Slashdot Log In
Publicly-Funded Research Data is Public?
Posted by
Cliff
on Thu Jan 18, 2007 08:45 AM
from the if-you-paid-for-it-shouldn't-you-be-able-to-use-it dept.
from the if-you-paid-for-it-shouldn't-you-be-able-to-use-it dept.
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?"
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Full
Abbreviated
Hidden
Loading... please wait.
free (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I read this and just giggled. Of course, we don't have a right to alot of the R&D that government does on our behave. That just pressed slashdot buttons right there. I'll tell you 3 thin
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Anything which the public is allowed to have (I.E. it's not classified as top secret or as a something which is illegal for civilians to possess) should be publicly available. For anything else, it's largely irrelevant.
The problem here is that tax dollars are being funnelled into companies so that they can research. They then turn around and get patents on the work so that they can exclusively provide that product or service.
I might be ok with one or two years of exclu
yes (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Many academic publications are available online at the local state university.
The publications are available, to anyone living close enough to a university to use the library. But the data is most definitely not. Open access data, at least in biology, is still the exception, rather than the rule. Even with journals that have online supplements, the extra material is usually more detailed analysis, not the data itself.
The exception in my field relates to gene sequences, which must be submitted to an ope
Caveat Imperator (Score:2)
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
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Perhaps, but a more relevant case is that some poor schmoe with the same knowledge and tools as you but with more time to devote to the analysis of a particular data set is able to do your work a little bit faster than you.
In the field where I work (cosmology with ground based CMB telescopes), a team of twenty people can easily work full time for years building an instrument. Tends of man-years are spent inst
define 'substantial' (Score:2)
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 loo
Re: (Score:2)
And in some cases, it's not the data itself that gives away what was going on -- eg. K40506A [caltech.edu].
Also, people are free to find other funding for their efforts, if they want an extended embargo period, or to never release their data.
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Yes, a sponser, ie someone who pays for it, should get first dibs. So when it's the taxpayer paying they shoud get first dibs too and have it placed in the public domain.
FalconRe: (Score:2)
I don't see how it's similar logic at all. A weather satellite is pointed at the Earth and takes pictures of the Earth. That's all it does. What is AccuWeather's contribution? Not a whole lot. AccuWeather just wanted the government to package up a business model and give it to them as a gift.
Compare with what I said about the HST. The HST looks at an area of the sky about the side of your thumb held at arms length. How does it know where to point? Well, some sci
Re: (Score:2)
It's possible you missed my point. Good science - that's my point. How many observations do I have to make in order to call it good science?
Hubble knew that he needed a lot, on the order of 40. But the trend became apparent early on. So after only five or six observations, I could have published "the Oni Constant"
Yes (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
I may have been answering a slightly different question than the article asks.
I am also of the opinion that any work receiving public funding should be made public. It isn't that common for research to be kept private, though; scientists generally want to publish. A more common scenario may be patenting publicly-funded research, which still necessitates disclosure (but prevents anyone else from acting upon that disclosure).
yes! (Score:2, Informative)
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 h
You left out a step (Score:2)
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
Re: (Score:2)
Of course it should be public (Score:2, Informative)
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 f
No Publically funded but privately owned patents (Score:3, Insightful)
That may be the system now, but I think that is morally wrong. If the research leading to the "innovation" is publically funded, then the innovation should be publically owned.
IMHO, any of the following should apply:
Public research is not public (Score:3, Interesting)
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 [boston.com]
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
A signing statement is not "a petulant child whining about the rules he is told to follow". Nor is it law, and I don't think I've ever seen any serious claim that it is. It's more akin to "legislative history", congressional "fact finding", and executive orders, which also aren't "law" in the Constitutional sense. A signing statement is nothing more than a statement by the executive branch on what IT thinks a law just signed means, on its reach in the face of conflicting requirements that arise in other
Another bit of pro-business, anti-public law (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, but make sure funding is available (Score:3, Insightful)
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
Re:Yes, but make sure funding is available (Score:4, Insightful)
Publicly funded results should be made available, but the funding source should also provide the funding to do so.
If by "results" you mean raw data, then the funding is a significant problem in almost every field of scientific endeavor. But it's not just the funding. For any non-trivial experiment, the raw data is meaningless to all but a very small number of actively involved investigators. To make that raw data available in a form that would be potentially useful to the vanishingly small fraction of people capable of doing something would add months or years of work to most projects (documenting, archiving, documenting, and documenting some more, etc.). A large fraction of useful and important projects could become fiscally infeasible to operate. Further, funding for short projects would have to be continued for years or decades to maintain and support archival maintenance of data that no one (including the original collectors!) cares about any longer.
Take an example from my own current research work in high energy physics: I work on a "small" experiment involving about 20 physicists. Over the 7-10 year life of the project, we'll collect about 200TB of data ... that's almost nothing in the grand scheme of modern high energy physics experiments. We already have to deal with not having enough funding to maintain all that data live _for our own analysis_, much less for public consumption; we need months of CPU time just to convert the raw data to an intermediate format for further analysis. The goal of the experiment is a measurement with a precision of 1 part per million; nderstanding the detailed subtleties of the physics, geometry, hardware, software, firmware, human interaction, numerics, mathematics, external influences like cosmic rays, etc. is the work of a number of PhD, Master's and Bachelor's theses over that 10 year period. We're talking a few hundred man-years of work here. And when the work is all done, we'll publish a few papers, and then the collaboration will scatter to the proverbial winds, moving on to other projects. There won't be anyone left to spend their time and energy maintaining the raw information that went into the experiment, documenting things at the level necessary for outsiders to be able to do anything with it, answering questions, etc. More importantly, no outsider will ever be able to understand the experiment at the level necessary to get the "right result" from it, because they won't have ever gotten their hands dirty with the hardware and data taking.
This is the sort of idea that is emotionally compelling, but makes little sense to anyone that has actually done the hard work of taking and analyzing data in the real world. The immense fiscal costs of such a policy will bring nothing more than illusory benefits, and are just not justified in my opinion.
Parent
Ethical positions (Score:3, Interesting)
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).
It's worse than that,really (Score:2, Interesting)
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 univer
Wrong with current system? (Score:2)
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 yo
View on free data from a publishing scientist (Score:2)
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 da
Taxpayers should own it OR cash equivalent (Score:2)
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.
If it's publically funded (Score:2)
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?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Often in engineering the most important thing to know is that something can be done. Oh, having the details may spare you a few years of toil, but a nation with access to fissionables and with physicists at its disposal will get there sooner or later. Most likely sooner.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
The US Government really needs to overhaul how public funds are spent on research. IMHO, the government should only be spending money on fundamental, groundbreaking type research. A good example of this is stem cells, the government should no longer be funding any type of stem cell research, the basic understanding of how stem cells work has been done, the work no
Re: (Score:2)
A good example of this is stem cells, the government should no longer be funding any type of stem cell research, the basic understanding of how stem cells work has been done, the work now centers around finding applications for them,
You have no clue what you are talking about here. There is a lot of the biology of stem cells that we simply don't understand at all yet. There is a ton of basic research that needs done to understand how they do things. All that is basic fun
Re: (Score:2)
Most of the articles I read, addressing the lack of public funding for stem cells, centers around research for specific applications, such as MJF's push for using stem cells to
Re: (Score:2)
Most of the articles I read, addressing the lack of public funding for stem cells, centers around research for specific applications, such as MJF's push for using stem cells to find a cure for Parkinson's, that is a specific application of stem cells and should be pursued with private funds
As a research
Re: (Score:2)
Then we disagree, because I see no difference, in the end, both constitute corporate welfare. No where in the Constitution or in natural law is there a right to a healthy life, just to life itself.
Re: (Score:2)
I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree.
Re: (Score:2)
BTW, in the Ohio the lane markings are absolutely the worst I have ever seen (they all but disappear when it is raining at night), and I clearly (no pun intended)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Uh, yeah! (Score:4, Insightful)
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
Parent
is tax supported research open? (Score:4, Informative)
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 [cancer.gov], spent $183,000,000 developing Taxol [fsu.edu], 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.
FalconParent