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Creative Commons For Science
Posted by
timothy
on Wed Dec 29, 2004 11:12 AM
from the piper-payers-ask-to-call-tune dept.
from the piper-payers-ask-to-call-tune dept.
chrisspurgeon writes "The folks at Creative Commons are rolling out a new project aimed at improving the dissemination of scientific publications and data. The National Institutes of Health is already proposing mandated Open Access to all NIH-funded research, and many scientists welcome the free redistribution of their papers, they just don't know the legal details of how to do it. The Science Commons project will take on the copyright problems unique to scientists (things like pre and post prints, and electronic vs. paper journal distribution)."
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Great (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Great (Score:4, Insightful)
If I were making this post or publishing work that I'd done for some government or company, then the copyright goes to that government or company, because that published work was written by an extension of the government or company (me) and is thier property.
If that guy invented CDs and DVDs (or the technology behind them) did so as part of his job, he will get nothing. Gallileo got nothing but prison time for his discoveries. Archimedes got nothing for his discoveries. Not fair, but a reality.
Re:Great (Score:3, Interesting)
True, but the situation could become a little bit more muddled when -- while you may be an employee of a university, but the funding (which you wrote the proposal for) comes from a government agency.
Some government agencies require that all work done
Go Larry (Score:5, Insightful)
Keep up the good work!
Taxpayer funded reseach is not for profit (Score:3, Insightful)
That data, source code must be public domain or at least a BSD style
Too Late, already done: xxx.lanl.gov (Score:3, Informative)
http://xxx.lanl.gov/
sorry, its not porn. don't know why they chose xxx
past discussions (Score:5, Insightful)
It won't affect for-profit science though... (Score:5, Insightful)
I think this is excellent, but only academic and possibly government funded research will use this. The pharmaceutical and bio-tech companies will continue to do their own thing and make billions.
Re:It won't affect for-profit science though... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:It won't affect for-profit science though... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:It won't affect for-profit science though... (Score:3, Funny)
Exactly! Before this happens, IBM will start shipping the Apache web server and Sun will release the Solaris source code!
Big corporations will never see the
US government does this already (sometimes)? (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm a US government scientist, just found out that journals must have two types of copyright agreements, don't know if this is universal:
1. For most people, all rights go to [journal].
2. If more than X co-authors are US. government employees, the work must be Public Domain.
I believe this is forced on the journals as the price of accepting work from government scientists. This, is a Good Thing the government is doing (for once) over publishing industry. Don't know if this is universal across agencies, journals, sorry if the above paraphrase is impeferfect (legalese isn't in front of me right now).
Re:US government does this already (sometimes)? (Score:3, Informative)
"It should be pointed out that when an article is declared a "work of the U.S. Government" it is not simply that the copyright cannot be trans
BBC Radio 4 (Score:5, Interesting)
You can listen to it online [bbc.co.uk] from the BBC website. It requires Real Player, however.
BBC Radio 4documentary on Free Publishing revoluti (Score:4, Interesting)
To listen to the programme http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/science/rams/publish.r am [bbc.co.uk] 'Listen Again' service will happily send a RealAudio stream of the programme which mplayer --dump-stream will happily rip for you. (The Beeb say they can only offer streaming media because their rights agreements don't cover other formats :/ ) No, I'm not connected with Aunty Beeb in any way, I'm just a Radio 4 junkie :)
Good thing! (Score:4, Interesting)
This is a very good thing. If my tax dollars are going to support the research, I hope it benefits as many people as possible (instead of just the big PHaRMA [phrma.org] ).
I had heard that the Pharma people have a way around this. They will co-sponsor research with NIH, and when it comes time to publish, claim that all of the good stuff came from their share of the funding (and hence claim it as their IP). I don't know how true this is, but that's what I've heard.
I have been on the lookout for quality (human) Microarray data for doing predictive data mining with some exciting new techniques, but can't find too many such sets around. Looking at the revenues of Affymetrix (for instance), one would think there would be oodles of data out there; but this is not the case. Yes, I am aware of the SMD, etc.
You may thank RMS for this (in part) (Score:5, Insightful)
This is the idea of "free" as in speech, people. And this is why the free software paradigm is more important than just getting stuff done and providing low-cost solutions. Bio-research is extremely heavily encumbered with patents and costs. I'm extremely happy to see several initiatives (see for example the BIOS initiative and the open access initiative) slowly gain momentum.
Hell, we had to pay to get an article published (quite common) and then pay another 30$ to get a copy of the journal issue (and, no, there is not such thing as free internet access for high-profile journals) to read our own article.
I really want publishers and research companies to make money, but public funded research must be free for all. This is humanity's intellectual property, not the coca-cola recipe!
P.
Just to clarify.. (Score:3, Informative)
But let me share something with you..
There is a program called SBIR (Small Business Inovation Research). In which small businesses ( under 500 employees) can submit for grants for very (typically) very specific "problems" the various federal agencies want to have solved. With an end result being commercialization of your product/technology.
It goes like this..
1. Feds put out a list of solicitations
2. You submit a paper describing your idea and how commercially viable it is
3. You may or may not get "Phase I" funding for research.
4. Now, if you did well in Phase I you can submit for "Phase II" funding. Which gives you more money. This step is primarily to help get your product into the market. So you better have a good set of sales numbers ready.
Sometimes the "product" is something that the Feds will want to buy from you (e.g. NASA, US Army, etc..) and other times it will have civilian application. So if you want it to have civilian application, you can work on that too with the grant money.
And in regards to IP, you retain exclusive rights to ALL work you have done. And the US Govt. also has right to the technology, but not to sell it, just to use/improve/rework it.
This is not free money, you do need other sources of capital in order to progress in the funding. They aren't giving out free money without you doing some work and showing you can generate outside interest.
The point of the program is to grow the US economy and also to provide the US Govt. with R&D for technology it finds it has a need for.
There are many details that I have just glossed over. But you can find out more here [sba.gov].
There is a national conference twice a year to learn more about the program. You can find out about that by going here [sbirworld.com].
It has a sister-program called STTR which allows you to work with a university and use their labs and staff. You can learn about both at the conference, I find them quite informative.
Nope... (Score:4, Insightful)
What would be an idea is a repository of CC licenced scientific papers which academic critics can review.
Alternatively, Universites could run their own dedicated sites for papers; they *only* allow papers from their University to be made available there but anyone can read / reproduce them under the terms of the licence.
Riiiiiiiiight! (Score:3, Interesting)
This quote is really a steaming pile. Like today public and private school degrees are anything but purchased produ
Re:Tragedy of the scientific commons? (Score:3, Informative)
Peer review is not everything (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't know. Maybe it's just because most free access journals are unknown startups with no established history. If you submit a manuscript to one of the established and prestigious scientific journals such as Science, Nature or PRL (at least in my field), it's not only going to be peer reviewed but it's going to be subjected to a peer-review-from-hell. That, on the other hand, is unlikely to happen if you submit it to a free access journal...
Re:Peer review is not everything (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Tragedy of the scientific commons? (Score:3, Informative)
I don't know e
Re:Tragedy of the scientific commons? (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm a physics grad student now, but let me give my take on it. The answer to your question is really yes or now. Much like the printing press and the internet let's any crackpot publish/disseminate bogus facts, but it gives the same abilities to people that have something worthwhile to say.
But how do you tell the good stuff from the bad? Firstly, most scientists worth their salt will be able to immediately distinguish whether a paper is written by an expert in the field, or someone bullshitting. Now as to someone outright lying, well the case of Jan Hendrick Schon reveals that problem can exist within the peer-reviewed literature too. However, seeing how afterwards he was exposed he was fired, and even had his PhD revoked by his university, can hopefully deter other would-be frauders. Scientific 'trolling' may be a harder problem to crack, though.
One such method to determine relative 'goodness' of an author, or a paper, is to see how many times it is cited by another paper. In fact, one of my former professors at U. Penn was one of the motivators for this method because she experienced alot of discrimination trying to get a faculty job. (In the old days, and even today to a smaller extent, female PhD physicists are underrepresented). She had to use these citation numbers to prove her work was as influential as some of the top men in the field.
Of course, with fully open access, it will be relatively easy to create many 'spam' articles that cite your own article to increase it's perceived importance. One way to combat this might be to weigh citing scores lower if they come from within an intimate circle. Another would be to have a moderation and meta-moderation system to acknowledge which papers in their field are worthy of being cited. Of course this goes back to the 'elite' problem of someone being unfairly shut out, but at least they can still publish their paper openly, if they need to point out 20 years down the line they were the first to publish a certain theory.
There actually already are such open venues, for example the arxiv [arxiv.org] will allow AFAIK anybody to publish a paper there.
Other than publications, the American Physical Society [aps.org], for example, gets some federal funding and hence provide some public services. For example, at some of the larger meetings they might provide a room for presentations from non-physicists or others, kind of like the local public access station on cable TV. Sometimes talks are given on philosophy of physics, sometimes there are just crackpot talks, but any decent physicist will be able to tell by a talk whether it is worthwhile or not.