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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?"
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
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"
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
You act like the distinction is cut and dry, and that it's obvious who's paying for research. What if you are a professor at a major university doing a study. You have one student who is funded from grants by private industry, and others by NSF grants. The one on the NSF grant builds a new research infrastructure the other student later uses for his research. Should that other student than have all his work publicly available? Also you act like the students won't be helping each other out etc.
Basically it's almost impossible to find private research today that ISN'T in part funded by the government. In fact even projects that have all private money indirectly are getting government funding. Who do you think paid to train the scientists working on those projects? It isn't cheap to create scientists. Generally it takes 4-10 years of graduate studies, each year costing tens of thousands of dollars etc etc.
Additionally what about the person who comes up with an outside idea while being funded by a government source. If they can't stay on and work on it (and gain from it) they might just leave their government source and work independently now. Is this really what we want?
Also not all work that is done is publishable. Much of it isn't, such as many studies that find "negative results" such as "doing XYZ didn't solve problem ABC". This results in much of this work being repeated by multiple groups.
Then there's the question of who cares? for the vast majority of research, the public just doesn't care about. Unless you're directly doing that research as well it doesn't effect you.
phil
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.
The Princeton Plasma Physics Lab does fusion research and development, and because it is Department of Energy funded everything there, including salaries, is available to the public on request.
Marques Johansson
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.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?