individuals not somehow parachuting into WIV to conduct forensics themselves?
Here are a few excerpts from their private communication:
> I am of the view that the natural selection hypothesis is the most likely (specifically the non-bat reservoir).
> I disagree with Ron that the passaging hypothesis is evidentially equal to the engineering hypothesis.
> Now, the presence of the furin site in pangos would nail it, but the absence (as it appears to be) wouldn't really tell us much.
These are the words of people who believe one thing (which may or may not end up being true) and both interrogating it and advocating for it... i.e. "doing science."
And again: science doesn't work by every scientist advocating for every theory. That is not remotely realistic from either a practical or a psychological perspective.
It works by scientists vigorously advocating for the theories they find most plausible, and other scientists saying that they're stupid and pointing out why they're wrong, which again anyone was free to do!
that is just not true. Otherwise feel free to provide that magical definition. In the meantime this is definition by the government:
https://www.phe.gov/s3/dualuse/documents/gain-of-function.pd...
"Gain-of-function studies, or research that improves the ability of a pathogen to cause disease,"
By the way that 2014 document above is exactly the document which was the base for the gain of function research to be moved from US to in particular Wuhan. And Fauci was instrumental in that move. So, Fauci lied. Blatantly.
>If you listen to his testimony about that testimony, he goes on to explain that if he were to take the more expansive laymen term of "gain of function," then the other side of the boundary becomes meaningless. E.g. Using e. coli to produce insulin is gain of function.
Again, he lies here. Just look at the government definition of GoF above - according to it, using e. coli to produce insulin isn't gain of function.
>Unless you're talking about these private individuals not somehow parachuting into WIV to conduct forensics themselves?
Are you kidding? Or are you really don't know about Daszak rushing there and cleaning up all the evidence?
The research at WIV was assessed as not being GoF under this framework by multiple levels of reviewers when it was approved. Nobody really disputes this, they just argue that it should have been assessed as GoF (an argument that's circularly evidenced by the claim one of those viruses is responsible for the pandemic).
You seem to be willfully misunderstanding the E. coli point. Obviously it doesn't satisfy the P3CO definition, but nor did the research approved at WIV.
> Are you kidding? Or are you really don't know about Daszak rushing there and cleaning up all the evidence?
Hey now, don't get tired from moving those goal posts! Your claim was that Proximal Origins authors didn't consider the lab leak. You are unambiguously wrong.
Please share your evidence of "Daszak rushing there and cleaning up all the evidence." Not familiar with it!
1. as my previous link is gone here is 2 pretty same NIH and government definitions of GoF, 2016 and 2025:
https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/738...
(1) Gain-of-function research.--The term ``gain-of-function
research'' means any research that--
(A) involves the genetic alteration of an organism
to change or enhance the organism's biological
functions, which change or enhancement may include
increased infectivity, transmissibility, pathogenicity,
or host range (which is the spectrum of hosts that an
organism can infect); or
(B) may be reasonably anticipated to confer
attributes to an organism, such that the organism would
have enhanced infectivity, pathogenicity, or
transmissibility, or otherwise pose a threat to
national security, public safety, or the health of
humans, companion animals, or livestock, poultry,
seafood and aquaculture species, or game animals.
"Gain-of-function (GOF) research involves experimentation that aims or is expected to (and/or, perhaps, actually does) increase the transmissibility and/or virulence of pathogens."
Both definitions clearly cover Wuhan research - genetically implanting ACE2 binding protein on non-human coronavirus so that the resulting virus infects and kill human cells containing ACE2 receptor. Thus hard fact numero uno - Fauci lied to Congress.
2.
>Your claim was that Proximal Origins authors didn't consider the lab leak.
No. My claim is that NIH didn't perform any scientific study - which would naturally include peer reviewed publishing of results - of Wuhan created viruses vs. COVID.
What doesn't count as such a study is the lazy email chat between several dudes who were recruited by Daszak without even letting them know of the conflict of interests that he and Fauci had on the matter.
3. Fauci as a top leader at a scientific institution had the duty to maintain scientific integrity of the institution. Giving his and Daszak conflict of interests on the matter, he catastrophically failed at maintaining that scientific integrity when he didn't not send independent investigators to Wuhan instead of Daszak.
Note how synergistically the fact 3. dovetails with the fact 1. and how that provides very plausible explanation for the fact 2.
And with that i rest my case :)
Great stuff.
And just totally bailing on your claim that "Daszak ran into WIV and destroyed evidence" lol
Have a good night!
In about 5 years it will become common knowledge that longCOVID is simply the persistance of the SARS-CoV2 virus within the human body and that there are both symptomatic versions of this disease (aka "longhaulers") and asymptomatic versions of this disease (aka, many of the so called "fully recovered"). Note that we have zero direct evidence that the virus ever leaves the body; it is just assumed because nasal swabs test negative and, for some, symptoms go away. It is a good time to invest in pharmaceutical companies that have already developed antivirals.
Dangerous GoF research should be outright banned regardless!
Insofar as there is huge ambiguity in what we did or didn't know at the time, I can fault scientists for covering their own asses and their preferred research directions (which I agree are dangerous), but I can't fault them for biasing themselves against statements that leaned on the side of ambiguous that might have, at the time, literally sparked a war.
Presumably this was implemented by some developers trying to do the absolute bare minimum to comply with the absurd orders they were given.