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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".
And if you're married, create a legal teergrube for them. Explain all your research to your wife/husband and have them draft and submit a patent. Then attempt to sell a product by Copyrighting all usable names for this product. Seed the idea everywhere you can in newsgroups, mail lists, and chat rooms.
Use all of thse 'weapons' as a self-destructing blackmail. As in, you take this patent away from me, I'll kill the patent by legal kill.
The best way is to have as many in the grad class do this. It'll hurt the pocket dollar of these colleges.
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.
I'm sure my librarians would disagree with you $10,000 or more for a 12 issues of a journal is only possible because libraries buy these things for demanding faculty. There is a huge difference in price between the $50-$100 for a IEEE/ACM journal and one of the commercial journals. I draw the line at reviewing for a journal at $500/yr. The last publisher of $20-30 math books, Springer-Verlag, just got sold to a publisher that wants to maximize profit with no regard for the academic process they are serving. I think it may be time to abandon these old school publishers, I'm sure you could collect enough pre-orders with an electronic edition to get Dover or Eldritch Press to make a print run and mail them out. No one writes these books that sell 200-1000 copies worldwide for profit, it's merely a nicer form than pdf files.
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 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.
In computer science the code can bew very valuable. The papers are too, but here it is more important that your name be attached to it than any other aspect of copyright be ahered to. Often we sign our copyright away to a reputable member organization such as the ACM, while retaining distribution rights to our own papers. You gain from this from a legal standpoint in the common instance of multiple author papers.
I know the patent issue wasn't mentioned, but I still think I'd much rather give up the patents, which are mostly a hinderance, than give up the copyright which actually can be useful. I'd also be glad to give up the exclusive copying privledge of copyright after say five years, if I could retain the right to say "this paper must be copied in it's entirety if need to excerpt more than say 30% of the paper and the original paper must be referenced if you use more than 10% of it and it constitutes a significant part of your work." Academic principles would be stricter than this anyway, but this would allow me to go after true scalawags. Copyright lengths themselves are insane, I have no financial interest after 2-3 years in even the code, it's evolved greatly or I've dropped that pursuit by then, and I have no financial interest in papers what so ever. I can't for the life of me see why I need copyright protection in the grave either, for me a term of five years whether I'm dead or alive is more than enough for publishers to feel comfortable making a book, and a right to have my name attached to significant derivative works would be nice (though it won't motivate or dismotivate me any either way, plagarism is usually caught in the peer review process.) Honestly three years of copyright would be plenty good motivation in our field, but as an author I prefer more, but I also see great harm in making it more than five years. On the other hand I think five years for fiction books would be the minimum and ten years a good compromise in length. I don't see much harm in even a twenty year copyright in the developed world, but there is with anything more than ten in the developing world.
I don't think copyright is the right tool for music or software binaries. Here a compulsary licensing scheme would work much better than leaving the copying policies in the hands of the "creators." In music there are so few tunes you can actually make in the 12 note system that the copyright act more like patents. Software binaries are not written to be understood so don't really qualify as creative works, but the still require protection so that their software development can be compensated. I'm not sure what the right thing is, but the courts should not have made law and turned them into creative works. I'm sure the legislative system, as broken as it is, would have come up with something better.