Publicly-Funded Research Data is Public? 85
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?"
Nuclear Engineering... (Score:1)
Re:Nuclear Engineering... (Score:2)
Re:Nuclear Engineering... (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:Nuclear Engineering... (Score:3, Informative)
Don't Know (Score:1)
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.
FalconThe vaccine-research enthusiasts may like it (Score:1, Interesting)
free (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:free (Score:2)
Re:free (Score:2)
Re:free (Score:2)
Re:free (Score:2)
Re:free (Score:1)
For the most part I'd agree. It should be freely accessible --to a point, depending on many criteria. But free to whom, the whole world or only to the citizens of the goverment governing the taxed citizens (their money) in question or any denizen of the world? How would we keep it from getting into thte wrong hands?
And what about publicly funded high-technology? The sort that other countries with less cash or resources go about doing industrial espionage for.
Let's say the feds fund some ultra-secret (say, weapons) research at various national laboratories. Should that research be available to thine enemy -or even to the general citizenry amongst whom might live some reckless individuals who think they know what's best for them or their followers?
Re:free (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 exclusivity, depending upon the product/technology. It's highly likely that the company would get this anyway, given their jump-start on the tech. But getting a full patent's term is absurd. My tax dollars should not be spent making a corporation billions of dollars.
Re:free (Score:0)
Kind of like.. hmm... politicians and unelected officials?
I never get over how much blind faith some people have in authority. Just because some people have more power than you doesn't mean they're in any way better human beings, or working for your (vs. their own) benefit. More often than not, it's just the opposite.
Re:free (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 things that you don't need to know: 1 what the CIA, NSA, FBI or DOD builds, 2 nuclear weapons, biowarfare agents, cheap chemical weapons or homemade explosives, urban guerilla warfare tactics, 3 the cover my ass and our friends ass clause that we don't want you to learn about something until we aren't just retired, but buried so we don't have to have reporters pestering us through our retirements for morally questionable things we did with public funds. I think that we need a www.foia.gov that is responsible for all the nations "public to its citizens" data. (I'd require my citizens to register and log in to make sure only my citizens were reading all that info though.) I'd hope civilian usage products would be held for the public trust and any US company could use the info. There are plenty of things that we just don't need to know that was funded by our tax dollars. I'd love to have the plans for stealth bombers to look at, but I would hope that they'll never release that info through a FIOA request.
Re:free (Score:2)
Just so you know I'm not blowing smoke up your ass, here's a list of things you don't have a right to know, taken from 4-202 of that link I gave. It's a sensible list, and you should think very carefully about what's on it and why. Documents the Government doesn't automatically declassify are those that could reasonably:
The real issue here is where we draw the line between things that really should be classified, and things which shouldn't. The list above just exempts the document from automatic declassification -- documents are routinely classified for other reasons. The extent of the system is an ongoing debate, one for which both sides have valid arguments. It's certainly not going to be resolved by a few posts on Slashdot, especially by the vast majority of posters who have no idea how politics, national defense, or international relations work.
yes (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:yes (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 open access repository like Genbank. This enables two important avenues for research. First, we can verify that the sequences used in a study were correct - if they don't match independently produced sequences for the same species then the results of the study will need to be reconsidered. Second, the time and effort that went into producing those sequences need not be duplicated by other researchers. Both are important in moving the science forward.
The whole scientific process is finally starting to take full advantage of the benefits of the internet. At this point there is no reason for all studies and their data to be publicly available for no additional fee beyond the tax money that was invested in their creation. The only thing preventing this is the inertia associated with the current publishing/funding system. It will take some time to develop a new working model, but it will happen.
yp
Re:yes (Score:2)
Except that the library has paid for those, and access is generally limited to students and faculty, and the library does not OWN the results (even if the research was conducted at that university) but rather is paying a vendor for licensed, limited-time access. And it's generally a horrendously high fee.
Also, note that a great deal of the publishing rights for research in the US don't belong to the universities or the scientists who conducted the research. They belong to the companies that own the scientific journals, so they decide on the terms for access. That gives the general public no right to access them, as most university license agreements for scientific database access are limited to those associated with the university as faculty, staff, or students.
And good luck once your library can't afford the academic journal subscriptions anymore. Cornell cancelled its Reed Elsevier academic journal package in 2003 [cornell.edu] and libraries of all types are having trouble purchasing the licenses for you to access the information.
So... it isn't free public access. Not the same thing at all. As a librarian currently trying to figure out what databases the public library consortium I'm in can afford, I can promise you that.
Apologies for any repitition in this post. I should know better than to try and write something at work.
Would it really matter? (Score:1)
Re:Would it really matter? (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 now centers around finding applications for them, private money should be used for this, since private companies are the ones that will benefit from the application of the research.
Unfortunately in the current setup, Congress determines where public monies are spent on research, they are pretty much the last group of people that should decide how money is spent on research (and certainly on a lot of things as well). Congresses role should end at approval of a budget for research, a independent body, made up of researchers representing all/many areas of expertise, should then decide how that money is allocated.
Re:Would it really matter? (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 fundamental biology and has nothing to do with applying that information to make products.
Re:Would it really matter? (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. Public funds need to go to helping the largest percentage of the population first, using public funds to find cures to afflictions that affect a small percentage of the population is not the best use for those funds.
I also suspect, you being a "Ph.D in Biology", you don't speak from a completely unbiased point of view, since your livelihood at least partially depends on public funding...
Re:Would it really matter? (Score:0)
What about nonprofits? Can they do research that applies to real products?
The articles you are reading are about specific applications because that is the most efficient way to apply legislative pressure. Who wants to be against a cure for Parkinson's? (Or Alzheimer's etc etc.) That research is also driven by practical considerations: the brain damage that causes Parkinson's is localized and easy to define. If you can get stem cells to fix that localized damage, and can understand how they fixed it, then you can figure out the harder problem of fixing the global brain damage that comes with aging. (And Alzheimer's and Vascular Dementia).
Research is done based on what experiment will be the most effective for learning how something works - not on how many people it might benefit if you are lucky enough for it to work. What benefits the most people is policy guesswork, not science.
I'm posting AC, but I'm not the parent poster, and I'm not a scientist.
Re:Would it really matter? (Score:2)
Re:Would it really matter? (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 researcher, I often talk about theoretical indirect benefits that come from the basic research I do. The general public usually has no understanding and no interest about hearing about the intricacies of a signal transduction cascade, and what kinases may or may not be activating specific proteins. In order to put our research into language the general public might understand we will often extrapolate what further research from our basic research might lead to, if we can only understand the fundamental biology behind it. That's why people working on the biology of telomeres, etc, will talk about important medical breakthroughs that may come later, as a result of our better understanding of the basic biology of stem cells.
The other thing to keep in mind is that pharmaceutical companies are driven by one thing, money. Most of the research that is being done by NIH funds, even that geared towards curing disease, would not be done if not for the NIH. The money just isn't enough to lure the pharmaceutical companies into it. Research which is lucrative enough the pharm companies are already doing. Without the NIH sponsoring research in the other areas, many of the treatments, medications, vaccines that you and your loved ones may depend on would not exist. The pharm companies might eventually get around to spending in those other areas, but it would take decades more before things currently available would be then. If your loved one needs that advance in medicine now, I think you would think it is very worthy of funding. If we were talking about the government spending money for a technology widget for a computer or TV I would agree with you, but we are talking about medicines here, and different guidelines are appropriate for public interest/investment when the lack of the research may mean disease or death for many of them.
Re:Would it really matter? (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:Would it really matter? (Score:2)
I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree.
Re:Would it really matter? (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) wish they would stop giving tax payer money to whichever company makes that paint!
But with roads I get something in return... (Score:0)
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.
Uh, yeah! (Score:0)
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.
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
Re:Uh, yeah! (Score:1)
Is the university funded by tax dollars?
After they accept the first government dime, the work should become public domain.
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?
Of course. I don't see where (or why) there would be any other answer.
Basically it's almost impossible to find private research today that ISN'T in part funded by the government.
Well, there you are then. A large body of research that is made available to the publich should lead to advances in many fields of study, and opportunities for researchers to cooperate and collaborate on projects will be greatly expanded and become more obvious to those participating.
There you go.
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 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.
Weather data? (Score:1)
Re:Weather data? (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 scientist comes up with an idea and submits a proposal asking to have the HST pointed at that particular thumb-sized area. What is the scientist's contribution? Well, he or she had to study past work, had to come up with a unique idea (a theory), had to articulate that idea in a proposal, and so on. I think that person deserves the right to publish a paper. That doesn't seem unreasonable to me.
The HST is of course named for Edwin Hubble. He is famous for his discovery that redshift increases with distance - thus, the universe is expanding. To make this discovery, he had to make detailed observations of MANY galaxies. It took him a lot of time and a lot of hard work to do that. The wiki page says his data set consisted of 46 galaxies. Undoubtedly, he looked at other galaxies but was unable to use that data (maybe his instruments were not sensitive enough to determine their redshift). Undoubtedly, there were nights where cloud cover prevented him from working. Undoubtedly, he ended up with some smudged images and had to repeat some observations.
The point is, it took him a LONG time to get those 46 galaxies. But having 46 galaxies gives him a good solid trend line. What Hubble did is called good science, but it took time. For all his hard work, he is famous, and he deserve some fame.
Now imagine that every time he made an observation it was immediately published on a website. Now I come along and look at his first 10 galaxies and publish a paper titled "The Oni Conjecture, the Universe is Expanding."
Now suddenly, *I'm* famous. And instead of "The Hubble Constant" kids in school are learning about "The Oni Constant." And Edwin Hubble would be remembered for "having gathered additional data to confirm the Oni Constant." Does any of that seem fair to you??
Re:Weather data? (Score:1)
Re:Weather data? (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" and I would have been (lucky and) right. But that's not good science, any more than temperature observations over the last few days could be used to show a global climate trend.
Do you really not see what I'm getting at here? We want to encourage good science. We do not want people rushing to get a paper out just to beat someone else. We want people like Hubble to say, "ok, I need to do some more work to confirm this" We don't want him saying, "OMFG THESE TWO PICS ARE TEH RED!!!11 IM GONNA WRITE ABOUT IT."
In many ways, we do get a lot of that today. We get people rushing to tell the media that they have discovered cold fusion. Then later it has to be retracted. We don't want that. We want to give a scientist a tiny, tiny, reasonable amount of privacy so that they will do good work.
If I thought up the idea that maybe the universe is expanding and I applied for the telescope time to see if I'm right, give me a little bit of space to publish. That is totally reasonable.
Re:Weather data? (Score:1)
Re:Caveat Imperator (Score:2)
Re:Caveat Imperator (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 installing and calibrating it, figuring out where to point it, and writing software to capture and preprocess the data. Then someone has to manually set up and run the instrument while it's taking data.
At the end of the day, the "unreduced" data that comes streaming out of the back side of our instrument is the result of years of work. If we put it up live immediately, someone could easily take it and publish a map before we could, especially if they knew or could guess something about the form of the data, which wouldn't be too hard, given the proposals and conference talks floating around. What's more, our competitor would have the benefit of months of leisure during which to try out data analysis algorithms before the data appears, while we're all working 100 hour weeks just assembling and testing the thing.
Now, you can certainly bring a few dedicated analysis guys into the collaboration early on in an effort to get a full data analysis pipeline up and running as soon as possible. They're likely to have a slight advantage over competitors, given advanced knowledge of the instrument and form of the raw data. But, artificially broadening a collaboration solely in order to stand a fighting chance at competing with outsiders has its own drawbacks. Handing off all of the analysis to someone else isn't particularly more attractive just because the other guy agrees to put your name on the paper.
Under those circumstances, it seems entirely reasonable to me to demand that data be made public eventually, say when the first results paper based upon it is approved for publication, or after a fixed window of time. But, requiring immediate release provides little benefit could do a great deal of harm.
When it comes to a facilities instrument, like the Hubble, a more demanding release schedule may be appropriate. But, even when data formats and instrument parameters are fixed and researchers don't need to build instruments, it still takes a nontrivial amount of time and effort to choose an observing strategy, submit proposals, arrange for followups, etc. And, as in the parent poster's example, there are times when the rush to publish first could easily reward people who are willing to run with a barely-adequate measurement instead of those who do things right. (That happens anyway in some cases, but unrestricted immediate data release could only hurt.)
Re:Caveat Imperator (Score:2)
If someone can do analysis faster and cheaper than you can - let them do it.
If you built a super fine tool - you should have your bit of fame from all research done with this tool, because you really deserve it. But not releasing data to public to gain some fame from exclusive access to data - that's selfish.
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 look at the OpenScience Project [openscience.org], the Science Commons [sciencecommons.org], the NSF's 2003 Cyberinfrastructure Report [nsf.gov], the NSB's Government Funding of Scientific Research [nsf.gov] and the Astronomer's Data Manifesto [ivoa.net] for a bit of background (specifically, see Ray Norris's Can Astronomy Manage its Data? [arxiv.org]).
Re:define 'substantial' (Score:1)
Re:define 'substantial' (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:Caveat Imperator (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.
FalconYes (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:Yes (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 highly cited open access journals have come up - check out www.plos.org or Biomedcentralahref=http://www.biomedcentral.com/re l=url2html-28477 [slashdot.org]http://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?
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:yes! (Score:1)
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 Biomedcentral http://www.biomedcentral.com/ [biomedcentral.com] - they are open access publishers who don't charge for access - instead, they charge the authors for the publication costs.
For Physics, Mathematics, CS and Quantitative Biology:
Arxiv [arxiv.org]
Re:yes! (Score:2)
Re:yes! (Score:0)
Information aquired under the patriot act? (Score:1)
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 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.
No Publically funded but privately owned patents (Score:3, Insightful)
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.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:Public research is not public (Score:2)
Re:Public research is not public (Score:1)
A good explanation here [usdoj.gov].
Re:Public research is not public (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 laws, treaties, and the Constitution, and how the executive intends to comply with the statutory text consistent with those other constraints. You can agree with those interpretations or not, but the text isn't legally binding on anyone. To the extent that they influence the outcome of court actions, they carry no more weight than "legislative history" and "fact finding" statements, the arguments of parties to a lawsuit, or opinions requested by a court from the Solicitor General's office, for instance. They are hardly a threat to the constitutional order of our republic.
Out of curiosity, why don't you see an explicit statement from the executive branch on how it interprets statutory text as a good thing? Isn't it better for the executive to be public, open, andd consistent about its interpretation of the law and Constitution, than to hide its interpretation behind closed doors, or even worse, to change its theory from day-to-day or state-to-state or official-to-official?
Personally, I think you'll be seeing more signing statements from President's of both parties in the future, and I don't see that as a bad thing at all.
Non-public patents: Invention Secrecy Act of 1951 (Score:1)
Another bit of pro-business, anti-public law (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Another bit of pro-business, anti-public law (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:0)
(Disclosure - I currently work at BNL, where the NNDC is located and the PDB originated).
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.
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 university infrastructure
(labs, equipment, students and employees) to work for them.
Public owns the data (Score:1)
Research is public already, at least in astronomy (Score:0)
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.
Re:Public owns the data (Score:1)
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 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...
yes. and the public should profit from any patents (Score:0)
What about privacy? A slashdot must-have topic. (Score:1)
Public data release at NIH (Score:0)
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.
Utter tosh! (Score:0)
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.
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 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.
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.
Comment removed (Score:2)
IP ownership (Score:1)
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.
Of course not (Score:0)
Patents were available online to anyone... (Score:1)
U.S. Government policy (Score:0)
Sometimes? (Score:1)