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Open Source Science
Tim writes "A few days ago (June 26th), the "Public Access to Science" act was introduced to the House of Representatives. This act would ammend the US Copyright Act to "exclude from copyright protection works resulting from scientific research substantially funded by the Federal Government," in essence, requiring all federally-funded scientific research to be published as open content. The Public Library of Science has a press release with more information."
I don't think this is a bad thing, actually. But I'm sure the lobbyists are going to twist this into "the government can't *buy* GPL code".
This is just one more reason not to accept federal funds. I always said there were too many strings attached.
But I'm not sure I agree there are "excessive profits" at journals, especially since some of them have recently spent big $$ to digitize and archive old articles--in many cases dating back over a hundred years. But since many of us are almost exclusively using online access to journals, distribution charges will decrease dramatically.
So the big question isn't whether this should happen--it should. Science ideally should be a meritocracy of ideas, not dependent on how much your school is willing to spend on journals. But the big question is who pays in this new model. Someone has to review and edit articles. Someone has to pay for the bandwidth of the journal. So do we go back to the "you pay if you want to publish" method (bad idea--only the rich can publish) or will public funds go to public distribution (i.e. the public library model).
Too bad public libraries are often underfunded.
-Geoff
That would be my reading of that announcement too. Of course it's the initial proposal, so it'll get all sorts of changes along the way.
No, it's not necessarily a bad thing. There's a whole lot of work that's completely hidden from view that would be opened up to academic research. I can think of several chemistry programs I'd love to get in source form.
But it would be quite interesting to see how they decide to make the cutoff. TCP/IP was government-funded research. Does that mean anything that uses it must be released? (This is why IANAL.)
-Geoff
I would totally buy the arguement of not allowing patents on government funded research. But government funding doesn't really compensate graduate students for the work they do and unless they plan on giving the NSF 10x more money and forcing schools to pay their grad students well this just won't fly. I've been on a grad student salary I was $200 in the hole per month before paying for food and clothing, plus there were gaps in the pay, you didn't get paid over winter break, when you were furiously working on a paper, and you didn't get payed for the last month of each school year. You were two months into summer before you got your first paycheck from the internship... The government won't even give you student loans for the shortfall or for health insurance or registration fees. The only blessing is that credit card companies don't seem to have a problem lending a PhD student thousands at 20% (probably a good bet for them...) Doctors & Dentists also give you pretty good repayment terms, but I digress. Considering the economic hit that the students are taking it seems only fair that they keep at least copyright on their work.
I also think people will find ways around this, say you accept government money for two years and accept corporate money for non-exclusive use rights in the last two years.. Well what do you know, you made a lot of progress in that last year...
The free research movement
Is avalaiable asa PDF here.
Do not confuse duty with what other people expect of you; they are utterly different.Duty is a debt you owe to yourself.
Don't get me wrong, I think this is a VERY good thing. Just think of the BILLIONS of dollars in research funds shelled out to corporations that never let the results see the light of day (outside their own firm). This could be HUGE in the private/amature space development efforts.
I just wonder whether it applies to all the funds that have already been spent and whether companies will be able to negotiate exemptions into their development contracts with the government.
science is a religion
I agree with this proposal. If the US Government is paying for the research, they should be able to expect ownership of the IP. Since the USG isn't in the business of IP hoarding, then they instead have it released into the Public Domain.
The research does not have to be federally funded. So, if this condition is too much for the research team, then perhaps they should seek alternate funding. Then the altruism of the doner may allow the research team to keep the IP.
What those who want activist courts fear is rule by the people.
Next they should retroactively make make government sponsered organizations (cough, monopolies, cough) open source (ie Bell Labs, various power companies, ICANN, yada, yada).
This is good and bad.
It's great for papers. For one thing, it would prevent the obnoxious practice of making authors sign over the rights to their papers to the publishing company (Springer-Verlag is notorious for this.) It's a good first step towards building a free internet repository for scientific papers.
On the other hand, it could prevent computer scientists from working on GPL (or even BSD code), since derivative works must be copyrighted under the same license. That would really suck, in fact,
Perhaps the law could be amended in one of the following two ways:
- Instead of removing copyright protection, simply require that they give anyone permission to copy the work verbatim. This would jibe with the BSD license and (probably) the GPL.
- Remove copyright from only "scientific papers" or something like that.
It's interesting that they're providing full public access to new technology without requiring NDA's and licensing fees.
This is good public policy, one that will advance overall progress faster than if restrictions were in place.
Logically, the government doesn't (or shouldn't) need monetary incentives to create new inventions in the same way that individuals do; they already have the ability to reap tax revenue from a wide field at will.
By making their IP free, the government thereby lowers barriers to entry for anyone that wants to build upon the technology. As a result, society at large will benefit from more frequent and competitive introductions of inventions built on top of government-developed IP. The field of possible new inventors isn't restricted to those with both intelligence and money; it's enough to be intelligent.
Interestingly, release of software developed under U.S. government funding usually is required to contain a proviso like:
and the usual disclaimer of no warranty.In some cases software has been licensed for a fee to outside entites and in other cases it has been released freely under the various flavors of GPL, BSD, etc.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
I would totally buy the arguement of not allowing patents on government funded research.
The bill is about prohibiting copyrights on reports of government funded research.
The patent issue was not mentioned.
I would be extreemly rare for any researcher to make much money by retaining the copyright to federally funded research. Maybe if somebody wrote a "thesis of the year" but most academic research books make little money for their authors.
I think this is a good idea overall. It helps to level the playing field for poorer universities. Also, since there's fairly blatant Napster-like copyright violations done by every researcher and by article repositories (Citeseer), this would pave the way for truly open research content.
Take a look at this email to get an idea of the various battling forces in the academic world.
Anand Rangarajan anand@cise.ufl.edu
Maybe I missed it, but where would all this information be located? Availability online still limits the stuff, as many people don't have internet capabilities at home. Availability in paper form (or microfilm or whatever) would be a physically enormous amount of data. Would people in other countries also get to see everything?
Would this eventually become retroactive; that is, we get to see what our tax dollars funded in the past?
It's a huge amount of stuff. Think of all the grants from the EPA, FDA (would we get to see drug trials?), NASA, NSF, DARPA, DoE (Energy, not necessarily Education), and so on.
Don't get me wrong; I completely support it, and am kinda curious about exactly what kinds of studies my taxes have funded. It just seems like there are some large problems to be thought through.
"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former." -- Albert Einstein