> From a government / national perspective should it be free world wide?
Yes. The answer is unequivocally yes. Your country will benefit vastly more from the research being freely available than other people having a better world on your dime will disadvantage you.
And here's the thing. Other countries face the same calculus. Scientific research brings the greatest return on investment of anything ever. It's why we have electricity and computers and satellites and penicillin. At the national level you can pay for it and give it away and still come out ahead regardless of what anybody else does.
Since every country benefits from doing it by more than it costs them, everybody can "cooperate" by doing research and giving it away without having to worry about anybody else defecting -- because defectors can't hurt you, they can only not help you. The sooner everybody realizes that the sooner everybody can choose to cooperate and the better off the whole world will be.
And the returns when every country publishes research for free are... large.
Nationally-funded research that's published in expensive journals is still very much available to the rest of the world. That's true with about anything that's published...
I was gonna say that the rest of the world purchase from these journals, but of course the journal might as well be foreign so that argument doesn't hold.
Journals don't buy the science. It's given to them for free from scientists in return for "prestige". Most of the time this is damaging to their government's interests, since they give away taxfunded research usually to a foreign entity.
No, it's rather important, vital indeed, that code is published. Ironically Phil Jones of the UK Met Centre made this point himself:
"We have 25 or so years invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it. "
Some of us always thought that having your ideas and results discussed and examined in a public forum was what science, an intensely cooperative activity, was about.
- And especially when public policy often demanding massive input from the taxpayer depends on it.
If so, why should nations give away their expensive research that potentially give them an edge either military or commercially?
Personally I almost never traded technology when I played civilization, let alone give it away!