A cynic might say that people want things produced by others to be free and easy to get, while they also want the things they produce to be expensive and under their tight and exclusive control.
So, government statistics are data collected, analyzed, and published for free, and which many academics find useful.
Meanwhile, we already know that most academics are reluctant to publish all their full data sets and program codes online for everyone to both scrutinize and use. Peer review referees often have to sign all sorts of nondisclosure agreements.
The cynic could be even more cynical and say that the government could get a lot more bang for its public buck if it insisted as a condition of accepting public funding that all research results – data and published papers – be available to the public for free, and that many publicly-funded academics currently calling for more funding of government statistics would resist such a reform if it applied to their own research.
Actually, I think that a lot of economists are unhappy with the way that journals perform their gatekeeping function, and a lot of economists want more transparency. Academic life has powerful inertia (think of the low turnover rate among elite institutions), because academics who have succeeded under a particular set of norms and institutions have both the incentive and the ability to sustain those norms and institutions.
I do not think that most academic economists necessarily prefer that their research be proprietary rather than open. It’s just that those with the opposite preference are fighting inertia. But my impressions are based on reading blogs, and the blogosphere is bound to select for economists who prefer open to proprietary.
Kling is right on journals.
How about college admissions?
A private company deserves full confidential discretion over who they pay to employ or sever employment with. I don’t see why a public state university gets the same confidential discretion over which students are given the privilege of the option of purchasing classes that the state basically holds a monopoly on.
“So, government statistics are data collected, analyzed, and published for free”
Like Britain’s NHS, government statistics are free *at the point of service* (in this case, the government website from which we retrieve data). But it still costs money to produce those data.
There are different reasons why academics are not always keen on publishing their data and code.
1. The data cannot be released due to confidentiality, IRB etc.
2. The data are proprietary (business) and cannot be released
3. The data are publicly available – “go get them yourself”
The trend is positive, however: more and more journals require data and code, and more researchers post their data and code online. An editor for a top journal also told me, If one cannot even attempt to replicate a paper, it’s not science. And finally John Cochrane had a great post about “Secret data”, comparing authors’ claims to Fermat’s last theorem.
It has something to do with fear. They cynic is expressing the preferences of fearful people; desperate people.