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Publicly-Funded Research Data is Public?
Elektroschock asks: "Public data belongs to the public, some advocates believe. BSD Unix is one of the most striking business examples of that 'public data' rule. Gauss and Google made patent data available. But what about classical research results? Should free access to knowledge get regulated? A new petition supported by Open Society Institute wants free public access to research: 'Evidence is accumulating to indicate that research that is openly accessible is read more and used more and that open access to research findings would bring economic advantage'. How do scientists feel about it? Does public funding really turn their results into public property?"
seems like a good counter example.
Lets start refering to The War Against Terror by it's initials. . .
I don't know if it is open but if it is not it should be.
They often complain that the "data" provided is obfuscated or mischaracterized.
If public money funds research, it is unthinkable that the public should be forbidden to review the product of their contributions. Even things that GWB would label 'threats to national security'; the government exists to facilitate public interest, not to manipulate us like pawns. We have a right to know what is going on, and in the case of research, there is little, if any, defense provided in saying that information is simply too dangerous for normal people to know.
absolutely public data should be public, just not mine ; P Seriously, if taxpayer money is used, the public should be able to access the results of studies, etc. To a large extent, I would argue it's already like this. Many academic publications are available online at the local state university. Of course, not too many people use that resource. The real travesty is when public money is used to fund research that benefits the public, but the fruits of the research are appropriated and patented by corporate concerns like pharmaceutical companies. The USGS lockdown of some map data is another example of abuse of public knowledge. I also happen to think the national telecommuncations infrastructure should be nationalized, but that's another discussion . . . ; )
harmonious design
It seems to me that we (the public) pay taxes to a government for research that bends the truth or tells us flat-out lies in addition to keeping some of their research a secret. Is that what we're paying them for? Would anything stop them? Most importantly, does anyone care?... or would they rather just "live their lives" and not have to worry about what their government does?
If you're feeding at the public trough, your research should be available to the public.
Want to keep your research private, get private funding.
The data should be public but I would just add one small caveat. There should be a substantial delay in releasing the data in order to give the sponsor the first go at publishing it.
It's the same thing that they do with Hubble images. If you take all the time necessary to write a (lengthy) proposal to have the HST take a picture, then you patiently wait (perhaps years) for your turn in line, then finally you get your image - but some other random shmoe throws together a paper describing it, well, how much would that suck? You did all the leg work, you should be able to publish and get the recognition.
After that of course, it's fine to make the data public.
I've often wondered why, if the scientists themselves are willing to publish results for free, the journals don't follow suit? When I began doing research, I was a student in a university that did not have access to all of the journals I needed. This was incredibly frustrating and may have negatively impacted my research, as I was unable to do an extensive literature review (there are only so many times one is willing to pay for articles before the bill gets quite large). Perhaps most universities have access to the journals, but the journals don't have any right to restrict access to others' research in the first place, IMO.
This happens in music as well. Trying to find free sheet music of classical public domain works can be quite challenging, though projects like Mutopia are beginning to change this.
I am a researcher (biologist). Since I work in a university, all my experiments have been funded by the tax-payer - hell, even my salary is paid by the tax-payer! So I believe publicly funded research data must be public.
I think the primary problem with a model where everyone has acccess to such research has been the fact that scientific research is distributed in the form of peer-reviewed scientific journals - which required paid subscriptions. However, in the last 3-5 years,some very respectable and highly cited open access journals have come up - check out www.plos.org or Biomedcentralahref=http://www.biomedcentral.com/re l=url2html-28477http://www.biomedcentral.com/> - they are open access publishers who don't charge for access - instead, they charge the authors for the publication costs. If I remember correctly, NIH has stated that all research performed at NIH must be published in open access journals. Many grants now have specific amounts of money set aside for publication charges - supporting the open access model.
Hopefully, in a few years time, all significant and important research will be available publicly. Obviously, we could choose to voluntarily block public access to some forms of research - defence research,etc. But then again, what percentage of sensitive nuclear/defence research actually gets published in peer-reviewed literature in the first place?
"Laziness is an optimisation protocol"
Information acquired under the patriot act?
As a scientist funded by the U.S. National Instiutes of Health, the answer has already been chosen. The NIH requires that all data be made freely accessible to the public within one year of generating a published report of the data. And that all manuscripts be made freely available within 6 months of publication.
I completely agree that this is the way things should be. The people of this nation pay my research bills, it should be their data. However, if I innovate something, I am free to file a patent. In fact, the patent office already has a one-year rule between publicly discussing an idea and filing for a patent. Patents are made to protect intellectual property, research should be free and clear.
Dec. 30: When requested, scientific information ''prepared by government researchers and scientists shall be transmitted [to Congress] uncensored and without delay." Bush's signing statement: The president can tell researchers to withhold any information from Congress if he decides its disclosure could impair foreign relations, national security, or the workings of the executive branch. Link
Although I am sensative to the free information argument, I can see witholding things like weapons research, nuke material transportation and gathering, etc. There are just some things the sick people who have a need for such things should have to do on their own. What bothers me is any research that could impair the workings of the executive branch. Lets say the executive branch is working on promoting revised environmental policy loosened emmissions to save money. This would seem to say they could withold any public research that would hurt their goal.
So public research is not required to be given to the public, or even anyone besides the president. Should it be? I'd say in a vast majority of cases, yes. But I do think it is best we withold info that would make creating advanced weaponry easy for others.
Read up on the Bayh-Dole Act. This is the specific reason why your research tax dollars generate stock value as opposed to public knowledge.
Tags != Comments, and -1 (Troll) != -1 (I Would Respond Angrily To This Poster So They Must Be Trolling)
Publicly funded results should be made available, but the funding source should also provide the funding to do so. Going from the raw data used to produce the results in a research study to raw data that can be used by other researchers is an expensive process. There are a number of workflows and tools used in processing the results that will not be available to other researchers. The common FOSS argument is only use open tools, but for many scientific applications, this is not possible. Just try telling an engineer to give up Matlab for medium-scale numeric computing in favor of your favorite scripting language. They won't accept it, and for good reasons.
Instead, the funding sources (e.g. NSF, NIH, DOD, etc) should include additional support in grants for the final step of making data available in a common format. Scientists can use their favorite tools for this and commercial tools can simply support the open publication formats. Better yet, create a National Data Repository whose purpose is to handle the final data preparation and dissemation.
For publically funded software, a similar process should occur. Most research software, while useful for a very narrow set of example applications, is not developed to the point where it is usable outside these tight constraints. This is simply because there is no research incentive to go any further than "good enough for publication". Without requiring specific languages, the funding agencies should provide enough money to finish the software engineering process and enable truly reusable software results. Some labs already meet this standard, but it's not cheap (they usually have a full time development staff in addition to the grad-student and post-doc researchers).
Most scientists don't have the time or resrouces to change current process, so it's really up to the public to not only push for open data, but also suggest and support realistic approaches to the problem.
-Chris
I believe you left out a step in your argument:
Of course, it's possible to deduce what the missing step was from context.
--MarkusQ
Don't forget that, using similar logic, some Senator (Arlin Specter, R-PA, I think) wanted to force NOAA to stop distributing its weather satellite imagery and data. He wanted it only available through commercial organizations like AccuWeather and The Weather Channel.
There are three classes of ethical theories in use: theories of rights, theories of utility and virtue ethics.
Under a theory of rights, it is hard to see how the public is not entitled to data that it paid for. If the public is deprived of the data, then the taxation used to pay for the data becomes theft.
Under a theory of utility, the question becomes whether the public benefits more from privatising public data or from putting it in the public domain. This has to be judged on a case by case basis. It is possible that medical research might need to be privatised in order to get commercial distribution of otherwise unprofitable treatments. The geographic data in question is so immediately useful that the public does not need a third party to "commercialize" it.
Under theories of virtue, the question is whether the public character is enhanced most by open exchange of data, or by privatising data. I think there is plenty of opportunity for private enterprise to add value to data, so on the whole openness is better.
Of course, what is going on here is that public agencies want to do more with less funding. Usually this is a good thing, but in this case they are ignoring the overall public good. What they are doing is reducing the amount of taxation (good), but turning a portion of that taxation into theft (bad).
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
No, most publically funded research is not available to the public, at least not for free.
But it's not just the public money that is spent on research that is misappropiated, it is
in fact the entire infrastructure that private corporations get use of for next to
nothing.
Most university departments "cooperate" in research with private corporations in that
those corporations put the professors in charge of the dept on their payrolls. They in turn
"align their research" with what the corps want and put the university infrastructure
(labs, equipment, students and employees) to work for them.
I look at it like this. If you are a reasearcher working for a private company and the owner of the company tells you that he/she wants to see all of your data (both raw data and analysis/conclusions), you are surely going to give them the data. (assuming you want to remain employed). In my mind, the same thing applies to publicly funded research. In this case, the owner of the data is the taxpaying public. And the data should be available to them. I think that when the results of research are published, the corresponding raw data should be published. As for research results that aren't published, I am sure someone can come up with a mechanism for publishing that raw data too. Anyway... I am a programmer that comes from a biology background. The company that I am programmer with now is not even vaguely related to biological research. I have many times found myself wanting some raw data that I could play with in developing algorithms in my free time. As a taxpayer who funds research, I think I should be entitled to the data.
www.DIYTVAntennas.com
This suggests there is something wrong with the current system...
In the current system, journal and libraries charge a fee to
1) pay for editors who have some knowledge of the material
2) pay for the administration of the peer-review process
3) pay for distribution costs
It is not like you really pay for access to the research. There are simply costs associated with ranking the research relative to other research via peer review (and this is essential), and costs associated with distribution.
As it is now, if you have access to a decent library, you have access to all published research...
And if you want to make it all public domain, you need to figure out how to conduct reasonable peer-review/ranking of papers, and distribution using public funds (this is actually the easy part). And how to deal with the journals, some of which make a LOT of money, when you tell them you are eminent domaining their business model...
Data usually gets made publicly available and is often put on the web, and the data behind any published paper should always be available to anyone who asks (for verification purposes, but that doesn't stop you doing your own analysis). There's sometimes a delay of a year or two, for reasons covered elsewhere in this discussion.
If you want raw data, find a suitable paper and ask the author (be polite and concise, etc, you are their employer but so are millions of others, and those others want their employee scientists to get on with their research). Try searching the web too, there may already be online databases of what you want.
Likewise, most research software in astronomy is open-source, or at least freeware (notable exceptions IDL and mathematica), and it all runs on linux.
Journals aren't free, but abstracts are. If you'd like to read something you've seen the abstract of you can email the corresponding author of a paper (listed with the abstract) and they'll give you an offprint (most likely a PDF) for free, or you can usually get a preprint from the arxiv server.
Anyone, from anywhere in the world could replicate all my research without spending a cent, aside from the costs of time and computation/bandwidth.
If you're talking on the order of a 6 month embargo, I could see that. If you're talking two years, I'd have to say that's too long.
I may be biased on the matter, as one of my duties is to distribute some public research data. The data that we generate is released immediately, except for new missions, which have had embargos until they could finish testing the instruments. The data we get from other locations may be embargoed for a few months.
For those who are new to the topic, I'd suggest you take a look at the OpenScience Project, the Science Commons, the NSF's 2003 Cyberinfrastructure Report, the NSB's Government Funding of Scientific Research and the Astronomer's Data Manifesto for a bit of background (specifically, see Ray Norris's Can Astronomy Manage its Data?).
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
yes, the results should be public and the resulting patents should be owned by the public and actually used to turn a profit in the public's interest thereby reducing tax burdens.
IMHO, any of the following should apply:
- patents resulting from publically funded research should never be granted (i.e. its free and open tech)
- drug companies with publically funded patents should be forbidden from including "R&D" cost in the prices of their drugs as a condition of their patent grants, because the taxpayer has already paid once. The price would be regulated to contain only operational production cost, limited overhead, and a limited "fair" profit (nte 10%)
- a special class of patent (say 5 years) for partial public funding to allow the company to recoup their portion of the costs
I am hesitant to advocate direct price controls because I am a economic libertarian, but patents are a special case since they are a government granted monopoly. If the research leading to the invention was funded by the government to begin with, the government has a extraordinary moral right to the end result.Imagine if the University Of YourState had done the aol search log research (http://aolsearchlogs.com/). The reported legitimate user of that data was Phd students in computer science and information retrieval. Making things public is nice, but I would hesitate to take it full speed and make a law requiring it (which with all things slashdot, it's all or nothing). Not because there is no review, but because, like the case of aol, there was review but they were scientists, not security experts and hosed it up.
I'm not responding as a representative of the US Government, and my opinions are my own, but I work at the NIH, and as far as NIH research goes it seems like the trend is more and more towards full open access. We're "strongly encouraged" to deposit all publications in PubMed Central and to do what we can to make them publicly accessible as quickly as possible.
Also, as far as I know all my official business writings are, by default, without copyright and completely in the public domain. At least the boilerplate I was told to put in whatever software I send out says that, though it does beg people to attribute the source of their software in anything they do so I (and NIH) get some credit.
I know several scientists around are actively trying to publish in some of the new open access journals and it seems like a lot of the bigger journals are promoting some kind of open access or open access option (eg. author pays a bunch more money and their article is open access). It seems to me that the biggest barrier to more people depositing their work in PubMed Central is that people don't know very well how to do it and what the rules each journal is for public access so they don't bother doing it.
Possibly releated to this is the Invention Secrecy Act of 1951. Here's a good summary page about what happens to inventions that are considered "too sensitive" to national security: http://www.fas.org/sgp/othergov/invention/index.ht ml
I wonder if most people realize this provision exists in the patent law for the government to keep information quiet, and it really makes me wonder what might be contained in the some 4800 patent applications.
"Gauss and Google made patent data available." ????
I hate to break it to the submitter, but patent data has always been freely available to the public. In fact it's the law. In exchange for grant of a patent, it must be published. Most patent offices around the world have online freely accessible databases of patents and patent applications. Google did not invent the patent search.
I am a publishing scientist, and have published data funded by public dollars (US government) in scientific journals, and so I have a ethical opinion to share, as well as a practical one which slightly contradicts the ethical one.
.html for online access. Maintaining those servers, running a peer-review process in a timely manner (which includes the editor running herd over many potential reviewers, all of which are of varying quality and speed), and handling problems all takes time and money to accomplish. While I do think some journals charge way too much for subscriptions of journals that are so-so in quality, ultimately I appreciate the hard work and cost that goes into doing this work. What most people don't realize is that peer-review is on a whole a free process; scientists donate their time to review other scientist's work to make sure its correct and not bogus. I review at least 2 papers a month, and since I can't find time to get it done at work, I take these home and work on them in the evening, even cleaning up grammar from non-US authors. Sometimes one paper can take 4 hours to review properly. So nothing is truly free, and therefore, someone has to pay for it, even if the original data was paid for by a taxpayer somewhere.
.pdf. At worst you'll get ignored but then if you work for a university you can get access to the paper through interlibrary loan...and maybe even through a good public library if you are willing to work with the librarian. In both cases you don't have to pay to get a copy of the paper, but it can take a very long time to receive your free copy either way.
Ethical opinion: Absolutely - data created with public money should be free and available to the public that paid for it. So in the case of a US government grant (say from National Science Foundation or even Office of Naval Research) US citizens should be allowed to access the data for free, they paid for it didn't they? But if a non-US citizen, who has not paid taxes to fund the research wants to access the paper for free - this shouldn't be as easy, but ideally as one scientist to another, it should be given provided the other scientist shares something freely in return.
Practical opinion: The reason why access isn't free is that ultimately someone has to pay for creating the article, getting it cleaned up, reviewed, and into a publishable format for others to read. To quote my favorite SciFi author (Heinlein), There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. It costs money for the journals to clean up the formatting on a paper and put it into a publishable format, even to convert it to
So there is the other practical solution in place already, but its slow, and that is requesting reprints and/or interlibrary loan. Right now one can access the titles and abstracts for just about every major scientific journal for free, just not the paper. So if you really want a copy and can't afford it, you can send an email to the author and ask them for a "reprint" of the paper. If the author feels generous and has enough print copies left over, you'll get one in the mail. If not, maybe a
Ideally it would be nice to make the data and results free to all, but in practice someone has to pay. Either more tax dollars go to support all the publishing services to make the data free, or we stick with the existing system and if you really want the data, you have to put forth the effort to go and get it. Not a perfect system, but it works better than a lot of people think it does.
-When going for broke, go for Ithaca!
Well, of course the taxpayers should end up "owning" whatever it is that they buy.
But I do have one alternative to it being free, that I think would be just as fair. First, make sure you account for whatever the taxpayers really paid into it. Then, that figure becomes the minimum bid in an auction. If private parties want to own the research, make 'em pay a fair market value for it, into the public fund.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
If it's publically funded, it is morally bankrupt to restrict access to those who paid for it.
Imagine you receive a bill from the publically owned water utility. You pay them $500 as required by law, and they still cut your water off. Then they send you another letter, saying that if you want water, you'll have to negotiate an additional water-access contract.
People would never stand for that. Why should access to publically funded research results be any different?
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
I don't know if it is open but if it is not it should be.
Not all public research data is open or publicly available. For instance the NCI, National Cancer Institute, spent $183,000,000 developing Taxol, a drug used in the treatment of cancer. What did the NCI do with the research data it came up with? It sold the data to BMS, Bristol-Myers Squibb, for $43,000,000. Not only did BMS pay less than 1/4 the cost of developing Taxol but it also got exclusive rights to the research. It was estimated that in 2000 BMS was to make $1,000,000,000, one billion dollars, in sales of Taxol, and another billion per year thereafter.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Having worked for both the Federal gov't and a number of contractors (including one I owned), I can say the following:
Anything written by a gov't employee is not subject to copyrighting (17 U.S.C. 101). If something is written by a non-gov't employee using gov't funds, I'm not sure entirely what the rules are, but it is not necessarily not copyrighted. I know this because if a gov't employee writes a journal article, the article is not copyrighted, but if someone (professor/contractor/etc) working on gov't funds writes the article, the copyright belongs to the journals publisher (I've published in both situations, the paperwork is different). Whether or not gov't produced documents are in the public domain, however, is subject to classification and such, but I don't claim to be an expert on the FIA.
The gov't holds the right to patent and protect technology developed by gov't employees except in the situation of a Cooperative Research And Development Agreement (CRADA) where private funding of the work can cause a private company (who paid for the work) to own the work. The gov't holds the ip rights to technology developed by contractors using direct gov't funds except in the case of a Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) grant or contract. In the case of a SBIR (or the closely related STTR), the contractor(s) retain the exclusive right to market the developed technology.
The government has no more obligation to reveal all its information than it does to provide us each with nuclear submarines or a room in the White House. We have transferred the rights over such things to the government along with the money itself. What the government does with the research it has funded is up to it to determine. Don't confuse this with censorship. When the government tries to silence someone, that is cencorship, and it (potentially) violates the rights of that person. On the other hand, when the government chooses to not to disclose something that it has discovered, that is well within its rights.
...before Google got to them, just go to uspto.gov. I'm sure the Google interface is much easier to use though.
The U.S. Government policy presently is that results (but not data) from government-funded research can be used by the government. But a non-government worker has all other rights to the data and results. So JPL, as a NASA contractor, might get some data or a pretty picture from a planetary probe. NASA gets a copy of that picture and can use it for government purposes, which might include putting it on a NASA web site. But only the government can use that picture for free. If you want that picture for your screen saver you should contact JPL and ask if you can buy a copy of that picture (or data) and what price they want to charge for it. It's JPL's picture or data. There's another government agency which is collecting a lot of climate model data. But the researchers and non-governmental organizations get to decide what data and results to publish. You can't look at the data and discover what isn't published.
The company I work for often receives data from, and shares data with, Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The data we share is regarding the environment, specifically diesel emissions. Clearly the research benefits U.S. citizens and poses no security risk and should therefore be publicly available. But there are definitely cases where data should not be made public. Nuclear energy research, any weapons research, and combustion research could fall into that category amongst many others. Sure tax payers paid for it, but that does not mean that they should possess the data directly. There would be nothing stopping the average Joe from putting that data into the world domain. Then the world, who hasn't made any contribution to the research, financially or otherwise, now has this information that U.S. taxpayers footed the bill for.
Government may be paying companies for road work, but I get the value of being able to use said roads in return.
A better analogy for what exists would be that I pay taxes to build and maintain a road, but in order to use that road I also have to pay a significant toll to the contractor that built it. The toll does little to benefit anyone or maintain the road, but instead results in profit for a select few who know how to work the political system and provide kickbacks.
So not only is it corporate welfare, but it's double dipping. Add in medicare/aid/whatever and it's triple dipping, etc.