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“A new study shows sugar might fuel the growth of cancer.” “A new study shows that late-night snacking could damage your ability to retain memories.” “A new study shows that drinking a glass of red wine is just as good as spending an hour in the gym.” Scientific headlines likes these are the brunt of a John Oliver routine, but they provide an unfortunate perspective into what scientific research has become in the public sphere: simplified and punch-lined. These types of filtered and watered-downed studies are ubiquitous—on TV, in social media feeds, or even as clickbait—and they hurt science’s underlying credibility.
Limited-access research can also inhibit the findings from reaching a broad, large-scale audience: scientists are caught in a continual frenzy of publishing in only highly-selective journals that the greater public simply cannot access. Therefore, when science is not presented as simplified, it can be thought of as elitist or serving the interests of big business, yet another injustice to the capabilities of research.
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Scientific research results should be considered a “public good”—both in the context of funding and circulation—because such a classification would simultaneously allow science to serve a public interest while growing its scope.
It is first necessary to determine whether scientific research can be classified within the existing historical framework and economic precedent of a public good. Saint Augustine, as early as the 400s, wrote at length regarding the conceptual basis of public goods in his commentaries. In his landmark Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith defined the two distinctions of public goods as (1) nonexcludable and (2) nonrivalrous “works in the highest degree advantageous to a great society” (Smith, 1776).
Considering both their magnitude of potential cost and societal importance, Smith believed that public institutions and governments had a role in fostering an open-access exchange of public goods, which included assisting in both the production and dissemination of knowledge and information as well as infrastructure and resources. In the early 1600s, Francis Bacon connected the philosophical concept of public goods into the scientific realm, writing that scientific knowledge and research had inherent “benefits of discoveries that may extend to the whole human race… for virtually all time” (Bacon, 1620/2014).
Furthermore, scholars in the mid-1900s solidified the economic comparison of scientific research as a public good by introducing the idea of scientific data and scientific information acting as the primary input and output variables of scientific research (Arrow, 1962). Comparing the potential costs to conduct the scientific research with the potential economic and societal impact, these scholars echoed Smith in their conclusion that science “cannot be expected that any small number of individuals [solely] erect or maintain” (Smith 1776). Therefore, modern literature has come to accept the similarity in the underlying ideologies and economics between public goods and scientific research: both share the inherent goal of advancing society and are only made possible through a source of funding that establishes a non-competitive interest.
Upon establishing the theoretical justification for the commodification of scientific scholarship, it is imperative to explore the merits of such a classification. With respect to the public good’s aspect of funding, the results of scientific research can benefit from increased relevance and scope when considered a public good. The process of scientific results being created as a public good most closely matches the perspective of Immanuel Kant, who posits “self-legislation” as a moral obligation to benefit the majority of society. In other words, to ultimately achieve equal access, equal opportunity for creation must be established (Evans, 2012). Fortunately, Smith’s earlier analysis of the government’s role in the creation of public goods can be directly applied to science: the government and other public institutions should be the primary source of funding research in order most closely achieve an equality in production. Funding scientific research exists on two spheres: first, the process for researching and generating pure knowledge through experimentation and second, the embodiment and development of that research into some sort of socially useful technology, medicine, or mechanism (Dalrymple, 2005).
Both require significant time, effort, and resources but provide no guarantee of successful outcome. In recent years however, American government funding and grants (from institutions like the National Institute of Health and National Science Foundation) have been primarily concentrated on foundational development with private funding sponsoring the research of the highly-specialized topics and development (Dalrymple, 2003). While allowing for pockets of in-depth research, the dangerous dual-faceted funding has created an overall discrepancy in production of scientific research. The majority of the United States’s $456.1 billion spending on research and development is currently geared toward biological and medicinal applications, with fields in the environmental and computer sciences paling in comparison (National Science Foundation, 2014). The reliance on private funding in countries internationally, especially in more developing nations with smaller GDP’s, furthers the moral hazard. In addition to weakening the diversification of research, public funding instead of private can prevent cyclical research cycles resulting in inconsistency and volatility.
Private research funding for combating global pandemics (such HIV/AIDS, Ebola, Zika) are closely correlated with incidents of outbreak, whereas the public funding patterns with cancers and other long-term illness are more sustained and continuous. For instance, the estimated US federal support of HIV/AIDS research has for nearly a decade maintained a standard of $30 billion (Kaiser, 2018). Combined, the susceptibility of weak diversification and funding inconsistencies of scientific research falter on its moral obligation as instrument of equal opportunity and benefit. These shortcomings, however, can be addressed through additional public funding instead of private funding. Scientists universally would agree that open-ended, unbounded, and curiosity-driven research is the most effective and promising. Public good style funding of research makes this possible, allowing for foundational advances across fields focusing on the long-term. Industry-funding is antithetical to this concept and instead geared towards instant profitability: “What CEO would sign off on research in yeast on how cells secrete bioactive substances, based on the slight chances that in 20-30 years, this knowledge might revolutionize drug delivery?” (Bertuzzi, 2017). With the magnitude of uncertainty and cost from discovery to monetary payback, only public funding for basic scientific research is sustainable.
When the concept of a public good is applied to funding scientific research, it is also useful to explore the funding’s influence on the trustworthiness of the research. Studies demonstrate the public have mixed feelings on scientific research when for-profit corporation are involved, with many survey respondents citing fears of a lack in long-term perspectives (Besley et al., 2017). With science being stigmatized as a greedy “big business,” especially in the biomedical and biochemical contexts with multinational pharmaceutical giants like Pfizer and Merck, public funding initiatives have waned. The declining ‘“research intensity” (the federal R&D budget as a percentage of GDP) from nearly 2% in the 1960s to less than .8% in the 2000s stems largely from this distrust. (Edwards and Roy, 2017). The weak transparency in intent impacts the public perception of science, but it is also closely tied to the closed-access circulation of scientific research.
The results of scientific research should be considered a public good in order to alleviate the drawbacks with the publication and distribution. Aristotle detailed on the similarities between the “common good” and “public good,” suggesting that the ultimate purpose of both goods was to be “attainable only by the community, yet individually shared by its members” (Critchley, 1995). Scientific research results today are neither appropriately shared within the overall community nor between the scientific community, but thinking about them as public goods can result in stronger open-access. There is no doubt that the current system of scientific research publication is both hazardous and hyper-competitive: reliance on metrics such as citation factor and numbers of papers has decreased the emphasis on quality. The question of research ownership between the scientist and the institution further complicates their often strained relationship: the setup fosters questionable experimental integrity and unachievable demand. Published research is becoming an “avalanche” of substandard applicability and incremental/marginal impact; not only are concerns about moral hazard and unethical conduct at play, fears of the public being locked out of scientific results are rampant (Edwards and Roy, 2016).
Most researchers strive for publication in scholarly, highly-selective, and peer-reviewed publications in which the greater public has no meaningful access. Similarly, many scientists have believed that the “framing” of their research by more accessible forms of publication—such as media outlets and non-technical sites—may distort the accuracy and purity of their work (Dubos, 1961). The solution, therefore, is in journals gravitating towards an “open-access” system where the public’s enhanced accessibility and understanding of their research can leading to stronger inclination to support future research. Scientific research considered as a public good would not only improve accessibility in the public sphere, it would also improve accountability practices within the research and funding process, resulting in a stronger reputation for overall science and improved attention and career advancement for individual scientists (Stogios, 2014). Scientists would also be forced to rely less on jargon and technicalities in communicating the most important elements of their work, developing a “big-picture” mentality than can help foster improved applicability.
Yet perhaps the benefits of improved circulation within the scientific community are the most significant. Practices such as excessive patenting, copyright, and exclusivity are inherent factors of a private science: one based on rivalry and durable competitive advantages. But by asking scientific journals to make research freely available on the internet with a reasonable delay (six-months or a year) and loosening the intellectual property arrangements of the private sector and universities, scientific research would have improved prospects of the impact within the scientific community. The University of California, Berkeley’s “socially-responsible licensing program” designed to improve circulation of technology with exceptional promise to the developing world and IBM’s release of hundreds of largely unspecialized patents are model behaviors that should be replicated in order to encourage greater research (Dalrymple, 2005).
For scientists, the benefits of public-good research is clear: expanded outreach to the public and wider scientific community can lead to unexpected new connections and new ideas that can stimulate collaboration (a world’s away from the toxic competitiveness of current publishing). For science, this process results in attainment of larger scope of research and an increased likelihood of successfully transitioning from idea to product. It allows science not to be considered as a stationary, but as an active, living, and breathing body of knowledge that can quickly react and respond to new ideas and innovations (Callon and Bowker, 1994). Ultimately, considering science as a public good strengthens science’s social contract with society, allowing human beings to collectively benefit through medicinal, technological, physical and all types of scientific advancements.
The prospect of scientific research being considered as a “pure” public good is a futile ambition given that a “pure state” is nearly impossible in our world, but that should be no deterrent in embracing the qualities of a public good in both the funding and circulation of scientific research. The early works Smith and Bacon strengthen the correlation between the economic and theoretical purposes of public goods and those of scientific research, justifying that scientific research results can be considered a public good while Kant explores the moral obligation aspect and Aristotle the open-access. Moreover, the cost-based analysis of the research funding demonstrates that such a classification would merits relating to the scope, relevance, and transparency of the results while the distribution analysis showcases the benefits on the publication process, the public’s perception, and societal impact. Science and scientific research, in their most foundational sense, serves the public interest. They work on society’s problems: understanding and treating disease and producing devices and products that change people’s lives. But they drive innovation, knowledge and, as a result, economic development. Not considering the results of scientific research a public good would be simply be a disservice to science, scientists, and society.
Scientific Attitude as a Public Good. (2022, Jan 15). Retrieved from https://studymoose.com/scientific-attitude-as-a-public-good-essay
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