National Science Policy vs Science as a Global Public Good

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Science is financed mainly by national governments, but scientific knowledge rarely remains within national borders. A theorem proved in one country, a dataset assembled in another, and software maintained elsewhere may support researchers worldwide.

This creates an apparent conflict:

• National science policy asks how public research spending can advance a country’s economy, security, health, education, and technological capacity.
• Science as a global public good asks how humanity can produce and share knowledge whose benefits are not confined to one government, institution, or population.

These objectives do not have to be mutually exclusive. A well-designed funding architecture can let governments finance national priorities while contributing to a shared global scientific system.

The proposed AI Internet-Meritocracy (AIIM) architecture offers one possible model. AIIM could maintain common mechanisms for evaluating scientific contributions while allowing governments, international organizations, charities, and private donors to create distinct funding pools with their own legitimate eligibility and policy rules.

What Is National Science Policy?

National science policy is the set of decisions through which a government influences research, innovation, scientific institutions, infrastructure, education, and technological development.

Its objectives commonly include:

• improving public health;
• increasing economic productivity;
• developing strategically important technologies;
• supporting universities and laboratories;
• educating scientists and engineers;
• strengthening national research capacity;
• addressing local environmental and social problems;
• preserving scientific independence and resilience.

These are legitimate responsibilities. Taxpayers may reasonably expect their government to support domestic institutions, train local researchers, address national problems, and build capabilities that would otherwise be underfunded.

National science funding is therefore not merely an arbitrary restriction on global science. It is also one of the main mechanisms through which scientific capacity is created.

However, a purely national funding system has structural limitations.

Why Science Cannot Be Treated as Exclusively National

Scientific knowledge is unusually difficult to contain within political borders.

Once openly published, a mathematical proof can be used almost anywhere. Open-source research software can support thousands of projects in many countries. Climate models, astronomical observations, genomic databases, and epidemiological methods acquire much of their value through international use and combination.

The 2021 UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science describes open science in terms of collective benefit and recognizes scientific knowledge as a global public good that should benefit humanity as a whole. UNESCO reports that the recommendation was adopted by 194 countries.

A public good is generally understood as something whose use by one person does not substantially prevent its use by others and from which it may be difficult to exclude non-payers. Much scientific knowledge has both characteristics:

1. Non-rivalry: one researcher’s use of a theorem or dataset does not normally stop another researcher from using it.
2. Limited excludability: after knowledge has been openly disclosed, restricting its intellectual use may be impractical or undesirable.

Science is not a perfectly unrestricted public good. Laboratories, computing resources, patented technologies, sensitive data, and specialized training can remain scarce or controlled. Nevertheless, the knowledge produced by research often generates benefits far beyond the jurisdiction that financed it.

The Central Policy Tension

The underlying problem is not that governments behave irrationally. It is that the geographic scope of scientific benefits is often larger than the geographic scope of political accountability.

A national government may ask:

Why should our taxpayers finance work that primarily benefits people elsewhere?

Humanity collectively faces the opposite question:

Who will finance valuable research when its benefits are too widely distributed for any one country to capture?

This creates a potential global public-good funding gap. Every country can benefit from discoveries financed by others, while each government has an incentive to concentrate spending on benefits that are visible domestically.

The result may be insufficient support for:

• basic mathematics and theoretical science;
• global research infrastructure;
• open datasets and scientific software;
• research on rare diseases;
• replication and negative results;
• problems concentrated in poorer countries;
• discoveries whose practical applications are unpredictable;
• maintenance work used globally but owned by no single institution.

The OECD emphasizes that international scientific cooperation is important for open science, shared research data, international infrastructure, standards, networks, and responses to global crises.

Yet eliminating national science policy would not solve this problem. Governments still require mechanisms for setting priorities, developing domestic expertise, protecting legitimate security interests, and remaining accountable for public expenditure.

The better objective is interoperability between national and global funding.

How AIIM Could Combine Global and National Science Financing

AI Internet-Meritocracy is a proposed system for evaluating scientific and open-source contributions and allocating money according to assessed merit. Its central concept is that funding can follow observable contributions rather than depending entirely on conventional grant applications, institutional prestige, or committee selection.

The architecture could separate two decisions that traditional funding systems often combine:

1. How is scientific merit evaluated?
2. Which source of money is permitted to reward which contributors or outputs?

A common evaluation layer could operate globally, while separate financing pools retain different mandates.

A Global Funding Pool

A global AIIM pool could accept money intended to support scientific value without a nationality restriction.

Researchers could be evaluated according to factors such as:

• originality;
• correctness;
• reproducibility;
• usefulness;
• contribution to later work;
• provision of data, proofs, software, or infrastructure;
• successful replication;
• maintenance of shared research resources;
• contribution to global or neglected problems.

This pool would treat scientific output as part of a shared human knowledge system. A contribution could receive funding regardless of where its author lives, provided that it meets the pool’s scientific, legal, and openness requirements.

National Funding Pools

A government could simultaneously create a national AIIM pool.

For example, an Israeli pool could fund eligible Israeli researchers, research institutions, nationally relevant projects, or work that strengthens Israeli scientific capacity. A European Union pool could support eligible participants within EU programmes. Other countries or regions could establish pools reflecting their own legal and policy frameworks.

The AIIM proposal for governments already presents the system as a globally open funding mechanism that could also be adopted for public science expenditure. A related discussion of AIIM and Horizon Europe describes the possibility of EU-specific funding flows for European researchers, donors, and institutions.

National pools could apply eligibility conditions such as:

• citizenship or legal residency;
• affiliation with an eligible domestic institution;
• research activity conducted within the country;
• relevance to an announced national priority;
• collaboration with domestic laboratories;
• publication under required access conditions;
• compliance with national ethics, data, and security law.

The key distinction is that these conditions would govern the source of payment, not necessarily the universal scientific evaluation of the work.

One Contribution Could Qualify for Several Pools

AIIM would not need to force every contribution into a single funding category.

Consider a researcher who develops an open-source system for detecting water contamination:

• A national fund might reward the contribution because it improves domestic water security.
• A regional environmental fund might support it because it advances shared ecological objectives.
• A global fund might reward it because the software can be reused worldwide.
• A charitable fund might contribute because the technology is especially useful in low-income regions.

These payments would represent different reasons for supporting the same output.

The system could calculate a contribution’s scientific merit once, then determine its eligibility under several independently financed pools. Subject to each pool’s rules, rewards could be additive rather than mutually exclusive.

This is more flexible than asking whether research is either “national” or “global.” Much valuable science is both.

Common Evaluation, Plural Funding Mandates

The most important architectural principle is:

Scientific evaluation can be shared even when funding mandates differ.

Every government currently building a separate evaluation bureaucracy must appoint reviewers, process applications, rank institutions, investigate outputs, and monitor results. International funders and charities often duplicate much of the same work.

AIIM could provide shared technical infrastructure for:

• identifying scientific outputs;
• mapping relationships between contributions;
• gathering evaluations and evidence;
• detecting dependencies between projects;
• measuring use and downstream influence;
• recording funding decisions;
• explaining algorithmic recommendations;
• auditing conflicts, errors, and manipulation.

Each funder could then determine how much weight to place on the resulting evidence and which eligibility constraints to impose.

This would be analogous to a common scientific information layer supporting multiple policy decisions—not a single global authority imposing one political agenda.

National Priorities Without Scientific Isolation

A country could use AIIM to define thematic pools for specific goals:

• public-health research;
• renewable energy;
• local agriculture;
• national-language technologies;
• cybersecurity;
• mathematics education;
• industrial productivity;
• climate adaptation;
• preservation of biodiversity;
• research infrastructure.

However, national relevance would not require intellectual isolation.

A domestic project may depend on foreign software, imported methods, international datasets, or theoretical work developed elsewhere. Conversely, nationally financed work may later benefit the rest of the world.

A dependency-aware architecture could make these relationships visible. When a nationally funded output relies heavily on a globally maintained scientific resource, the national fund could voluntarily allocate a fraction of its budget to the upstream contributors that made the domestic result possible.

For example:

1. A country rewards a local medical research project.
2. AIIM identifies an open statistical library used throughout the project.
3. The library is maintained by contributors in several countries.
4. A predefined infrastructure allocation rewards those maintainers.
5. The country still achieves its national objective while helping preserve the global infrastructure on which its researchers depend.

National interest and global reciprocity become complementary rather than contradictory.

Preventing National Pools from Becoming Prestige Filters

National eligibility does not automatically imply national meritocracy.

A country-specific pool could still reproduce existing inequalities if it directs most money to a small set of prestigious universities, senior academics, or politically connected programmes.

AIIM should therefore distinguish between:

• legitimate jurisdictional restrictions, such as a statutory requirement to fund domestic research; and
• irrelevant status signals, such as institutional prestige when evaluating the scientific value of a specific contribution.

An output-based system could evaluate eligible contributors according to their work rather than assuming that the most famous institution produces the most valuable research.

This could be especially important for:

• independent scientists;
• early-career researchers;
• researchers outside elite universities;
• scientific software developers;
• dataset maintainers;
• reviewers and replicators;
• contributors whose work is useful but not conventionally prestigious.

The goal would not be to eliminate national policy. It would be to make national policy more accurately merit-based.

Global Funds Could Correct Geographic Inequality

A global pool would serve a different purpose from national pools.

Wealthy countries can finance domestic universities and infrastructure at levels unavailable to poorer states. If every country supports only its own researchers, pre-existing scientific inequality can become self-reinforcing: well-funded systems produce more visible outputs, receive more recognition, and attract even more resources.

Global funding could partly counterbalance this pattern by rewarding valuable contributions independently of the fiscal capacity of the contributor’s country.

It could also fund work whose primary beneficiaries are spread across many jurisdictions, including:

• open scientific infrastructure;
• neglected diseases;
• global environmental monitoring;
• foundational theory;
• multilingual research tools;
• low-cost laboratory methods;
• disaster prediction;
• reproducibility and replication;
• standards for interoperable scientific data.

This does not mean distributing funding equally among countries regardless of output. It means evaluating contributions globally while recognizing that merit can emerge from places with very unequal access to conventional funding.

Auditability Is Essential for Public Financing

Governments cannot simply transfer public authority to an opaque model.

Any use of AI in science financing would require:

• published eligibility rules;
• documented evaluation criteria;
• traceable evidence;
• explanations for funding decisions;
• procedures for correcting factual errors;
• independent audits;
• protection against conflicts of interest;
• adversarial testing;
• human appeal and oversight;
• compliance with public law;
• transparent changes to models and scoring rules.

Blockchain records could help document transactions and governance decisions, but blockchain alone would not establish scientific correctness or procedural fairness. The evaluation process, source evidence, model behaviour, appeals, and institutional responsibilities would also require scrutiny.

AIIM should therefore be understood as proposed funding infrastructure—not an infallible scientific judge.

Research Security and Legitimate Limits

Science as a global public good does not mean that every piece of information must always be immediately and universally disclosed.

Some research involves:

• personal or medical data;
• endangered communities or species;
• confidential industrial information;
• dual-use risks;
• critical infrastructure;
• national-security restrictions;
• indigenous or community-controlled knowledge.

The OECD has noted the contemporary policy challenge of balancing international research cooperation and scientific openness with national and economic security.

An AIIM funding pool would therefore need explicit policies distinguishing open scientific value from information that must be protected for ethical, legal, or security reasons. Restrictions should be specific and reviewable rather than used as a general excuse for scientific protectionism.

A Federated Model Is Better Than a Single World Science Ministry

Treating science as a global public good does not require creating one centralized institution that decides all research priorities.

A more resilient model would be federated:

• global funds finance universally valuable contributions;
• governments finance domestic capacity and national priorities;
• regional organizations finance shared regional objectives;
• charities support neglected causes;
• universities and research institutions finance their missions;
• individual donors support topics they consider valuable;
• common infrastructure evaluates outputs and records funding relationships.

This plural structure reduces dependence on any single political authority, algorithm, donor, or institutional ideology.

AIIM’s role would be to connect these funding sources to a shared map of scientific contributions—not to erase differences between funders.

From Competition Between Countries to Contribution Accounting

Countries will continue to compete in science. They seek talent, economic advantage, prestige, security, and technological leadership. Some competition can motivate investment.

The problem arises when competition conceals interdependence.

Modern scientific achievements are rarely products of one isolated nation. They depend on international literature, imported equipment, open software, shared standards, migration, education, and long chains of previous discoveries.

AIIM could make this interdependence more explicit by recording who contributed what and which later outputs depended on those contributions.

A government could then say:

We are financing our national scientific priorities, but we are also paying a fair share toward the global knowledge and infrastructure that make our national achievements possible.

That is a more credible model than either extreme:

• pretending that science can be completely nationalized; or
• expecting governments to spend public money without any domestic mandate.

Conclusion

National science policy and science as a global public good operate at different levels.

National policy determines how a country develops capacity, addresses domestic needs, and accounts for public expenditure. The global-public-good perspective recognizes that scientific knowledge, infrastructure, and benefits frequently cross borders.

AIIM could reconcile these levels through a federated architecture:

• one global map of scientific contributions;
• transparent and auditable evaluation mechanisms;
• multiple independently governed funding pools;
• national, regional, thematic, and global eligibility rules;
• additive rewards from several compatible sources;
• recognition of international dependencies;
• protection for legitimate legal, ethical, and security constraints.

The central principle is not that every government must finance every scientist. It is that national financing decisions should operate within an accurate understanding of science as a globally interconnected production system.

A country can invest in its own scientific future while also supporting the common foundations of human knowledge. AIIM could provide the accounting, evaluation, and financing infrastructure needed to make both objectives compatible.