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Creative Commons For Science
chrisspurgeon writes "The folks at Creative Commons are rolling out a new project aimed at improving the dissemination of scientific publications and data. The National Institutes of Health is already proposing mandated Open Access to all NIH-funded research, and many scientists welcome the free redistribution of their papers, they just don't know the legal details of how to do it. The Science Commons project will take on the copyright problems unique to scientists (things like pre and post prints, and electronic vs. paper journal distribution)."
BBC Radio 4 did a radio program about the publish problems in Science, especially Physics, recently. I thought it was very good.
You can listen to it online from the BBC website. It requires Real Player, however.
- Jax
Let me clarify: It is possible / likely that big pharma will publish work under the creative commons license system and it is a guarantee that we will continue to make billions of dollars.
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
This quote is really a steaming pile. Like today public and private school degrees are anything but purchased products? Get real. In the United States (and certain Caribbean islands), a university "education" is purchased for a price just like anything else. Rarely do grades and actual knowledge have much to do with obtaining a degree.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
To listen to the programme http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/science/rams/publish.r am 'Listen Again' service will happily send a RealAudio stream of the programme which mplayer --dump-stream will happily rip for you. (The Beeb say they can only offer streaming media because their rights agreements don't cover other formats :/ ) No, I'm not connected with Aunty Beeb in any way, I'm just a Radio 4 junkie :)
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
This is a very good thing. If my tax dollars are going to support the research, I hope it benefits as many people as possible (instead of just the big PHaRMA ).
I had heard that the Pharma people have a way around this. They will co-sponsor research with NIH, and when it comes time to publish, claim that all of the good stuff came from their share of the funding (and hence claim it as their IP). I don't know how true this is, but that's what I've heard.
I have been on the lookout for quality (human) Microarray data for doing predictive data mining with some exciting new techniques, but can't find too many such sets around. Looking at the revenues of Affymetrix (for instance), one would think there would be oodles of data out there; but this is not the case. Yes, I am aware of the SMD, etc.
Many government grants do require some sort of public access to the data and results, but they do not require everything to be free. There are many grants from the military where they require a certain amount of secrecy for obvious reasons.
Actually, many of us in Basic science research are highly concerned by this. There are some specialized journals that will probably go out of print (e.g. Journal of Comparative Neurology) because if the articles published therein are made free (no subscription needed, or allowed), they can't cover their publishing costs. The proposal to cover costs in the absence of maintaing current subscription levels is to pass the costs along to the authors - most estimates fall around $5000 USD per article. Most scientists will not be able to pay this, and so the field will narrow considerably. Even if they could, they'd have to spend taxpayer money to do so! Most likely, what will happen is the journals will simply fold, and consequently, neuroanatomists will lose the most highly respected journal devoted to this discipline, and by default, there will be fewer venues for scientific publication, and less advancement in general.
Pharmaceutical research will probably suffer too, since they tend to rely on basic science research for their ideas/targets.
Besides, most of the public wouldn't understand a damn thing in any one of these articles. And if you really want access, you can write to the corresponding author and request a reprint (most scientists are more than willing to give them out).
True, but the situation could become a little bit more muddled when -- while you may be an employee of a university, but the funding (which you wrote the proposal for) comes from a government agency.
Some government agencies require that all work done with their funding pass into the public domain, and yet the University typically tries to claim copyright (and patent rights) over the publications and inventions produced, at the same time.
Yet -- your grant is already paying the University for the "privelege" of doing your research at their institution. Sometimes this sum that the University gets is actually more than what goes into the science. Ostensibly, this money goes to "overhead" -- paying for the electricity and water bill and "facilities" for example. Yet, you have to buy most of your own equipment with grant money -- which is also taxed for overhead -- as well.
This system is inherently unfair. Taxpayer pays to get research done, you do all the work -- and the University keeps all the goodies? For what?
In fact, old Larry's institution, Stanford, is one of the worst offenders in the overhead game.
Which may be why he's proposing alternatives to the "employer keep all" scheme--which is fine for a commercial venture, but NOT fine at all for publically funded research at private universities. Who knows, this could be the thin edge of a very interesting wedge to start cracking that system.