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

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.

Salon has some deeper coverage

[hassr]

This article gives a bit more than the press release.

The free research movement