[Todos] ciencia_publicacion_academia

[Eduardo J. Dubuc]

Hola,

en un reciente "posting" en la lista de categorias (lista en la que 
participan investigadores interesados en la teoria de categorias) 
alguien denuncio que un fulano (conocido en la lista) habia patentado 
los colimites (y su aplicacion para escribir cierto software). Se armo 
un revuelo barbaro que no voy a describir, pero uno de los postings (que 
les copio aqui abajo) me parecio interesante para la discusion de lo que 
significa "publicar" en matematicas (en respuesta a una acusacion que 
decia que era una lastima que no haya publicado resultados de interes 
matematico para que no le patenten posibles aplicaciones). Aqui les 
copio parte del posting:

********
Escribe A:
I don't think that we published anything about this construction. the
patent description was written by the lawyer (a very bright woman, i think
with an MIT PhD, who now runs the world for google). some other things
that we didn't publish were perhaps closer to a mathematical result. but
the purpose of it all was to build software, not to publish mathematical
results.

Comenta B:
It's a shame if there were new mathematical results that weren't published.

Responde A:

Is publishing really the supreme purpose of mathematical results?,
it is the main method to get an academic job, but academia itself is not 
a purpose of itself.

mathematics and sciences are a good thing in at least two ways:

1) as a form of communication (collaboration) between people, and

2) as a source of benefits (better life, useful technologies)

the imperative of publishing evolved as a part of (1). are the current
publishing practices still serving their original purpose, to help
collaboration? or did we put the cart in front of the horse? does the
publishing scrutiny really improve sciences? (search, web, internet all
arose from largely unpublished results. some great ideas of category
theory did not hurry to get published. and the other way around...)

patenting evolved as a part of (2). it also deviated from its original
purpose, and now mostly hampers social benefits...

can such problems be solved on moral grounds, by saying "patenting is 
bad, i won't patent"? some people think it can. both grothendieck and 
newton said "publishing is bad, i won't publish". and did anything 
change? i somehow don't think that it would change if i joined them.
****************

end.