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This makes me happy. It was such an obvious right thing to do, but it took so long to come to fruition.

Next, it would be great if published standards were freely available. It is astonishing to me that they are not.

> 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.

FYI, you can view the NEC for free. You have to have an account and it’s a janky web view of a PDF, which is suboptimal, but it is free.

I should add that India does this for some IEC documents and other standards under open information acts.

While you're at it, make textbooks free. And movies. And games. Who is going to pay for standards development? How will it maintain a stable funding mechanism? I refer you to recent developments with the US government.

If an AHJ wants to make the standard a legal requirement... Then they pay for it and provide it to all people under their jurisdiction. Full fucking stop.

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.

AHJ = authority having jurisdiction

I used to think that way as well, then I started to participate in standards development. Now, I think it's more valuable to society to have the standards properly developed, funded and regulated.

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)

It's almost like there's a functional method to achieve this through.... drumroll... taxation.

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).

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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.

Specially the ones with force of law

I agree; but then we need to come up with a different funding model.

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 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).

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.

That's not the only funding model. Many industry standards are free to access, for example HL7 FHIR. Their funding model is largely organizational membership fees, plus some additional charges for meeting attendance and training courses. This works fine. Several federal regulations mandate the use of HL7 standards for healthcare interoperability.

> It is astonishing to me that they are not.

If you'd like the public to somehow pick up the tab for drafting them, sure.

The standards that already exist? Is there some special meaning of "drafted" here?

Isn't the main cost on the participants in the consortium anyway? I.e. effort amd time.

This is good though it's not clear whether these papers will appear in the PMC Open Access subset (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/tools/openftlist/) and be bulk downloadable.

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

Yes, it depends on what you're doing; for general paper discovery / search tasks, title abstract can be enough (which is also why Springer and Elsevier have been pulling even their abstracts from sources like OpenAlex).

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?

I've recently had this problem where the important information (number of study participants, and how many were filtered out during which step) were only encoded in figures, not in the text. Maddening.

Do you know of any ready to use alternatives to title and abstract screening? Wondering about it since I'm in the weeds of doing so.

what do you mean exactly? I was suprised how with grobid many of at least the arXiv papers are easily converted to xml for better processing than PDF.

Most of the papers are constructed from their latex sources so there's an easy way to undo it i guess.

https://github.com/kermitt2/grobid

grobid is a wonderful resource, patrice did an awesome job (I used it at my previous job at scite.ai)

that's exactly what I needed!

glad to hear!

My reading of this press release is that they are just removing the 12 month embargo period before the already mandated free-access (untypeset) versions of grant-supported manuscripts can go on pubmed central. The prior policy of a 12 month embargo period allowed publishers to have a small value add over the free version. This value add justifies subscription fees which support, among other things, infrastructure necessary to support peer review and possibly some in-house staff scientific editing and review. I do wonder whether it is worth it to make all papers available immediately if indirectly may make peer review even less supported than it is now.

We had some papers published under NIH grants at my last job. Our papers went public right away. Although the publishers charged the lab an extra fee because of free requirement.

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.

https://www.nlm.nih.gov/mesh/meshhome.html

Peer review is not supported by publishers. Many editors are unpaid too.

I specifically said journals subscription fees support peer review infrastructure. Yes peer reviewers are unpaid but peer review also would not exist in anything resembling its current form in the absence of journal staff moving papers through the peer review system. Associate/deputy editors are unpaid but the main editor of the journal is often paid and does provide scientific oversight and review, particularly at the margin of acceptance/rejection. The main editor of course is also responsible for recruiting associate editors who in turn are responsible for finding appropriate peer reviewers, so having a good editor who can recruit and maintain quality deputy/associate editors is key. Some journals even have staff scientific reviewers which act as a check on the occasional oversights of unpaid peer review.

The "infrastructure" is terrible software called Editorial Manager. It doesn't have any document annotation or collaboration features. It merely allows documents to be uploaded and downloaded, and is a pain to work with.

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.

Infrastucture is not the same as software. I was mostly referring to the human infrastructure (although editorialmanager is not free and until someone makes an open source alternative the supscription fees do support that license). And I would argue that the existence of a small number of prestige journals with scientific staff makes the entire system worth it, even if it means we have to deal with the existence of Elsevier and the like.

prestige journals are good for careers, but are they good for science? I don't think I've ever read a CS or math paper in Nature or Science that's blown me away. all the classics are on arxiv.

The value of good editorial staff may very well be less important in some fields. In the biomedical field subject-matter expertise still matters a lot in terms of discerning good research from seemingly good research. Which also means that prestige journals won't make research any more groundbreaking but if functioning properly should enrich for papers that are less likely to be junk science. I'd also argue that generic journals like Nature and Science are so unfocused that their staff probably provides little to no additional expertise and they rely entirely on peer review. Whereas staff at more specialized journals with lower but still very respectable impact factors are probably doing more informed work to select for quality science.

Pretty sure there are already FOSS options for file sharing, document management, revision management, process management, workflow management, and all-of-the-above management.

Also, are publishing monopolies like Elsevier really all that necessary?

There's no need for "prestige journals". I have nothing really against them, but if they shut down today it wouldn't harm scientific progress at all.

platforms in general seem to be a pathological edge case for capitalism. capitalism is healthy when companies have to compete and innovate, rather than sitting on their assets like feudal lords. academic publishers and social media sites are almost pure rent-seeking, up there with patent trolls and private equity firms.

your reading is incorrect. they're not announcing the removal of the 12 month embargo, they're moving it forward to the 1st of July

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

Moving forward the removal of the embargo. But my point is that access to federally funded science was free prior to anyone coming up with a plan to remove the embargo. You just needed to wait up to a year before a paper was put on pubmed central. This removal of the embargo is hardly a meaningful change in terms of access but one that erodes the institutions that ensure peer review happens. It is easy to say peer review is largely based on volunteers, but if journals ceased to exist tomorrow I doubt anyone here would volunteer to do the task of what the journals do now. At least you can put peer reviewer on your academic CV. The paid journal staff do much less glamorous work but still serve a role in keeping peer review running.

the current journal system works like this:

- 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

Peer review need not be synchronous.

As someone that went through university solely thanks to Sci-Hub I value any effort that can be put into making scientific papers more available. I would have never been able to pay for all the papers I had to access and, in my case, I only got a smoother experience using uni available content in my last semester, so...

Sci-Hub was an incredible achievement. It was the closest humanity came to the interconnected sharing of knowledge we dreamed the Internet would be in the 20th century.

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.

Something I wrote related to this in 2001: "An Open Letter to All Grantmakers and Donors On Copyright And Patent Policy In a Post-Scarcity Society" https://pdfernhout.net/open-letter-to-grantmakers-and-donors... "Foundations, other grantmaking agencies handling public tax-exempt dollars, and charitable donors need to consider the implications for their grantmaking or donation policies if they use a now obsolete charitable model of subsidizing proprietary publishing and proprietary research. In order to improve the effectiveness and collaborativeness of the non-profit sector overall, it is suggested these grantmaking organizations and donors move to requiring grantees to make any resulting copyrighted digital materials freely available on the internet, including free licenses granting the right for others to make and redistribute new derivative works without further permission. It is also suggested patents resulting from charitably subsidized research research also be made freely available for general use. The alternative of allowing charitable dollars to result in proprietary copyrights and proprietary patents is corrupting the non-profit sector as it results in a conflict of interest between a non-profit's primary mission of helping humanity through freely sharing knowledge (made possible at little cost by the internet) and a desire to maximize short term revenues through charging licensing fees for access to patents and copyrights. In essence, with the change of publishing and communication economics made possible by the wide spread use of the internet, tax-exempt non-profits have become, perhaps unwittingly, caught up in a new form of "self-dealing", and it is up to donors and grantmakers (and eventually lawmakers) to prevent this by requiring free licensing of results as a condition of their grants and donations."

Glad to see better policy happening -- even if all too slowly and only in some areas.

Scihub is the best. They are doing a huge service to humanity.

Just saying, sci-hub (and libgen) has turned off in my country (Netherlands). Like, they block access at an ISP level — and all ISPs and phone companies are blocking it. I imagine there might be a measurable decline in academic productivity, at that point.

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?

I wouldn't be surprised if the fact that Elsevier is a Dutch company had something to do with it.

I recommend a good vpn, such as Mullvad.

But I agree, countries should not allow this kind of authoritarian practices.

It is certainly not true that all ISPs and phone companies in the Netherlands are blocking Sci-Hub. Both my home ISP and my phone provider don't, and I'm also not aware of, nor can I find any, legal requirements for ISPs to block it. Dutch ISPs aren't in the habit of blocking things without being legally required to. Which provider are you on that does block it? That would normally be significant news and get picked up by various publications.

Here is one older article about it. It appears to only cover the larger ISPs — https://torrentfreak.com/dutch-court-orders-isp-to-block-ann...

Thanks for the link. That is specifically about LibGen and Anna's Archive, and links to the general agreement that when a court orders one ISP to block a pirate site, others will also block it. I suppose in situations where Sci-Hub forwards you to LibGen (does it still do that?) that means you'll be blocked regardless of the blocking status of Sci-Hub itself.

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.

[1]: https://www.delta.nl/geblokkeerd/

I've also had some trouble accessing them in Denmark. They're still available on Tor though.

they also had a telegram channel which sent you the papers.

Turned off how? Like a Chinese firewall kind of thing? Are you not able to simply VPN around the block?

Is there an actual court order in effect, or is it some kind of tacit agreement between ISPs?

Dynamic court order. Meaning they can block any new address under the order without returning to court. https://torrentfreak.com/dutch-court-orders-isp-to-block-ann...

Is Anna's Archive also blocked?

If your tax dollars are funding research, you should be entitled to reading the results.

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.

>"If your tax dollars are funding research, you should be entitled to reading the results."

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?

What goes to government should benefit the people, not the mythical entity

This is an absolute win. Publicly funded research should never be behind a pay wall.

At the same time, NIH just announced that all grants involving foreign researcher are shut.

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.

That's absolutely insane and isn't even the craziest thing to come from HHS this week.

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I didn’t realize the NIH still existed. I thought Musk fired all the government scientists and researchers.

Have the new generations forgotten how to praise an accomplishment even when it was realized by their enemy. “Give the devil his due”. Partisan myopia has reached an intellectually crippling height in the US. As a scientist who has worked in academia for decades, there is no equivocation in me about praising this move. So many times has my progress in research be speed-bumped by a paywall. Rejoice in the purple between red and blue.

This was already in the works pre-Trump, they just sped up the timeline by half a year:

> The 2024 Public Access Policy, originally slated to go into effect on December 31, 2025, will now be effective as of July 1, 2025.

Just to be clear, this is a Biden era policy.

> I am excited to announce that one of my first actions as NIH Director is pushing the accelerator on policies to make NIH research findings freely and quickly available to the public. 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.

Consider that a lot of NIH research funding has already been cut.

They effectively ended research they didn't want to release, wasting funding already provided, while counting it as wasteful spending.

That it survived two administrations in the current climate is a miracle to be thankful for

you'd be surprised at how many policies survived two administrations. the real big one (unless I'm missing something or there have been CIA covert ops) is "not invading any new countries" (yemen conflict started under obama)

Seems like it'll stick around too. It aligns with the current administration's goal of financially starving the bureaucracies that surround research institutions.

The difference is that while indirect costs are critical to research in most cases, journals are the poster child when it comes to skimming research funding.

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.

> It aligns with the current administration's goal of financially starving the bureaucracies that surround research institutions.

Though arguably orthogonal with their goal of financially starving the research institutions, too.

This - Open Access has been around for a while. Battarchya is claiming he's removing the 1 year delay but I've def seen things published and openaccessed ASAP before so I'm not super familiar on the specifics.

The change is that now all NIH-funded research must be open access.

yeah this is finally the way it should be. always wondered why stuff paid for by taxes got stashed behind paywalls for so long. feels like common sense, even if it took forever

...if there's any left:

https://www.thisamericanlife.org/859/transcript

How about NIH funded drugs, can they be "paywall-ed" ?

NIH doesn't do mass production. It may not even do the research necessary to get synthesizing at scale working.

Until the NIH becomes a drug production company, the drugs themselves are, by necessity, "paywalled".

I guess the punchline is the NIH won't be funding research then either?

Yes, this same guy is helping "to cut more than 40% from NIH’s 2026 budget and pare its 27 institutes and centers down to just eight." - https://www.science.org/content/article/new-nih-director-def...

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!

I've found so far: 'gender', 'diversity', 'equity', 'inclusion', as expected. Not: 'equality', 'socioeconomic', 'minority', 'ableism'.

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)

'pregnant people', 'transgender', 'nonbinary', and 'racism' are others I found

Very interestingly, I tried to write "gender" and mistakenly wrote "gendea". The search engine, trying to be helpful, gave me: "No results found for 'gendea'. Showing results for gender"

And voilà, I just got 1666 (heh) results free from the censors!

Note that the top result has actually been deleted though: https://www.nih.gov/nih-style-guide/inclusive-gender-neutral...

Typing "gender" in a phrase such as "sexual gender", "age and gender" works.

Yes you can also just put "gender" in quotes and it works. Or you can spell it wrong - transgender is blocked, but you can do transgendr and it will correct your spelling and return results. Of course, some of the pages it returns have been deleted.

Presumably this was implemented by some developers trying to do the absolute bare minimum to comply with the absurd orders they were given.

It's entertaining to see the early 2000s name "disemvoweling" return with a new purpose!

So it's not just censorship it's bottom of the barrel dumb censorship too.

The anti-intellectual crusade isn't hiring the best and the brightest to man the trenches, but they don't have to.

> try going to https://www.nih.gov/ and putting gender in the search box

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.

Trump's social media is literally named "Truth" Social. Incredibly Orwellian. I don't understand how people thought him being president a second time was a good idea.

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You don't know what the real source of COVID is, nor does anyone else, and this is what NIH has said the entire time.

> 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?

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This entire thing is derived from the vibes of the Internet. You should consider looking into the specifics with your own eyes.

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.

I’m familiar with the specifics, and if anything gpt-4o is underselling the egregious behavior. It doesn’t mention for example, that those scientists who immediately changed their views concurrently received millions of dollars in new grants, which looks incredibly suspicious in retrospect. It also doesn’t discuss rank self-interest as a possible motive for suppression, namely that Fauci was responsible for funding research at WIV which could plausibly have lead to the creation of SARS-COV-2. I’ll ask 03 to summarize and provide sources:

‘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.

> It doesn’t mention for example, that those scientists who immediately changed their views concurrently received millions of dollars in new grants

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.

> Would you have preferred that they have their grant applications cancelled after having published a paper?

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.

Anyone can read the emails themselves. They show people debating the origins, as you would expect.

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.

You're weaseling around the fact that Fauci outright and knowingly lied to the Congress about funding the gain-of-function research in WIV. That research in particular includfed successful inserting of human ACE2 receptor binding protein into non-human coronavirus with the resulting virus successfully killing off mice engineered with the human cells with ACE2 receptors. That happens to be exactly what COVID is, and that happened right before the official COVID emergence in Wuhan.

>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.

You're weaseling around the fact that Fauci used the actual regulatory definition of GoF, under which the WIV did not qualify as GoF. I can understand why this irks people, but I can also understand why someone as habitually precise as a virologist would use the statutory definition of a given term of art in sworn Congressional testimony.

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!

>Fauci used the actual regulatory definition of GoF, under which the WIV did not qualify as GoF.

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?

Your link doesn't work (oops forgot to actually read your sources?). Here's the right document: https://aspr.hhs.gov/S3/Documents/P3CO.pdf

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!

You again failed to provide definition. And you seem to get confused about goalposts. So, let me reiterate 3 hard facts here:

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 :)

Ah yes, now linking to the GoF definition that 1) doesn't govern NIH's decisions and 2) includes E. coli for insulin manufacturing.

Great stuff.

And just totally bailing on your claim that "Daszak ran into WIV and destroyed evidence" lol

Have a good night!

I worked with researchers in this space - virology + combatting future pandemics - in the decade before the pandemic. The one fact that the last 5 years never readily disclosed is that the core ideology of this community of researchers was fundamentally divided. About half of the researchers, including many leading virologists whose names appeared in the news, believed and argued passionately for the lab-based creation of super-viruses and super-bacteria. They believed that the only way to save humanity from a catastrophic pandemic was to engineer absolute nightmare bugs in the lab so that they could develop cures and vaccines. The other half of us, myself included, thought that this was pure hubris and infinitely too dangerous because humans and labs are fallible and leaks happen with surprisingly regularity. The moment that this pandemic become broad public knowledge, the portion of the community that advocated for creating these super-viruses became shockingly quiet and everyone just started to cover-their-asses and their funding.

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.

This is partially why I think the whole "they're conspiratorially lying to us and it was for sure a lab leak!" is a huge distraction. First, we have literally hundreds of pages of emails of scientists saying they believed (correctly or incorrectly) it was not a leak. Second, there is approximately zero chance we will ever know that it came from a lab. Third, it doesn't actually give us any more information: it could have come from any one of countless labs doing work on viruses like this.

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.

If anybody is reading this comment, I would recommend that you look at Michael Worobey's series of papers on COVID's origins; they are much more well thought out than this horseshit.

If you had an NIH grant, and then they cancelled the grant, does that count?

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