Profit vs. Science 70
graxrmelg writes: " The Washington Post reports that Science magazine has made a special agreement with Celera Genomics to allow publication of an article about its research without the requirement that the raw data be made publicly available (through an NIH database), as is done with all other articles. (Celera's patent-happiness has been discussed earlier on Slashdot.)
Science has put out a statement on the matter."
A shame (Score:1)
Well, since I'm the first, lets speak out the obvious:
I think that it is shame that a magazine of the scientific standing like Science and Nature take a stand in such debated terrain as patents on genomes.
As authorothies in science-land they should at least keep up the *appearance* of impartiality.
Free science (Score:4)
It's in science that we really need the sort of freedom that RMS advocates. Imagine how much closer we would be to a cure for cancer or AIDS if researchers were forced to co-operate rather than hide discoveries from each other in order to protect the massive profits the drug company that comes up with such acure would no doubt make.
Not good (Score:3)
All natural sciences rely on the fair peer review process and the repeatability of the experiments. This is the credo, the consitution, of the scientific community. If data is allowed to be held back or the referees in future will have to comply with "you don't need to know that because it's a trade secret" kind of crap from companies, it's the science as whole that will suffer.
Still some good for science... (Score:2)
Peer review is an essential part of all science researches. Period.
If Celera is not providing the whole pictures how do the readers/other researchers know the values of their works? Their "publications" could be misleading either by accidents or intentional bias in their raw data. Without full peer reviews, there is no way to tell. This is completely against the spirit of science.
Science mag needs to be careful that Celera is not just publishing FUD to enhance their stock values. On the other hand, maybe, just maybe, some of the information they are going to publish could be usefull for some other real scientists.
This is what happens when science is being treated like the plague by many, especially the sport-crazied Americans (sorry guys). Be the sport guy/gal not the science nerd. More fundings are needed for science in schools and universities, where the open exchange of ideas is the main goal, not making money.
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The evidence is there. (Score:2)
Read the science link! (Score:3)
Wow, talk about a completely misleading article header slashdot!
Read the article (Score:5)
Please read the article before posting. Comments on /. (and article descriptions) are quickly approaching the level of zdnet articles
The sequence (raw data) can be downloaded. Researchers are free to use the data, and publish papers based on the raw data. Commercial users must license the data for commercial use.
Yes, it would be good if the data were in the public domain. However, it is available to researchers, and nature has agreed to keep a copy of the data in escrow because of the particular situation
Before you decide to start typing up an uber-comment which is factless and basically a first post in disguise, please read the article.
pilot
One piece at a time (Score:1)
Re:Free science (Score:1)
BUT.... One should also look at the following: Right now genomic research is something VERY expensive. This has several implications.
1. Public funding for research is limited. In order to increase the amount of research done it is necessary to give companies an incentive to do research on their own. This incentive is given in the form of patents. I might even agree that patents on treatments for major diseases are bad since they make these treatments much more expensive. On the other hand the runtime of these patents is very limited and without patents companies would have a much smaller incentive to decipher genomic data. So basically patents will lead to a much larger amount of research funding yielding more results that at some point become public property (when the patents run out).
2. If you think that researchers in public institutions always share information and fully cooperate i think you are a bit away from reality. Look for example about the 'competetion' around who first found the AIDS Virus between Gallo and the Pasteur institute in Paris. The stakes are high in the scientific community as well.
3. Celera has agreed to give full access to the sequence data to scientific users. What they dont want is commercial use of their data by third parties. It cost the company hundreds of millions of dollars to generate this data and they are selling acces to it to people that want to use this data for commercial purposes. Still the fact that they allow scientific access to the sequence data is very valuable for the scientific community.
4. The public effort to sequencing the Human Genome has been working on the sequence with a different method for a long time. Their approach was a LOT more expensive than Celera's. Without the competition from Celera they would have continued to basically waste tax money on their own inefficient approach. Competition like this is important!
Re:Free science (Score:2)
So what you're basically saying is that everything would be much better in the world of science if everyone was forced to work without recognition or reward? That noone can claim any sort of ownership over their own work, or seek any reward from it?
In the real world, research doesn't suddenly discover something. Generally something is noticed and then it takes months to years to develop it into something that can be published. Allowing other people to leap in and take over before you've achieved something is tantamount to the loss of that work.
In the genomics field, things are progressing at such a rapid pace that the publishing of original work can't wait until all the commercial possibilities have been thrashed out, so they come up with a workable compromise, even guaranteeing access to the data if Celera go back on their obligation.
It's all very well to spout about big companies and profits, but I wager that you'd be the first person to scream if your government raised taxes by 10 percent to fund research. So if you're not going to pay for something, why criticize organizations who will.
What advocates of that raving lunatic RMS don't seem to grasp is that the majority of people are motivated to some extent by self-interest and that one is unlikely to achieve much by removing elements of self-interest. I wait with interest to see if these deluded people will eventually work it out on their own.
Now that I have read the article... ;-) (Score:1)
Okay the data is publicly available (with some restrictions) for peer review and further research. So Science (the mag) is not a (complete?) sold-out.
However I stand by my point that more money are needed for science in schools and universities. Where, hopefully, the free (beer and freedom) and open exchanges of idea are real and with no string attached in anyway.
BTW, I am sorry for the rush comment. (But hey this is slashdot ;-)
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Re:A shame (Score:1)
However I distinctly subscribing to Nature years and years ago
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Re:Free science (Score:1)
Whoops. It already has changed the world.
This is not MPEG software (Score:2)
Re:The evidence is there. (Score:2)
this kinda defeats the purpose of publishing the information. you publish to get the information to others so they can _build_ on it. this is really sad.
use LaTeX? want an online reference manager that
incomplete access (Score:2)
Correct but misleading. Public access and search are allowed for academic users, but downloads are limited to one megabase.
limited data access (Score:1)
More precisely, researchers have unlimited search access but are only allowed to download one million base pairs of data.
Re:Not good (Score:1)
If the data can't be checked by an independent researcher then it's not science.
Noone can tell if they've actually done this research or not, unless the data is available and able to be checked. The techies around here have a name for this kind of thing in engineering - vapourware. A product is vapourware until you can buy one and have it delivered. A acientific theory/result is vapourware until it has been checked.
There was a related problem in maths around 1990 about a purported proof of Fermat's last theorem. After the proof was released, it was found to be flawed, but the original author of the proof denied the flaw, and carried on publishing related articles and giving lectures on his proof. This all kind of went away when Wiles published a correct proof a few years later, but I don't know if this guy has ever retracted his proof.
"That's not an article" -- What is Science? (Score:1)
An article that contains nothing but results with the disclaimer "if you want the data, you can buy it" is nothing more than an advertisement for the company selling the data
Firstly, as several other posters have pointed out, this isn't the case. If you want to make commercial use of the data Celera have invested vast sums of money in, you can pay them. For research, it's all available. You're even granted permission to make your own publications, to which Celera have no rights.
But then, this is a magazine article. If this was a legitimate scientific journal, how exactly could the peer review process occur when the data is kept secret?
I don't suppose you've ever heard of the term Impact Factor. It's a measure of how widely read and influential a journal is. Science is as legitmate as any other Journal, it conducts reviews of articles and has an impact factor, from my latest available numbers of just over 24. Nature has about 28. A typical specialist journal such as Applied Optics is lucky if it has a factor much over 1.
What this means is that you can't deride this as the work of some glossy magazine, nor as another result of a global conspiracy by megacorporations. This is decision by one of the most influential journals to develop new ways of dealing with intellectual property so that the results of research can be published and knowledge advanced.
What's the point of having this data anyway? (Score:1)
What will be more important is the decoding of this DNA, to work out exactly which bit does what and how all the digits interact. At the moment it's looking a bit like trying to learn to code from a binary dump of a kernel, or to speak egyptian from the heiroglyphics in the great pyramid. What wil be important and must not be patented/trade secreted is the results and methods of decoding DNA, which is going to require some serious mathematical and computer effort, hopefully leading to new insights into information theory. (can you imagine how compressed all the information involved in the formation of a human body is to fit into only 3 billion or so bases?)
The real problem involved in keeping this data secret is if the methods by which they got it are also secret, which means that other people can't reproduce the data.
Re:Free science (Score:1)
So what you're basically saying is that everything would be much better in the world of science if everyone was forced to work without recognition or reward? That noone can claim any sort of ownership over their own work, or seek any reward from it.
You are mixing recognition and financial reward which are two very different things. People don't in general go into science for the money. Scientists need recognition for their acheivments, but large financial rewards (which don't normally go to the person who made the discovery anyway) don't necessarily go in hand with that. "Science is like sex. Sometimes something useful comes out of it, but that isn't the reason we do it".
My impression is that the problem comes from commercial organisations' funding of research. If a drug company is funding research then it respects some financial return on it. The scientists involved rarely get any of the money (witness the guy who designed viagra who has made an absolute fortune for his company, but whose salary apparently hasn't changed at all). In addition this attitude has probably filtered down into the scientists a little from the top. I have heard the head of one lab (biotech stuff related) saying "The problem is that you get advances when all the top people in the field sit around and bash some ideas out between themselves. We're not getting that properly any more because everyone's worried they might give away some big idea that could have made millions".
What advocates of that raving lunatic RMS don't seem to grasp is that the majority of people are motivated to some extent by self-interest and that one is unlikely to achieve much by removing elements of self-interest. I wait with interest to see if these deluded people will eventually work it out on their own.
RMS talks about software which has a fairly low capital cost, and so eople can be motivated by recognition and a love of what they are doing - his arguments are actually pretty reasonable there. For science his arguments wouldn't work so well since, while the motivation is there, you need a lot of money and that tends to come with strings attatched. Maybe for science the current situation is a good as it can get, maybe it isn't, but to dismiss RMS by applying his arguments to soemething he never attempted to apply them to in the first place, and then show how they are wrong isn't a very honest argument.
The agreement does *not* give free access (Score:5)
It's not giving free access to academics, not in the open source meaning of "free" anyway.
If you want less than 1 Mb (that is, less than 0.03%) of the data, you agree to a clickwrap license on the Celera web site.
If you want all the data (about 3000 Mb), you and your institution cosign a formal license with Celera.
What does this license say, you may wonder? Well, so do we. Turns out, the details are still being worked out. But the gist is this: you can use the data for anything you want, so long as it is for noncommercial purposes. You can publish your results freely, with no reachthru rights being asserted by Celera. And you agree not to redistribute the data.
Oops. Look at that again. Ever see a scientific paper where you a) published your results and b) didn't "redistribute" (i.e show!) the primary data? Can someone define the bounds between publication and redistribution? I can't. Neither can Science, as of yesterday.
Science and Celera has not yet defined the bounds between trivial redistributions that Celera doesn't sue you for ("Figure 1 shows a BLAST alignment to my gene in the Celera database"), and real redistributions that they do ("Table 1 in the Web Supplement gives the positions of every DNA hexamer in the Celera database. Please don't use it to reconstruct the original data.") But I'll bet you that pretty much every large scale bioinformatics/computational biology analysis of the Celera data would be counted as a "redistribution"... potentially blocking the main use of the genome, which is for large-scale genomic analysis. And if the bounds aren't defined by the agreement, the bounds will be defined on a case-by-case basis by negotiation with Celera lawyers. Yes, I'm looking forward to that, I'll definitely get a lot of human genome research done.
It's a horrible precedent. Part of the reason for the success of bioinformatics has been the public availability of the international DNA databases. Science and Celera now threaten to set a precedent that could change that.
ob. disclaimer: I'm a coauthor on the competing Human Genome Project paper, and also a Celera stockholder. I'm conflicted both ways. I'm either going to be able to do human genome research freely, or I'll be rich. And I'd rather do research.
Re:Read the science link! (Score:1)
although much of the data will be freely available and researchers can even seek patents on what they find there, there will be limits on the amount of genetic data that can be downloaded by individual researchers and requirements that researchers under some circumstances sign agreements that limit their ability to redistribute or commercialize the data.
There are restrictions on how much you download, what you can do with it, and to whom you can give your results. THAT is not acceptable. People can't just "download the database" as you said.
How come moderators mark people up every time they say "go read the article!"? This guy himself aparently missed the article.
MyopicProwls
Absolutely, positively won't work (Score:2)
Here's why "open source AIDS research" won't work: it's not easy to learn how to to cure diseases, "debugging" requires that you already have AIDS and you're willing to sacrifice your last two or three years to help others find a cure, and biotech equipment is incredibly expensive. If you're going to do this kind of work, it's really a full time job. Even if you already have the schooling, each project is so different (curing AIDS vs. curing cancer) that it will still take you a while to get good at what you're working on. Finally, there's no way to make a profit off of open sourced medicine. You can't sell "support," your product isn't unique (because all your collaborators will be making exactly the same thing, they won't be customizing distros or any nonsense like that), and if your product ever loses commercial viability, it'll probably be after your 17 year patent expires.
Open Source is nice, but it can't be applied to anything. The fields in which Open Source will work will probably discover it on their own.
This is Ridiculous... (Score:3)
As was clear from the Science statement,
Science clearly felt that it was more beneficial to the research community to have the information available to advance work in the field than to adhere to some artificial standard of economic "purity".
This Slashdot article is at best woefully inaccurate and at worst yellow journalism; it's hard to escape the suspicion that these kind of articles are purposefully intended to stimulate high volumes of indignant postings, thus boosting site ad revenue.
Wouldn't it be ironic if the motivation behind this article is the same old-fashioned capitalistic drive for which Celera is so roundly criticized?
A megabase? (Score:1)
Up to one what? And these people are scientists...
"past custom" = "community standard" = "ethics" (Score:3)
To publish a paper and not deposit your DNA data in Genbank, EMBL, or DDBJ is literally unethical; it is not consistent with accepted professional standards of behavior.
Apologists for this deal argue that little concerns like "ethics" should be subservient to bigger concerns like "expediency". Where have I heard that argument before throughout history?
Yes, this is all going to make a great example for that required course we teach in research ethics. We'll be able to shorten the course a lot now. The lesson, kids, is that if you're big enough, the rules don't apply to you. Science is no different than real life. Anyone surprised?
Re:Not good (Score:1)
The information will be freely available if you don't want to commercialize it.
Of course, they do have that 1MB-limit problem...
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Patrick Doyle
Re:A megabase? (Score:3)
And obviously you are not. DNA sequence lengths are measured in base pair. A megabase is a segment that is 10^6 base pairs in length.
Academic vs. Commercial R&D (Score:4)
Even the concept of free publication by academics is disapearing - universities now want to review all publications for potential patentability - some schools now garner very considerable income from licensing ideas developed as part of academic research.
Patents were developed to encourage publishing - they allow disclosure and at the same time protect the commercial rights of the publisher. However patents are not scientific literature.
What Science is doing is very interesting - they are recognizing that the value of publication of some works outweighs the issues of mere procedural restrictions on the location of a database. How this will work out is very interesting, not only because of its impact on this particular field, but also for the whole corporate-academic dynamic.
Not that bad (Score:2)
The limits put there are a bit unfortunate, but still reasonable. You can still search, you can verify all the data that came from their papers, you can replicate the experiments. You might have problems designing new experiments from it if you need a very large sequence (which would be unusual in most cases), but then you can try to get an agreement with them.
And what Science did a good thing, because Celera didn't have it available before, and they can check the integrity of the database if there is any doubt about that. It's probably one of the best compromise available for everyone in that situation, IMHO.
Finishing public research privately (Score:3)
Celera owes it's data to the world as they only finished a process that was started by public research funding.
These big companies would all be nowhere if the public sector protected it's research to the degree that the private companies do.
I don't know the specifics of who runs Celera but I'm suspicious that many of their top scientists did research in the public sector for years and then went private when they got close to a breakthrough.
There's too much of a mix of public research and private patents these days.
Re:"past custom" = "community standard" = "ethics" (Score:1)
After all, what makes failure to publish data in Genbank et al unethical? Isn't it the fact that the work was supported by public funds -- and thus it is only right that the data be publically available for unrestricted use? This is, of course, the right thing to do.
But should the same expectation apply to work supported by private funds -- in other words, by people who invest their money expecting some sort of return? How can that return be generated if there is no possibility of gaining profit from the work?
It seems to me that to call the Science deal "unethical" is equivalent to saying that there is no place for profit-oriented private investment in this field of research. Is that your position?
Re:One piece at a time (Score:2)
The line between "public" and "private" (Score:2)
Nobody's bothered terribly about whether research is privately or publicly funded. (Hell, my research is funded by everything from your taxpayer money, to Howard Hughes' will, to Sun Microsystems.. and even, gasp, by Celera itself!)
The point is that publishing a scientific paper entails certain ethical responsibilities, among which is the free and open disclosure of your data to other scientists, so they can effectively build on your work. The community standard for *both* privately and publicly funded DNA sequence data is that *when it is published*, it goes to Genbank, EMBL, or DDBJ.
Companies that feel that disclosure will negatively impact their business model should not submit papers on their work, that's all. They should not seek the rewards of publication without meeting their responsibilities to the community of scientists that read their paper. Otherwise, their paper is an advertisement, not something that moves the field ahead. Other genomics companies seem to have no problem with this -- Incyte and HGSI, for example, don't try to muddy the waters by submitting papers on their proprietary genome databases.
Lots of the apologists for Celera say "shouldn't they be allowed to make money?" Sure they should. More power to them, my stock will go up, I'll be happy. But they can't have their cake and eat it too -- they shouldn't be able to get away with writing scientific papers about a proprietary database. It's not ethical.
Re:incomplete access (Score:1)
The ability to search the data is much more important than being able to download all of it anyhow.
Re:The line between "public" and "private" (Score:2)
Re:Free science (Score:1)
10% would be too much, but I would be happy to see a 1% increase in every tax I pay if I knew that the 1% would would be applied strictly to basic non-profit, non-secret, non-proprietary science
What advocates of that raving lunatic RMS don't seem to grasp is that the majority of people are motivated to some extent by self-interest and that one is unlikely to achieve much by removing elements of self-interest. I wait with interest to see if these deluded people will eventually work it out on their own.
I won't defend RMS, here, because he is a fanatic ("raving lunatic" is, perhaps, unjustified). But what many people don't seem to understand about science is that science truely does thrive only in an open intelectual environment. Suppose you publish the results of your experiments but keep your data and analysis secret. How can we check to make sure your experiment is repeatable? Even if the experient is repeatable, how can we criticize the conclusions you've drawn?
When you claim to have interesting knowledge but refuse to release the knowledge or refuse to release the basis of the knowledge, you've reduced potential science to mere advertising. I'm not saying its evil, but I am saying it's not science. When you call it science, you are lying to yourself and to the public.
What Celera is doing is not science. I hope "Science" magazine is satisfied with whatever compensation it is to recieve for this advertising it is doing for Celera; I'm certainly not happy with it.
Adrian
Re:The line between "public" and "private" (Score:1)
Bioinformaticians have to realize that our air supply is a freely available international sequence database. When it comes time to fight for our air supply, like now, it won't help if we're viewed as a pack of hypocrites. Published bioinformatics software has got to be made open source. As you point out, it's not much different from asking genome sequencers to deposit in Genbank.
Neither the journals not the community have established a standard of behavior for us yet, so it a less clearcut question than DNA sequence deposition right now. It will take more time and work to get the journals on board with respect to software access.
IP "rights" on the Human Genome (Score:2)
I fully acknowledge that there was a significant amount of work required to actually sequence this fact, and there should be commercial reward. But it seems that there exists no system as of now to do this. What options are there that don't assert ownership of the facts of the Genome?
This country is simply property-happy, especially when something isn't ownable in the first place.
Re:Absolutely, positively won't work (Score:1)
You claim:
This statement is unsupportable. Even a charitable interpretation of the statement presupposes that only those who are intimately involved in collecting data can conduct research, and only gross ignorance could lead one to believe that this is true.
You say:
I can only suppose that the irony of this statement escapes you. Let me spell it out for you. Industry decides that it must keep its research secret, so that it can profit from said research. It put the fruits of that research into designing research equipment, and when it patents all this knowledge and equipment it can use its legal monopoly on them to set any price it wants. Of course knowledge and equipment are both often prerequisites for research, and since the entities that owned this initial knowledge and equipment were free to charge whatever they wanted for them, the cost of the research is very high, so naturally when the research is completed and bears its own fruit of knowledge and equipment, industry has a good excuse for setting the price on this new fruit very very high, since they have to recoup the cost of this new research. Imagine how expensive the next generation of research will be.
You say:
History is rife with cases where people from disciplines thought to be unrelated to the research in question stumbled across published research and contributed insights that were obvious to anyone in these unrelated disciplines. Your statement presupposes that only laborious and time consuming contributions to science are valuable.
You say:
This statement is perhaps the only source of genuine insight in your entire diatribe. What you may have missed is that science has already discovered that an open model works best. Secrecy might be good for profit and it might be good for national security, but its never good for science.
Adrian
Re:The agreement does *not* give free access (Score:1)
While Science says that they are providing raw data (in accordance with normal publication procedure), the restriction that you can only get 1Mb of it at a time kinda ruins it for everyone. It's like going to the library and checking out War and Peace one page at a time. With the librarian looking over your shoulder! This WILL hinder the use of this data for bioinformatics research, as stated above.
On a side note, I thought that, while Celera had sequenced the whole genome, they are far from putting it together. Is this evident from the data that will be available for peer review? Will there be peer review on the reconstruction of full contigs of the sequence? Not if they can't see it all. So that is not really good, either...
I don't like the idea of patenting sequence. I have been watching the Open Source movement for about 2 years now in rapt awe, because I think that this IS exactly what is supposed to happen in science. In science, we merely discover or describe what is already out there but the Open Source movement is all about creating what definately wouldn't be there if people didn't do it. And yet we can't seem to perpetuate that idea in science, that everything is free for anyone to observe. While our economy probably depends on the profit garnered by such big companies like Celera (our stock market certainly depends on them) it is sad to see everything go forward in terms of profit. It takes money to make money, but it is definately the root of all evil.
Did you read the article? (Score:1)
And although much of the data will be freely available and researchers can even seek patents on what they find there, there will be limits on the amount of genetic data that can be downloaded by individual researchers and requirements that researchers under some circumstances sign agreements that limit their ability to redistribute or commercialize the data.
That sounds a lot more restrictive than you make it out to be, worse in fact, it sounds intentionally vague to leave room for tightening restrictions. There are "limits," "requirements," under "some circumstances," which does not sound like any non-commercial use is legal. Maybe you should read the article.
Re:Expensive medicine is just Darwin at work (Score:1)
Can we say... (Score:1)
Re:Free science (Score:2)
An earlier poster already observed that this has some elements of the GPL's philosophy in it. You can have the data for free, as long as you don't make any money off of it.
I agree that making scientific data available to only those who can pay for it would be complete bullshit, but that simply isn't what's going on here. There is something of a grey area in that drug companies, for example, will have to pay more do develop a drug based on this research than they would if it was completely public. However, some research would not have been done, or would not have been done as quickly, if not for the promise of some profit. There are potential problems, some serious, but they have to be balanced by the potential scientific gain. The specific weighting of risk vs. gain is a whole flame war in itself, so I'll stay the hell out of that.
Re:Read the article (Score:1)
Re:Free science (Score:2)
Several other posts in this thread have stated that the methods used in writing Free Software won't work in science and that science will grind to a halt without private funding and the patents that go along with it. They should read some history. Einstein objected to monetary interests interfering with science so much that he once said that it is essentially unethical for a person to be employed as a scientist. He believed that scientists should have other professions and do research as a hobby (he then remarked that he would have liked to be a plumber).
It is true that companies like Celera have to make a profit in order to stay in business. But it is not the job of the scientific comunity to help Celera make a profit any more than it is my job as a Free Software developer to help Microsoft make a profit. If Celera wants to participate in the scientific process, fine. If they can make a profit by doing so, that's also fine. The scientific comunity, however, should not compromise it's principles just to make sure the money Celera spent on research is realized in profits. To do so would compromise the legitimacy of any discoveries that Celera claims to have made and would damage the credibility of the scientific process in general. Celera should follow the same rules and traditions that other scientists do, and Science should be criticized for allowing them an exception (even though this is a relatively minor exception). Where would we be if Werner Heisenberg had demanded payment before revealing how he had formulated the uncertainty principle? Not posting to Slashdot, that's for sure.
Re:Free science (Score:1)
First, most of my reply was as much to the notion that there was no useful parellel to the open source mentality in the business of science. to the extent that this first point is true, your point about "Science's" statement is not really relevant.
My last paragraph, on the other hand, was aimed directly at Celera, and does not, therefore, enjoy any protection from the point expressed in the previous paragraph. This brings me to the second point.
In your own reply to my reply, you say:
While this is important to point out, there are a couple of potential problems that occur to me with making experimental data proprietary, even with this attempt at a restricted kind of openness.
First, it means that if I try to do further science using the entire body of data, I will be bound by this agreement not to redistribute the very data that I use to form my conclusions. If I can't release the data I use for theoretical work, can I really claim that I'm engaging in science, myself? Any attempt at scientific work that is based on Celera's data is tainted in an important way.
Second, corporations have a long history of using legal harrassment to suppress science and opinions that they don't like. How many times have we seen corporations send Cease and Desist letters for things that any reasonably intelligent person must know are perfectly legal and appropriate. While I don't like this silly notion that some people have that all lawyers are evil, there is a class of scum sucking bastards that happen to be lawyers who believe it is ethical to send unsupportable legal threats as a bluff in hopes that the target of these threats will back down without a fight. These bottom feeders deserve to be drawn and quartered, and if you are one of these sleasbags, you know who you are.
Anyway, imagine that you saw a flaw in Celera's reasoning and published your own paper using Celera's own data to refute their conclusions and make them look silly. Suppose that Celera's investors have sunk a great deal of money into a product based on some bit of flawed "science" that they've attempted to do. What do you think are the chances that they will simply acknowledge the problem, and then take their marbles and go home? When news of such a problem for a drug company hits the stock market, what is the typical effect on the price of the company's stock? CEO's are generally under tremendous pressure to maximize the value of their stock, and that pressure often warps their sense of proportion. Personally, I can see the CEO of such a company convincing himself that they will find a way around the problem with a little more research, and that he needs, first, to maintain investor confidence or he will be cheated of the chance to solve the problem and give a good return on the investments that came in before the bad news broke. Such a CEO might think he has a duty to discourage you from spreading news of this temporary setback any further.
Maybe you feel secure about being able to conduct your science with data from Celera, but what happens when Celera has second thoughts about continuing to make these data availible to the scientific community. Since you can't publish Celera's data in your research, you have no choice but to point your readers to Celera to get their own copies of the data that are the foundation of your research. But if Celera is embarassed and stops making these data availible to the scientist who are reading your paper, suddenly, you will find yourself trying to defend your own claims without being able to show any data to support them.
What would you do if you received a Cease and Desist letter from Celera? What if you knew damn well that Celera had no legal legs to stand on, and that this effort on their part was simply legal harrasment? What would you do? Are you confident that you and a cheap lawyer could prevail fight off an army of expensive lawyers? Did you get in the science business to advance science and get a really good reputation, or did you get in the business to become notorious for legal battles and grandious claims about your scientific prowess, which you can't prove, BTW, because the corporate legal army secured a temporary injuction barring further distrubution of your "slanderous" paper before you even realized you needed to hire a lawyer?
I fear that the confidence that some have expressed in Celera's reasonability is naive. I think those of you who think it's acceptable to make scientific data proprietary are not really paying close attention to history. Even if it turns out that we can trust Celera this particular time, I have the feeling we are on a slippery slope, and that ultimately this trend will have a positively chilling effect on science. It's great, I think, that scientific progress often leads to commercial and ecconomic developement, but if we let corporations own basic science, it seems obvious to me that basic science will suffer for it, and we will suffer along with it.
Adrian
Re:IP "rights" on the Human Genome (Score:1)
"I have a secret..." is different from "I invented/own the human genome," and it's important that corporations and Science remember that.
Re:Nature? About 28? Pah! (Score:1)
Nature's impact factor is 29.491. Please don't confuse it with those, ahem, "lesser" journals like the New England Journal of Medicine.
Re:Free science (Score:1)
So... You want the information for nothing? Or... Do you want nothing for information?
Re:Free science (Score:1)
Re:Free science (Score:2)
Now doing something new with the processes. That might reasonably be patentable. But reporting on the order that they have found (i.e., observed)... the mind boggles.
The entire patent system needs to be totally scrapped! It's not just software patents that have been turned on their heads. It seems to be everything! (Though I will admit, this isn't anything that I've seen happening in a software patent yet.)
Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
Re:Expensive medicine is just Darwin at work (Score:1)
Re:Free science (Score:1)
If I were to have found a flaw in their research, I am perfectly free to report that (provided it makes it past the review process). Once their paper is published, presenting their methods and results, there ain't no way in hell they'd be able to retract that (the data maybe, not the paper). I've read articles that have glaring basic errors, and let me tell you, I pity the author of that paper. Anytime I hear the authors' names now, all I can think of is, "duh." This is the same thing that would happen to any more research coming out of Celera; it would always be mistrusted.
This is why Science is holding a copy of the data in escrow, to prevent just such an occurence. This is one thing I do trust, since Science has too good a reputation to let one company tell them how to run things. Even if that one company is one of only two major players in the field of human genome sequencing.
Re:Not that bad (Score:2)
I side with the scientists but my opinion is not relevant either as I am not a scientist in this field either. I will take their word for it that 'Science' is way out of line here, their actions actively harmful.
Re:Free science (Score:2)
Anger and this sort of strong language _are_ _justified_ here. The sort of inflexible capitalist ethic we're seeing is flatly incompatible with scientific growth and progress. There have been times when any scientific discovery was tightly owned and controlled. They called one of them 'The Dark Ages'.
While the capitalistic ethic can sometimes be pretty harmless in relation to science, we're rapidly approaching a period in history when it IS NOT. A period where you are NOT ALLOWED to think (or your university will seize your ideas as IP) or invent (or someone will file a patent and block you from using your idea) or pursue scientific progress (how dare you suggest standing in the way of someone else's greater profit and valuation?)
This can only lead to another Dark Ages. No doubt in the Dark Ages, people thought they were at the peak of human invention, the pinnacle of society. And so they stayed there- and stayed there- rotting. What we will see is a brightly-lit, electronic Dark Ages- and there we will stay until the worship of the capitalist ethic IN ALL THINGS is discarded, and science is allowed to be science again.
What with universities ready to sue students for control of the intellectual property the students developed while at uni, I say we are already well into the new Dark Ages. This reality is on the one hand a totally logical extrapolation of Western capitalism- and on the other hand utterly unthinkable. But it's the reality- for now.
I hope to God I live to see the end of this.
I suggest a one-word change, then I'll agree (Score:2)
Re:incomplete access (Score:1)
Nobody begrudges Celera the right to place restrictions on their hard-won data. The beef that most people have is that Celera wants to have their cake and eat it too: they want the glory of publication without paying the price of full disclosure.
I agree that Celera's data is "mostly free" but even that one inch of compromise represents the start of a slippery slope. In my (worthless) opinion journals should never have considered this work for publication.
Re:Finishing public research privately (Score:1)
the point to all this is that celera doesn't have to publish anything if they don't want to. but it's more useful to everyone if they publish a bit, and that academic researchers get to download parts (a megabase is actually a lot unless you want to analyze the genome as a whole) than if they don't publish anything at all. everyone forgets that part because they feel entitled to someone else's expensive work.
Re:IP "rights" on the Human Genome (Score:1)
Re:Finishing public research privately (Score:1)
If Celera want's to brag in a peer reviewed forum they should obey the public rules.
Re:Science is free. (Score:1)
Academic researchers are required to publish and get grants to keep their jobs. Publication makes whatever work they're doing know to people doing similar work. Patents allow them to publish their work without fear of some big company reading the article and throwing 100 flunkies at the project to go the last yard to a product.
Commercial researchers (eg drug companies) are required to demonstrate safety and efficacy to the FDA before selling a medical product. Other researchers won't buy their research products unless those products have been proven effective and accurate. Either of these tests require publication in believable, peer-reviewed journals that insist on releasing methodology so that other people can reproduce the experiments.
The business of science comes down to a choice between trade secrets, which prevent anyone outside the company from knowing anything about a process, and patents, which allow everyone to know what's going on and build upon that progress. Either method is aimed at protecting the investment _someone_ has made: one is cooperative, one is not.
Re:Read the science link! (Score:1)
Raw data isn't normally published. (Score:2)
It is a longstanding tradition in science, and a requirement of major scientific journals, that researchers make their raw data available to other scientists when they publish...
Mr_Dyqik wrote:
If the data can't be checked by an independent researcher then it's not science. Noone can tell if they've actually done this research or not, unless the data is available and able to be checked.
Both these statements seem to be either oversimplifications or to betray a lack of knowledge about how scientific publishing works. The article's statement is not true. For instance, I've published various papers in the field of experimental nuclear physics. We never, ever made our raw data publicly available for downloading, and this was never an issue with the journals. First off, a typical experiment generated about twenty 8-mm tapes worth of raw data. I'd like to see the internet connection that would make that practical to download. Furthermore, someone who hadn't been involved in the actual experiment probably wouldn't have been able to interpret the data correctly without a lot of help.
Of course if someone wanted to work with the data, they could get in touch with us about forming a collaboration.
It's simply not true that you can't check results without access to the raw data. Do you have access to Galileo's notebooks? No, but you can check whether what he did was correct.
There is a fuzzy area in between completely raw data and well-cooked data. What you normally see in a published paper is the highly cooked stuff. Where to set the boundary between raw and cooked is a matter of opinion, and this would normally be handled by the peer-reviewing process.
Re:Read the article (Score:2)
#include "disclaim.h"
"All the best people in life seem to like LINUX." - Steve Wozniak
Re:Free science (Score:1)
Think about it for a moment -- right now you're sitting in front of a machine that wouldn't have been created but for profit-seeking whores, in a building that wouldn't have been built but for them, reading text off a monitor based on technologies which would not exist had someone not been greedy enough to want to steal someone else's market share by creating a better product.
The profit-seeking whores (not the SOBs who gain their profit unfairly, as with IP, but those who create and are compensated for it) are the only good and valuable individuals in this world, and you'd best learn some respect for them. You'd be in a world of hurt were it run by sentimentalists such as yourself.
I'd really like to debate with you one-on-one when I have more time. If you read this, mind emailing me? My address above is real.
Ohmigod, it's a EULA! (Score:2)
The newspaper article, however, makes it clear that what's really happening is Celera is going to require a EULA that prohibits any commercial use whatsoever. This is bad. Very very bad.
In the past, it was assumed that you could either keep your scientific data to yourself, or you could publish some or all of it, and there was no third option. If you wanted prestige (and tenure) and wanted to contribute to society, you published. If you didn't publish, you got none of the benefits. If Celera is publishing their cooked data but subjecting their raw data to a EULA, that blurs the line between what is science and what isn't. EULA'd information is arguably even less free than secret information. At least if I obtain secret information about my neighbor's marital problems, he can't sue me for a license violation! If this goes on, pretty soon scientists will need lawyers to tell them which parts of the scientific literature they can use without legal problems.
No no no no no !!!!
Re:Expensive medicine is just Darwin at work (Score:1)
Nothing Darwin about that.