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?"

free

[spune]

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.

yes

[lavaface]

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 . . . ; )

Yes

[Metasquares]

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.

Yes, but make sure funding is available

[rockmuelle]

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

Re:Uh, yeah!

[philipgar]

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

Re:Yes, but make sure funding is available

[krlynch]

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.

No Publically funded but privately owned patents

[HighOrbit]

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.

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:

1. patents resulting from publically funded research should never be granted (i.e. its free and open tech)
2. 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%)
3. 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.

Re:free

[Sancho]

It's not really all that complicated.

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.