Slashdot Mirror
Profit vs. Science
graxrmelg writes: " The Washington Post reports that Science magazine has made a special agreement with Celera Genomics to allow publication of an article about its research without the requirement that the raw data be made publicly available (through an NIH database), as is done with all other articles. (Celera's patent-happiness has been discussed earlier on Slashdot.)
Science has put out a statement on the matter."
While I'm a big fan of free software and Open Source, in the grand scheme of things it probably isn't going to change the world.
It's in science that we really need the sort of freedom that RMS advocates. Imagine how much closer we would be to a cure for cancer or AIDS if researchers were forced to co-operate rather than hide discoveries from each other in order to protect the massive profits the drug company that comes up with such acure would no doubt make.
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enterfornone - logging in for a change
Please read the article before posting. Comments on /. (and article descriptions) are quickly approaching the level of zdnet articles
The sequence (raw data) can be downloaded. Researchers are free to use the data, and publish papers based on the raw data. Commercial users must license the data for commercial use.
Yes, it would be good if the data were in the public domain. However, it is available to researchers, and nature has agreed to keep a copy of the data in escrow because of the particular situation
Before you decide to start typing up an uber-comment which is factless and basically a first post in disguise, please read the article.
pilot
It's not giving free access to academics, not in the open source meaning of "free" anyway.
If you want less than 1 Mb (that is, less than 0.03%) of the data, you agree to a clickwrap license on the Celera web site.
If you want all the data (about 3000 Mb), you and your institution cosign a formal license with Celera.
What does this license say, you may wonder? Well, so do we. Turns out, the details are still being worked out. But the gist is this: you can use the data for anything you want, so long as it is for noncommercial purposes. You can publish your results freely, with no reachthru rights being asserted by Celera. And you agree not to redistribute the data.
Oops. Look at that again. Ever see a scientific paper where you a) published your results and b) didn't "redistribute" (i.e show!) the primary data? Can someone define the bounds between publication and redistribution? I can't. Neither can Science, as of yesterday.
Science and Celera has not yet defined the bounds between trivial redistributions that Celera doesn't sue you for ("Figure 1 shows a BLAST alignment to my gene in the Celera database"), and real redistributions that they do ("Table 1 in the Web Supplement gives the positions of every DNA hexamer in the Celera database. Please don't use it to reconstruct the original data.") But I'll bet you that pretty much every large scale bioinformatics/computational biology analysis of the Celera data would be counted as a "redistribution"... potentially blocking the main use of the genome, which is for large-scale genomic analysis. And if the bounds aren't defined by the agreement, the bounds will be defined on a case-by-case basis by negotiation with Celera lawyers. Yes, I'm looking forward to that, I'll definitely get a lot of human genome research done.
It's a horrible precedent. Part of the reason for the success of bioinformatics has been the public availability of the international DNA databases. Science and Celera now threaten to set a precedent that could change that.
ob. disclaimer: I'm a coauthor on the competing Human Genome Project paper, and also a Celera stockholder. I'm conflicted both ways. I'm either going to be able to do human genome research freely, or I'll be rich. And I'd rather do research.
This tension between academic and commercial R&D is not new; any scientist doing work for a corporation is going to run into the issue that his work is owned be an organization with a profit motive, and that he does not have the right to freely publish his work.
Even the concept of free publication by academics is disapearing - universities now want to review all publications for potential patentability - some schools now garner very considerable income from licensing ideas developed as part of academic research.
Patents were developed to encourage publishing - they allow disclosure and at the same time protect the commercial rights of the publisher. However patents are not scientific literature.
What Science is doing is very interesting - they are recognizing that the value of publication of some works outweighs the issues of mere procedural restrictions on the location of a database. How this will work out is very interesting, not only because of its impact on this particular field, but also for the whole corporate-academic dynamic.