Open Source Science 33
Tim writes "A few days ago (June 26th), the "Public Access to Science" act was introduced to the House of Representatives. This act would ammend the US Copyright Act to "exclude from copyright protection works resulting from scientific research substantially funded by the Federal Government," in essence, requiring all federally-funded scientific research to be published as open content. The Public Library of Science has a press release with more information."
This means it can't be GPL'd (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't think this is a bad thing, actually. But I'm sure the lobbyists are going to twist this into "the government can't *buy* GPL code".
Re:This means it can't be GPL'd (Score:2, Informative)
Re:This means it can't be GPL'd (Score:1)
(As seen in slashdot QOTH at 12:25 am July 2)
Re:This means it can't be GPL'd (Score:1)
Re:This means it can't be GPL'd (Score:2)
Re:This means it can't be GPL'd (Score:2)
If I do, in order to release my modified version, I need to license it under the GPL. But if the government takes away my ability to copyright, then I can't. So then I can't distribute the work, which means we have less open science than before!
This would actually come up in my own research.
Re:This means it can't be GPL'd (Score:2)
Though bad for the GPL, if they actually do this in a consistent way then at least they are not hyprocrites. I am afraid they are going to get brainwashed into believing that GPL=bad but working on a patch for Windows is ok.
Re: Exclude from Copyright (Score:3, Insightful)
No, it's not necessarily a bad thing. There's a whole lot of work that's completely hidden from view that would be opened up to academic research. I can think of several chemistry programs I'd love to get in source form.
But it would be quite interesting to see how they decide to make the cutoff. TCP/IP was government-funded research. Does that mean anything that uses it m
Re:This means it can't be GPL'd (Score:3, Insightful)
While you're right it can't be released under the GPL, you are perfectly able to take the relased public domain work and stick it into the GPL. Hell, Microsoft can take stuff from the public domain and stick it into Widows and under their licence.
It doesn't prevent people from working on existing GPL code either, it just takes an extra step. You just release a public domain patch. Anyone (including you) can then apply that patch to a GP
Wonderful news! What's next? (Score:3, Insightful)
But I'm not sure I agree there are "excessive profits" at journals, especially since some of them have recently spent big $$ to digitize and archive old articles--in many cases dating back over a hundred years. But since many of us are almost exclusively using online access to journals, distribution charges will decrease dramatically.
So the big question isn't whether this should happen--it should. Science ideally should be a meritocracy of ideas, not dependent on how much your school is willing to spend on journals. But the big question is who pays in this new model. Someone has to review and edit articles. Someone has to pay for the bandwidth of the journal. So do we go back to the "you pay if you want to publish" method (bad idea--only the rich can publish) or will public funds go to public distribution (i.e. the public library model).
Too bad public libraries are often underfunded.
-Geoff
Re:Wonderful news! What's next? (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm sure my librarians would disagree with you $10,000 or more for a 12 issues of a journal is only possible because libraries buy these things for demanding faculty. There is a huge difference in price between the $50-$100 for a IEEE/ACM journal and one of the commercial journals. I draw the line at reviewing for a journal at $500/yr. The last publisher of $20-30 math books, Springer-Verlag, just got sold to a publisher that wants to maximize profit with no regard for the academic process they are serving. I think it may be time to abandon these old school publishers, I'm sure you could collect enough pre-orders with an electronic edition to get Dover or Eldritch Press to make a print run and mail them out. No one writes these books that sell 200-1000 copies worldwide for profit, it's merely a nicer form than pdf files.
Re:Wonderful news! What's next? (Score:3, Informative)
I'm not so sure that electronic journals have been such a good deal. This article seems to say quite the opposite:
http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue2_8/odlyzko /
This ar
Bad Idea (Score:5, Informative)
I also think people will find ways around this, say you accept government money for two years and accept corporate money for non-exclusive use rights in the last two years.. Well what do you know, you made a lot of progress in that last year...
Re:Bad Idea (Score:2, Interesting)
Use all of thse 'weapons' as a self-destructing blackmail. As in, you take this patent away from me, I'll kill the patent by legal kill.
The best way is to have as many in the grad class do this. It'll hurt t
Re:Bad Idea (Score:5, Informative)
Interestingly, in Canada the trend is the opposite. More and more Canadian universities are giving students almost complete IP rights. For instance, my university does this, they only require that they can have eternal free use of whatever I come up with while I'm there. Not a bad deal at all.
Of coures maybe things are different in America? Are grad students in funded exclusivly by the government as they are here? If not I suppose this law may not have as much of an impact. If it is the same, then this could perhaps hurt US academic research community.
Re:Bad Idea (Score:4, Informative)
Grad students aren't funded directly. Professors apply for grants in various fields and then pay the university to employ the student at a fixed rate. But the university doesn't care where the money comes from, the university might take a 60% cut for overhead and a cut on any purchases over $300. Where I was the professor also paid a health insurance co-pay for students even though students weren't given health insurance. Professors also get money from industry, Microsoft, IBM, Unilever... but except for Microsoft these are on an entirely different league, a lab might get a few million from the government and a 100k from the other sources. Microsoft gave us money for some patent rights to stuff developed with government money, but the much smaller grants from others were completely unrestricted. They just wanted to visit and have an inside track on hiring graduate students for summer internships. Government money, especially military money, has very few restrictions and is often more than you can spend. The universities don't allow spending this on the students, presumably to avoid the apperance that well funded departments pay better than the pure and social sciences, and the humanities. (Part of the "Contract with America" when the Republicans swept congress was the elimination of government funding for the humanities(NEH), so those departments are funded (badly) out of that 60%+ overhead..The arts funding (NEA) still exists in limited form, but generally this is less relevant as there are large private donors to fund these, and they do not grant many Ph.D's)
As for IP, patents usually belong to the university, but you have the copyright. Some universities take all the money from patents, but most have some give the inventor 50%+ of the royalties. Unfortunately since they own the patent you can't release your code without their permission. Your copyright gives you some leverage, as the patent is less valuable to them without it, but I've yet to ever hear back from legal when I wanted to release anything patented I wrote without a direct cash payment to the university.. A couple of the very best Uni's give you patent rights.. I don't think there is any move toward this. Though I think I might have patented some things if I had been given control of the patent with royalty obligations to the university. As the system is currently you'd be a fool to do it, you won't ever be able to use your own code legally again except at their approval. Well unless you move to some country where the patent doesn't apply.
copyrights not patents (Score:2)
The bill is about prohibiting copyrights on reports of government funded research.
The patent issue was not mentioned.
I would be extreemly rare for any researcher to make much money by retaining the copyright to federally funded research. Maybe if somebody wrote a "thesis of the year" but most academic research books make little money for their authors.
Re:copyrights not patents (Score:3, Interesting)
In computer science the code can bew very valuable. The papers are too, but here it is more important that your name be attached to it than any other aspect of copyright be ahered to. Often we sign our copyright away to a reputable member organization such as the ACM, whil
Re:Bad Idea (Score:1)
Re:Bad Idea (Score:2)
Re:Bad Idea (Score:1)
Are you making significant money from your code copyright? I would be surprised if more than a tiny fraction of CS grad students make a lot of money from copyright on their code, but then aga
Re:Bad Idea (Score:2)
That's pretty much how I see GPL too, but I don't release everything under it. Though I try to stick to open libraries so I can eventually.
The lab I work at now has made a little over 2 million on licensing on code I worked on with others as a definately less than the lab has seen in government grant
Salon has some deeper coverage (Score:4, Informative)
The free research movement [salon.com]
Text of the bill... (Score:3, Informative)
NASA, I'd like to see your books... (Score:1)
Don't get me wrong, I think this is a VERY good thing. Just think of the BILLIONS of dollars in research funds shelled out to corporations that never let the results see the light of day (outside their own firm). This could be HUGE in the private/amature space development efforts.
I just wonder whether it appli
Re:NASA, I'd like to see your books... (Score:2)
Good idea overall (Score:1)
Take a look at this email [uiuc.edu] to get an idea of the various battling forces in the academic world.
Chiming In . . . (Score:4, Insightful)
I agree with this proposal. If the US Government is paying for the research, they should be able to expect ownership of the IP. Since the USG isn't in the business of IP hoarding, then they instead have it released into the Public Domain.
The research does not have to be federally funded. So, if this condition is too much for the research team, then perhaps they should seek alternate funding. Then the altruism of the doner may allow the research team to keep the IP.
Next on the list.... (Score:2)
Good and Bad (Score:2, Interesting)
It's great for papers. For one thing, it would prevent the obnoxious practice of making authors sign over the rights to their papers to the publishing company (Springer-Verlag is notorious for this.) It's a good first step towards building a free internet repository for scientific papers.
On the other hand, it could prevent computer scientists from working on GPL (or even BSD code), since derivative works must be copyrighted under the same license. That would really suck, in fact,
Perh
Departure from FootInDoor (Score:3, Interesting)
It's interesting that they're providing full public access to new technology without requiring NDA's and licensing fees.
This is good public policy, one that will advance overall progress faster than if restrictions were in place.
Logically, the government doesn't (or shouldn't) need monetary incentives to create new inventions in the same way that individuals do; they already have the ability to reap tax revenue from a wide field at will.
By making their IP free, the government thereby lowers barriers to entry for anyone that wants to build upon the technology. As a result, society at large will benefit from more frequent and competitive introductions of inventions built on top of government-developed IP. The field of possible new inventors isn't restricted to those with both intelligence and money; it's enough to be intelligent.
Interestingly, release of software developed under U.S. government funding usually is required to contain a proviso like:
and the usual disclaimer of no warranty.In some cases software has been licensed for a fee to outside entites and in other cases it has been released freely under the various flavors of GPL, BSD, etc.
Where? How? (Score:2)
Maybe I missed it, but where would all this information be located? Availability online still limits the stuff, as many people don't have internet capabilities at home. Availability in paper form (or microfilm or whatever) would be a physically enormous amount of data. Would people in other countries also get to see everything?
Would this eventually become retroactive; that is, we get to see what our tax dollars funded in the past?
It's a huge amount of stuff. Think of all the grants from the EPA, FDA (