Public Science in the Public Interest
What is public science in the public interest? I don't know that there's an official definition. I suppose there is, somewhere, a definition, but really public science in the public interest is done openly, published freely, benefits everyone and is concerned with increasing knowledge and the general good.
It's also quite clear what public science in the public interest is not. And that is much of what passes for public science today. It cannot be conducted in secret. It cannot be conducted in partnership with businesses who sign on for cheap R&D and the chance to take control of commercial results. I'm not even completely sure it survives as well as it could when it's hemmed in by accountability and credentialism and enforced cooperation and partnership (as in you must involve three other colleges and cross two state lines and....).
A professor at a university in California made it a condition of his employment that all his software development be released as open source, had to make it a condition of employment if he wanted to see it released--the university was more concerned about partnerships and profit. We make deals with companies to give them all the intellectual property we develop from some specific project, forgetting that it's not the purpose of public science to confer advantage.
There are weaknesses in all types of scientific research. There are issues of risk-taking, understanding consequences, and interpreting results. There are difficulties in seeing and accounting for the values that permeate the process. But science is not and never has been--despite its often misleading billing--the realm of breakthrough innovation by eccentric geniuses. If it was, the scientific method would be built on different scaffolding. The key--the critical and important key--to scientific research is repeatability and verifiability. Science is incremental. Its progress is often based on the accumulation of information, on doing series of experiments just a little differently than the set before, and on happy--but repeatable--accidents.
I work with a man who talks passionately about boxes, about how important it is not to constrain researchers in boxes, to give them everything they need so creativity flows freely. You could make a case that the goal of doing public science in the public interest is a box, that it restricts funding and innovation and other important things. Maybe it is. But it's a vastly larger box than that which promises your results to a profit-making corporation, allowing them to review any papers before publication, or never releasing the results at all and removing that information from the sum of information that's available to all researchers in their pursuit of scientific learning.
We need public science in the public interest. We need to remember that it's important. We need to remember why it's important. And we need to find ways to fund it and promote it and to make sure it happens because it's critical to the kind of society that we believe in and say that we want.