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."

Comments

Wonderful news! What's next?

[ghutchis]

This would be great news and will certainly level the research playing field. The major research universities and companies can currently afford the massive prices required to subscribe to a wide variety of journals. One of the first responces, IMHO will be the increase in research quality outside the current "research farms."

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

Re: Exclude from Copyright

[ghutchis]

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

Chiming In . . .

[Dausha]

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.

Re:This means it can't be GPL'd

[Alsee]

This does mean that such work cannot be released under the GPL either

While you're right it can't be released under the GPL, you are perfectly able to take the relased public domain work and stick it into the GPL. Hell, Microsoft can take stuff from the public domain and stick it into Widows and under their licence.

It doesn't prevent people from working on existing GPL code either, it just takes an extra step. You just release a public domain patch. Anyone (including you) can then apply that patch to a GPL project and release it that way.

We just might need a new patching tool that is extra careful not to include any of the text of the source into the patch. It also needs to be able to grab code from one existing project and copy it into another existing project. Worst case you could implement it as a brain-dead key logger as you work on the project. Make the log file public domain and it can be used to update GPL code.

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