Talk:Science policy

Cleanup Required
This article is very confused -- and in some cases simply incorrect -- about the field of science policy. A good overview can be found in the opening chapter of Beyond Sputnik: U.S. Science Policy in the 21st Century — Preceding unsigned comment added by 64.230.26.156 (talk • contribs) 23:20, 19 March 2008

Monumental Science
I think the section on "Monumental Science" (even the name itself) is highly biased towards short-term or medium-term "practical" science (a less theoretical science), even taking an opinative and derrogatory view about long-term, theoretical, science. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 89.155.26.187 (talk • contribs) 12:22, 21 April 2007

in-practice specifics?
This article would be greatly improved with information on how science policy is arrived at and executed in specific governments -- for instance information about NIH funding and congressional Science and Technology committees in the US. I know next to nothing about this (actually what I came here to try and learn about), and so cannot really add it myself. 69.118.254.130 01:32, 15 May 2007 (UTC)

Other definitions of science policy
The term science policy is often used not only to refer to the policies that affect the conduct of the science and research enterprise, but also to refer to the act of applying scientific knowledge and consensus to the development of public policies. An example would be congressional requests to the National Academies to provide scientific consensus on global warming and/or recommendations of alternative fuels. Another example is the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Science and Technology Policy Fellowships, which place scientists in offices across the Federal government (e.g. Congress, Department of State, EPA, etc) to help inform policy processes with scientific knowledge. Hence there are two somewhat overlapping activities included in the term "science policy": policy for science and science for policy. Gguerre (talk) 21:59, 13 January 2008 (UTC)


 * Yes, good point. I've made a bold rewrite of the lead; it would be great if you could review that and then see if your other definition can be more easily worked in. I sense a different structure may be in order (perhaps with the current sections as subsections of a single top-level section). My personal interest is in space policy. I don't see a place to work space policy into the current structure of this "science policy" article.... (sdsds - talk) 18:07, 27 June 2009 (UTC)

improving page
Hi, I would like to improve this page over the next couple of months. However, I am not sure what to do about the Science Policies that I have categorized as "Specific Policy Programs", they do not have any references and I agree that it does not give clear nor accurate information about the field of Science Policy. Is it alright if i delete this? Thank you. MichChemGSI (talk) 03:46, 20 August 2010 (UTC)


 * I agree that this article could use a lot of work. I think, however, that it's generally better to find references and rewrite text rather than deleting it outright.  The "Specific Policy Programs" section isn't particuarly well-written and lacks references, but it could form a basis for a much stronger section on different philosophies of science policy.


 * There is a lot of overlap between this article, Funding of science, Military funding of science, and Big Science. I think a reorganization of these articles is in order to make Wikipedia's science policy coverage more coherent.  Also, as mentioned in a previous comment, science policy covers so much more than funding.  Additionally, there needs to be more international coverage as opposed to just U.S. or historical policy, which this set of articles tends to focus on.  Antony–22 (talk/contribs) 06:08, 15 November 2010 (UTC)


 * Actually, you can add Funding body and Research funding to that list. Antony–22 (talk/contribs) 06:30, 15 November 2010 (UTC)


 * I definitely agree about reorganizing the articles you mentioned as well. Thanks for fixing the Philosophies section. I will work on finding more references for the philosophies, and work a bit on reorganizing the pages you mentioned. I'm excited for this project! I hope you'll keep working on this page with me! and yes, we should see how to include some international policy as well. I had just started the page, and logically it was nice to start with the history. Hopefully we'll get past history soon! --MichChemGSI (talk) 05:10, 16 November 2010 (UTC)


 * Well, I haven't done anything to the "Philosophies" section yet except change the title... Right now I'd like to recommend the following changes:
 * Split out Science policy in the United States to its own article and expand, leaving a summary here.
 * Merge Funding body, the list portion of Research funding, and List of funding opportunity databases into this article as a framework for subsections on science policy in other countries.
 * Move Funding of science to History of science policy since that title describes its content better. Merge Military funding of science into that article, since they seem to really be talking about the same thing.
 * Merge the "Philosophies" section of this article with the non-list portion of Research funding and Big Science, since they seem to overlap a lot.
 * Once these are done, I think we'll have a stronger framework in which to start adding more content. Let me know what you think.  Antony–22 (talk/contribs) 06:16, 18 November 2010 (UTC)


 * I think those are good things to start with. I can do the first bullet point pretty easily. I'm still kind of a newbie, but how do we merge articles? is that something that we propose on the talk pages and an admin does this? —Preceding unsigned comment added by MichChemGSI (talk • contribs) 02:36, 19 November 2010 (UTC)


 * No admin approval is needed for merging. Generally there will be a discussion on the talk page, and the templates Template:Merge to and Template:Merge from can be used to call attention to this discussion.  If there seems to be a consensus, any editor can boldly merge the articles by cut-and-pasting the text and making a redirect to the new page.  The full policy is at WP:MERGE.


 * I've also just taken a first pass at copyediting the "Philosophies" section to remove some of the POV and vagueness issues, though it still needs a lot of work. Amazingly, this section seems to not have been significantly edited at all since the very first revision of this page from September 2003!  This was way before Wikipedia's emphasis on referencing sources had taken hold: it's hard to believe, but Template:Citation needed didn't even exist until July 2005.  Antony–22 (talk/contribs) 05:26, 22 November 2010 (UTC)


 * The article Research funding is actually a fairly well-developed article with a long history. There should be a discussion about whether it's better to keep a separate article on funding and focus on other aspects of science policy in this article, or whether these two articles overlap too much as they are currently.  Same deal for Military funding of science; I've moved that to History of military science instead.  Antony–22 (talk/contribs) 07:10, 22 November 2010 (UTC)

Futher planning
Now that I've done some copyediting and seen what we have to work with, I think it's time to plan what content we *want* to see in this article.

It would be useful to brainstorm what topics we want to cover in this article. A couple of themes I'd like to see covered are (with some US examples):


 * What does science policy emcompass?
 * What are the decision-making bodies which make science policy? (e.g. the OSTP and the appropriate Congressional committees)
 * What are different political positions on science policy?
 * What agencies carry out science policy&mdash;both within the government (e.g. NASA) and by awarding grants? (e.g. the NSF)
 * How is scientific data and expertise used in the political process? (e.g. the United States National Academies)

I'd also like to mention the article Research funding, which focuses on private as well as government funding of research. We should think about whether these articles should be merged or kept separate. I'm inclined towards the latter at this point, in which case I think that article should be moved to Funding of science since it doesn't talk about non-science research funding.

We should also think about the relationship of this article to the "Science and technology in X" series of articles. Any feedback would be helpful. Antony–22 (talk/contribs) 05:32, 23 November 2010 (UTC)