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

This means it can't be GPL'd

[spitzak]

This does mean that such work cannot be released under the GPL either (since the GPL requires copyright), it must be public domain.

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".

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:Wonderful news! What's next?

[zenyu]

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.

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

Bad Idea

[zenyu]

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...

Re:Bad Idea

[merdark]

I agree with you completely, I'm currently a grad student.

Interestingly, in Canada the trend is the opposite. More and more Canadian universities are giving students almost complete IP rights. For instance, my university does this, they only require that they can have eternal free use of whatever I come up with while I'm there. Not a bad deal at all.

Of coures maybe things are different in America? Are grad students in funded exclusivly by the government as they are here? If not I suppose this law may not have as much of an impact. If it is the same, then this could perhaps hurt US academic research community.

Re:Bad Idea

[zenyu]

Of coures maybe things are different in America? Are grad students in funded exclusivly by the government as they are here?

Grad students aren't funded directly. Professors apply for grants in various fields and then pay the university to employ the student at a fixed rate. But the university doesn't care where the money comes from, the university might take a 60% cut for overhead and a cut on any purchases over $300. Where I was the professor also paid a health insurance co-pay for students even though students weren't given health insurance. Professors also get money from industry, Microsoft, IBM, Unilever... but except for Microsoft these are on an entirely different league, a lab might get a few million from the government and a 100k from the other sources. Microsoft gave us money for some patent rights to stuff developed with government money, but the much smaller grants from others were completely unrestricted. They just wanted to visit and have an inside track on hiring graduate students for summer internships. Government money, especially military money, has very few restrictions and is often more than you can spend. The universities don't allow spending this on the students, presumably to avoid the apperance that well funded departments pay better than the pure and social sciences, and the humanities. (Part of the "Contract with America" when the Republicans swept congress was the elimination of government funding for the humanities(NEH), so those departments are funded (badly) out of that 60%+ overhead..The arts funding (NEA) still exists in limited form, but generally this is less relevant as there are large private donors to fund these, and they do not grant many Ph.D's)

As for IP, patents usually belong to the university, but you have the copyright. Some universities take all the money from patents, but most have some give the inventor 50%+ of the royalties. Unfortunately since they own the patent you can't release your code without their permission. Your copyright gives you some leverage, as the patent is less valuable to them without it, but I've yet to ever hear back from legal when I wanted to release anything patented I wrote without a direct cash payment to the university.. A couple of the very best Uni's give you patent rights.. I don't think there is any move toward this. Though I think I might have patented some things if I had been given control of the patent with royalty obligations to the university. As the system is currently you'd be a fool to do it, you won't ever be able to use your own code legally again except at their approval. Well unless you move to some country where the patent doesn't apply.

Salon has some deeper coverage

[hassr]

This article gives a bit more than the press release.

The free research movement

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.