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Canadian University Students Taught To Protect IP
innocent_white_lamb writes "Graduate students at Carleton University (Ottawa) are taking steps to protect their intellectual property, at the same time are insuring that they are being properly recognized for their work. This is in response to the increased commercialization of research done at universities, and high-profile cases of copyright infringement by professors at the University of Toronto and Indiana University. 'The initiative will include workshops and a handbook outlining what would constitute an infraction of students' intellectual property rights, Howlett said. Examples include a student not receiving authorship on written work, or having a professor take credit for their work. "This isn't an indictment of profs at all," said Howlett. "It's just to ensure that students' rights are protected in the case that it does happen."'"
Always good for someone to own the rights to research they've done. In the age of disregard for IP, I'm not sure how much it will do, but it's certainly a step in the right direction.
Employment contracts often stipulate that the employee has relinquished intellectual property rights in the field of business of the employer.
This same idea often applied to graduate students that are paid to help out a professor.
If an employer paid you to write a chapter for a book or to invent a widget, you may not have any intellectual property rights over that work.
If you helped a professor in a lab - and if he's paying you under terms of an employment agreement, that agreement could very well stipulate that you have relinquished all IP rights. Read that agreement before you start to work. If you have a problem with it, negotiate the contractual terms.
This is how a company can "award" employee a $200 "bonus" for an invention that's worth millions of dollars.
Mods?... The parent is far from OT. That was the first thing in my mind as well: how universities are becoming a place where people are taught to own and protect their ideas. Historically, a university was a place where scholars engaged in sharing of their ideas, where the free flow of information was encouraged. Modern universities, otoh, are built after an industrial model. Their curricula are fixed and their original research is sometimes regarded as a trade secret. An awful place to do science at.
-Protect IP
-Patents bad
-Steal the music
There can still be some pretty extreme cases that are clearly wrong. A friend of mine was a grad student at the UW-Madison where she wrote a paper (she was the first author, and the professor was the 2nd). When the professor submitted the paper, the porf switched the order of the names (made themselves fist). When the paper came back from review, the prof switched the order back, so to the student it still looked like they were the first author. This was all done in Microsoft word, with reversion history being recorded, so it was pretty clear what was going on. I'm not sure this is illegal, but it is clearly immoral, and exploitative. I looked at the University handbook, and it was clear that if a student had done this, they would have been violating a rule. It was unclear if there were any rules like that that applied to faculty. I wrote a letter to the head of the department, but never heard back.
If anyone knows the head of the Bio-eng department in Madison, maybe ask him why all of the phd students for some of his professors quit after getting their masters.
Similar to the upcoming US election results
Please RTFA. It looks like this "course" is intended to teach students to make sure that they get credit for their research and work.
Although I do agree that any obstruction of the free flow of information is detrimental to science and academia, I don't think that's the point of this initiative.
If your research is quoted/copied by another scientist (especially, one who is more reputable than you are) without proper citation, it can completely destroy your credibility, and severely hurt when applying for grants or being considered for tenure.
I really don't see anything wrong with this. Like TFA said, there have been several high-profile copyright infringement cases lately, and you'd be a fool not to protect yourself.
This famously happened with some of the original AIDS research in the 80s (that first identified HIV as a retrovirus), where the group of CDC epidemiologists who spearheaded the research received little to no credit for their work once conclusive evidence was found.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
Disclaimer: Carleton is my Alma Mater
.... that, btw, is one of the major reasons why it used to do so horribly in the MacLain's annual university ratings.
Carleton is very, very different from most universities. Last time I saw statistics, around 3/4 of the students were part-time students
Carleton is generally geared more towards continuing and part-time education, rather than simply being a "standard" undergraduate university. You'll have people taking their 2nd & 3rd degrees, upgrading their qualifications, or just taking interest courses.
Many of it's services are (were?) geared towards these students. And I suspect that the nature of the students - people with real-world experience, and thus more awareness of these issues - may have something to do with this.