Simple yes is not enough - it is much more complex than the article explains. Private funding is just the tip of the iceberg - private companies want their own opinions written in scientific manner, with facts taken and hidden to support that opinion. Is it good or bad? It actually does not matter - it is that way. But this applies only for paid papers.<p>There is a whole another category - paid research&#x2F;engineering projects. Scientists doing the work expect to publish something. Yet the meat of the research has to remain hidden for the company investing to hold market advantage. Result? Technical babble in papers. And it is quite often hard as hell to find which pieces of the paper are not honest.<p>Government funding application forms usually include a field labeled something like &quot;Expected result&#x2F;outcome&quot;. So you cannot just get funding without certainty of success in one form or another. Which basically results in funding directed to projects with some preliminary results. And those preliminary results are funded from another projects and so the cycle goes. This is very well illustrated in PhD Comics [1].<p>One of the core reasons behind all of this mess are funding gatekeepers: private companies know what they want and will pay for that particular output. Public funding is usually behind some Government Agency where the same set of people review funding applications and... &quot;known to be well behaving&quot; (delivering promised results) researchers are much more likely to get funded, see [1]. Either way, it is next to impossible to do what in my book is actual research - come up with a new idea and get funding to test whether it has any grounds at all.<p>[1]: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.phdcomics.com&#x2F;comics&#x2F;archive&#x2F;phd050611s.gif" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.phdcomics.com&#x2F;comics&#x2F;archive&#x2F;phd050611s.gif</a><p>Edit: fixed link