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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)."
now he can get his stuff copyrighted too!
The battle for accessible culture is important, but the battle for accessible science is more important (IMO).
Keep up the good work!
Need professional pictures taken in the Puget Sound? Hire me!
With all the discussions in previous years regarding the government trying to decide what scientists can and cannot post in journals, I am hoping this can further put the government at a distance and allow free information to remain, well, free.
IGB: More fun than eating oatmeal!
I think this is excellent, but only academic and possibly government funded research will use this. The pharmaceutical and bio-tech companies will continue to do their own thing and make billions.
It has never been difficult for crackpots with agendas to spread rubbish; usually with a purchased 'of the shelf' diploma under their belt.
What would be an idea is a repository of CC licenced scientific papers which academic critics can review.
Alternatively, Universites could run their own dedicated sites for papers; they *only* allow papers from their University to be made available there but anyone can read / reproduce them under the terms of the licence.
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
I'm a US government scientist, just found out that journals must have two types of copyright agreements, don't know if this is universal:
1. For most people, all rights go to [journal].
2. If more than X co-authors are US. government employees, the work must be Public Domain.
I believe this is forced on the journals as the price of accepting work from government scientists. This, is a Good Thing the government is doing (for once) over publishing industry. Don't know if this is universal across agencies, journals, sorry if the above paraphrase is impeferfect (legalese isn't in front of me right now).
All reputable scientific journals have a peer review system wherin the research to be published must first be scrutinized by other experts in the field. I don't see why free access to research publications would change this.
> Will this not make it much easier for crackpots with agendas to spread bogus/bullshit scientific "facts"?
I don't think so. The Creative Commons idea doesn't affect peer-review, reputation, etc., that are the bedrock of legitimate scientific publications. What it will do is make it easier for crackpots (and the rest of us) to read significant scientific publications.
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
I think you meant "author pays" (although commonly publication costs are paid from the grant that funds the research, or from the authors' institution(s)).
For years, journals have imposed "page charges" to defray part of the publication costs; PLOS and others recover essentially all of the costs from their authors (but since most or all of their distribution is electronic, their costs are lower than for traditional print journals). Their authors' fees are higher than typical "page charges" since they have no income from subscribers.
If the government funds your research, you should not be able to patent it and must make it, your source data, your computer programs, and your source code publically available for free.
That data, source code must be public domain or at least a BSD style license. This follows the federal government in that its publications are public domain.
Additionally, a financial statement of how you spent your taxpayer funded research money should be available for free, and be published on the internet.
In other words,
a. You can't profit from goverment grants
b. You cannot hide what you do with the grant money
c. Anyone can take your work without licensing fees or licensing legal agreements for any purpose.
I don't know. Maybe it's just because most free access journals are unknown startups with no established history. If you submit a manuscript to one of the established and prestigious scientific journals such as Science, Nature or PRL (at least in my field), it's not only going to be peer reviewed but it's going to be subjected to a peer-review-from-hell. That, on the other hand, is unlikely to happen if you submit it to a free access journal...
The owls are not what they seem
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.
I don't know enough about the expenses here to say whether that's a real problem.
Roughly speaking, there are no expenses.
The editor is usually a volunteer, and the reviewers are always volunteers. The editor sends your manuscript to two or three referees, who mark it up and write him a report. He then takes their names off the reports, and forwards them to you, with his decision (usually either ``forget it'' or ``revise and resubmit''). All this is done electronically, so costs are nil.
Reviewing is the price you pay for submitting to a journal: if you submit, you'll start getting articles to review. Doing a good job on these can only help your standing with the editor, and get you better referees and a better chance of helpful criticism on your next submission.
Aside from a secretary for the editor (not all publications have this), the only paid employees are the guys who run the printing press and the fat cats who take your checks to the bank. The authors and would-be authors do the writing, the peer review and the typesetting, and in return, the publisher takes the copyright and the profit.
See what I've been reading.
I'm a physics grad student now, but let me give my take on it. The answer to your question is really yes or now. Much like the printing press and the internet let's any crackpot publish/disseminate bogus facts, but it gives the same abilities to people that have something worthwhile to say.
But how do you tell the good stuff from the bad? Firstly, most scientists worth their salt will be able to immediately distinguish whether a paper is written by an expert in the field, or someone bullshitting. Now as to someone outright lying, well the case of Jan Hendrick Schon reveals that problem can exist within the peer-reviewed literature too. However, seeing how afterwards he was exposed he was fired, and even had his PhD revoked by his university, can hopefully deter other would-be frauders. Scientific 'trolling' may be a harder problem to crack, though.
One such method to determine relative 'goodness' of an author, or a paper, is to see how many times it is cited by another paper. In fact, one of my former professors at U. Penn was one of the motivators for this method because she experienced alot of discrimination trying to get a faculty job. (In the old days, and even today to a smaller extent, female PhD physicists are underrepresented). She had to use these citation numbers to prove her work was as influential as some of the top men in the field.
Of course, with fully open access, it will be relatively easy to create many 'spam' articles that cite your own article to increase it's perceived importance. One way to combat this might be to weigh citing scores lower if they come from within an intimate circle. Another would be to have a moderation and meta-moderation system to acknowledge which papers in their field are worthy of being cited. Of course this goes back to the 'elite' problem of someone being unfairly shut out, but at least they can still publish their paper openly, if they need to point out 20 years down the line they were the first to publish a certain theory.
There actually already are such open venues, for example the arxiv will allow AFAIK anybody to publish a paper there.
Other than publications, the American Physical Society , for example, gets some federal funding and hence provide some public services. For example, at some of the larger meetings they might provide a room for presentations from non-physicists or others, kind of like the local public access station on cable TV. Sometimes talks are given on philosophy of physics, sometimes there are just crackpot talks, but any decent physicist will be able to tell by a talk whether it is worthwhile or not.
make world, not war
This is the idea of "free" as in speech, people. And this is why the free software paradigm is more important than just getting stuff done and providing low-cost solutions. Bio-research is extremely heavily encumbered with patents and costs. I'm extremely happy to see several initiatives (see for example the BIOS initiative and the open access initiative) slowly gain momentum.
Hell, we had to pay to get an article published (quite common) and then pay another 30$ to get a copy of the journal issue (and, no, there is not such thing as free internet access for high-profile journals) to read our own article.
I really want publishers and research companies to make money, but public funded research must be free for all. This is humanity's intellectual property, not the coca-cola recipe!
P.
So many of you seem to be saying "Grants don't allow companies sell the technology" or "A business should not profit from public money".
But let me share something with you..
There is a program called SBIR (Small Business Inovation Research). In which small businesses ( under 500 employees) can submit for grants for very (typically) very specific "problems" the various federal agencies want to have solved. With an end result being commercialization of your product/technology.
It goes like this..
1. Feds put out a list of solicitations
2. You submit a paper describing your idea and how commercially viable it is
3. You may or may not get "Phase I" funding for research.
4. Now, if you did well in Phase I you can submit for "Phase II" funding. Which gives you more money. This step is primarily to help get your product into the market. So you better have a good set of sales numbers ready.
Sometimes the "product" is something that the Feds will want to buy from you (e.g. NASA, US Army, etc..) and other times it will have civilian application. So if you want it to have civilian application, you can work on that too with the grant money.
And in regards to IP, you retain exclusive rights to ALL work you have done. And the US Govt. also has right to the technology, but not to sell it, just to use/improve/rework it.
This is not free money, you do need other sources of capital in order to progress in the funding. They aren't giving out free money without you doing some work and showing you can generate outside interest.
The point of the program is to grow the US economy and also to provide the US Govt. with R&D for technology it finds it has a need for.
There are many details that I have just glossed over. But you can find out more here.
There is a national conference twice a year to learn more about the program. You can find out about that by going here.
It has a sister-program called STTR which allows you to work with a university and use their labs and staff. You can learn about both at the conference, I find them quite informative.
Here are some links for those who want more background and detail on the open access movement:
h ive.htm
Open Access Overview
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/overview.htm
(my introduction to OA for those who are new to the concept)
Open Access News blog
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/fosblog.html
(my blog, updated daily)
SPARC Open Access Newsletter
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/arc
(my newsletter, published monthly)
FAQ on the NIH public-access policy
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/nihfaq.htm
Timeline of the open access movement
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/timeline.htm
What you can do to help the cause of open access
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/lists.htm#do
Peter Suber
I'm not worried about scientists, I'm worried about the average boob who believes anything he sees on TV, because a "certified scientician" says so.
Like that Clonex or whoever, the UFO cult who claimed they cloned a human being. Despite the fact they couldn't even produce a photograph of the cloned baby, the media (thanks to a slow news week) plastered this "breakthrough" everywhere.
The average dope still thinks it's true.
People think that abortions cause breast cancer, because some born-again christian "scientist" said so (with nothing to back it up). People hear "science" and think it's true, they don't do the research to find out that this guy is alone in his belief.
Hell, every other day the media feeds us a story about "wine is good for you! it prevents cancer", and then the next day "wine is bad for you! it causes cancer!"
The problem is more with the media than the scientific community, I just worry about a giant collection of catchy scientific headlines for slow news days.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
One such method to determine relative 'goodness' of an author, or a paper, is to see how many times it is cited by another paper. In fact, one of my former professors at U. Penn was one of the motivators for this method because she experienced alot of discrimination trying to get a faculty job. (In the old days, and even today to a smaller extent, female PhD physicists are underrepresented). She had to use these citation numbers to prove her work was as influential as some of the top men in the field.
I am a female physicist and I think using the number of times a paper was cited as the sole test of how good the work was is a dangerous idea. In the space sciences, there are so many papers published every year, in many different journals, that it is impossible for anyone to read them all. What happens is that a lot of scientists will only read papers by established, experienced scientists that have built a strong reputation over many years. This means that the papers cited most often tend to be written by older men, and papers written by younger scientists and women tend to be cited far less often.
I find this quite disturbing, since when I recently did a journal article search for papers on a particular topic, I found an article published by a well-respected scientist in a reputable, peer-reviewed journal that was total garbage. In spite of the fact that the paper was just terrible, it had been cited many times. I know a lot of people who will cite a paper in their own work that was cited in a paper they recently read without bothering to check the original paper first.
I wonder how many people have actually read some of these papers that have been cited more than 100 times. Probably less than 50% of the people who cite a particular paper have actually bothered to look up the paper and read it carefully.
http://xxx.lanl.gov/
sorry, its not porn. don't know why they chose xxx
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.