Researchers' Right To Open Source Research

bstadil writes: "There is an interesting debate over at SiliconValley.com about the right of researchers funded by Universities to make their IP Open Source. It's not at all simple. On one side Universities claiming their derive 5% of their Budget from IP licenses and it's vital for continued high level of 'Output,' on the other hand researcher who claim the public is billed twice by licensing the output."

where'd the funding come from?

[anothy]

in my mind, the eventual disposition of the IP rights depend on where the funding for the research came from. in public institutions, like state schools, this should be clear: they're public institutions, funded by public money, so the public should get the benefits. that's simply an evolution of the original concept of public educations: we give money to educational institutions so society as a whole can benefit. in private institutions, it's less clear, since the public money (almost all private universities still get lots of public money) is usually a minority. but lots of big companies help fund research in public schools and still expect to get the results, and that doesn't make sense.

choice

[tps12]

I don't think either of the situations described in the article make sense: either a researcher is forced by her university to keep the source private, or she's forced (through the proposed laws agains "billing the public twice") to open it. I don't think either one needs to be the case, and I think what we have now is actually pretty sensible.

And what is the situation now? Basically, researchers are employed by the university. You can ask your employer (as you could working anywhere) to open a project's source, but in the end it's a management decision. I mean, there are probably some guys at Microsoft who'd like to open the IIS source to get rid of some bugs, but it just doesn't make sense given the business model in use. Researchers are always free to look for employment elsewhere, just like everyone else.

Paid twice; screwed once

[ho11yw00d]

Research funded by grants and government funding should be open. I'm all for capitalism, but if the public is going to "invest" in these schools and consistantly get nothing in return, we're getting fleeced.

As the article states, very few of these properties are lucrative and it's like the administrators are holding on to a free lottery ticket. I won't pay for my own gambling, let alone someone elses.

The answer is obvious...

[WolfWithoutAClause]

...only to Bill Gates or Richard Stallman.

Bill Gates thinks that all the software in the world should be licensed, (and he should hold the license).

Richard Stallman on the other hand, thinks that all the software in the world should be licensed, (and he should write the license).

To everyone else, I think it depends what you are trying to achieve with your software.

Would the IP protocol be here today if it hadn't been open source? Would Linux? Would Doom? [Doom: It's free, then it isn't!, then it's open source!]

I think it depends what you think is more important: great software or great profits

Personally I like both- and Doom shows one way to get the best of both worlds; but there's plenty of other ways through this particular maze.

A division of income sources

[erroneus]

The article doesn't address a pretty fundamental issue here.

Where and how is public funding being used? Where and how is private funding being used? Where are the overlaps in this case?

One could, of course, argue that since the research is being held within buildings paid for by public funds, using utilities paid for by public funds, that certainly the public holds an interest in all cases where such research is being carried out.

Private interests have an interest in seeing the work completed and the institutions themselves have an interest in licensing fees coming back to them as well.

This is a confusing problem. It's certainly not black and white now is it? If I were judge, however, I would rule in the public's interest. I view public funding as a moral obligation to return something to the public after accepting money from it. If private interests are allowed to influence where the results of research goes, then the private institution should be billed for the amount of public funds used during the course of the research.

As for the institution itself charging license fees... wow... that's an interesting one isn't it. To that I would answer, YES! Charge license fees all you want, but only to private interests and not to public ones.

Hrm... I'd say that was a fair assessment of this situation. If I were judge over this matter, I would rule in this way.

HOWEVER... we know that's not what is likely to happen is it?

Corporation A and B's lawyers will argue that public interests are served by providing a quality product for sale resulting from all of this research... :) Hyeah... get something for free and sell it back to us... yet that argument is made all the time and it makes sense to some judges in these cases. Bah!

Question of Ownership

[ackthpt]

But universities -- and some programmers -- oppose the open source movement, fearful valuable trade secrets could be lost.

All things exist, in space and time, they are merely ours to discover. Stanford, I can understand as it's a private school, but UC Berkeley hasn't a leg to stand on. Perform a service, do some research for IBM or such, sure, but it occurs to me that if a public institution claims ownership then it should be public. No secrets, no problem. Probably something else behind this is schools competing for prestige. UCB and Stanford both have a large number of Nobel prize winners, each. But that's no excuse for double charging the public, taxes, tuition, etc. + license fees.

Re:where'd the funding come from?

[ackthpt]

but lots of big companies help fund research in public schools and still expect to get the results, and that doesn't make sense.

Why pay for a building, staff, utilities, recruiting, wages, insurance, legal, etc. for a R&D department when you can rent one?

Re:where'd the funding come from?

[richie123]

This is why we have the principal of academic
freedom, if it becomes regulated that
researchers have to give over their work to
whoever pays for the work to be done, then the
researcher becomes little more than paid
employees of funder.

Good research needs to done by people who have
as little vested interest it the outcome of the
research as possible (not the quality of the
research, but the actual results it produces).

University researchers need to have the freedom
to license their work as they see fit, but they
also have a moral responsibility to serve both
the public and private interests who fund their
work.

In my opinion researches should be allowed to
decide how they license their work, but should
take that power very seriously and to be as open
as possible. Research work that has been paid
for by the public should be put into the public
domain, and work that was paid for by private
companies should be placed under a
non-discriminatory license that guarantees some
usefull degree of access by all.

Computer Science should grow up.

[EndersGame]

Computer science is a young field. We can produce papers and show one result without having to back them up with anything other than our word. _SOME_ computer scientists have the courage to put out their source, but now it sounds like the universities are pressuring them not to.

Biology has a culture such that if you produce a new mutant line and write a paper about your discovery, ANYONE can ask you for your line. If you don't produce it, you will loose any respect you might have built up over the years. How do universities handle this?

Let's just imagine if computer science was this way. If you produce a paper, you had to be willing to give the code. If someone took your code and found it wanton or you were unwilling to give up your code, it would be assumed that you faked it. Ouch! That would suck. It would certainly slow down our field, but I think at some point this should be the case.

Re:where'd the funding come from?

[haystor]

If these companies paid taxes on that money that they donated then perhaps they might be able to expect something in return.

However, if these are truly donations, you are not allowed to expect any financial considerations for donations that are written off.

This is simply a matter of whether the school wants to make cash from research. Frankly I'm not impressed by 5% of their budget coming from research. I'll bet that it eats up a great deal of professors time. This is time that could be spent with actual students who apparently are subsidizing this along with the state taxpayers.

Re:where'd the funding come from?

[fasta]

This comment reflects a widely held misconception about how research at public and private universities is funded. Much less than 10% of the research in the physical or natural sciences, or computer science or engineering at major universities (public or private) is funded by the institution. Almost all research is funded by federal agencies (NIH, NSF, DOD), and internal funds for research often come from indirect cost recovery from the federal grants. States and private endowments simply do not pay for research. (At fortunate institutions, they pay for buildings.)

Commercially-oriented research is often crap

[ab315]

A lot of what passes for commercial research is crap. For example, the stomach-ulcer drug "Zantac" was one of the biggest-selling drugs of all-time with billions of dollars in revenue. A perfect example of the commercial research model. Unfortunately the drug was complete crap, because all it did was treat the symptoms of stomach ulcers and not the cause, so you had to take it forever while the ulcers would silently get worse, requiring increasing doses. Of course, this is a great revenue generator -- the drug seems to work in trials, because it relieves the pain but somehow those patients just need to keep coming back for more. There was ONE guy in the world, a pathologist from New Zealand, who actually found out the real cause of many stomach ulcers -- a simple bacterial infection of the stomach that could be cured with cheap generic antibiotics. He spent twenty years trying to get the medical community to listen to him, but was completely ignored! After all he couldn't be right because Zantac was so successful! Standard treatment for ulcers today is testing for the bacteria (H.Pylori) and antibiotics.

Commercial research maximises profits, not progress. People who make real breakthroughs won't be accepted in a commercial research model, because they don't conform to the norm -- after all if a researcher finds out that a billion-dollar drug is useless that is not going to look good for the university -- people have been killed for less. Any university which goes down that road is going to guarantee it ends up producing mediocre incremental advances. We don't need any more zantacs, we need smart people with intellectual freedom -- if we can't collectively afford that then we are doomed.

Capitalism and Public Knowledge

[Anonymous Coward]

To answer this question, just ask: why have Universities in a capitalist society?

The idea behind capitalism is that, if something is of public benefit, someone will do it and sell it for a profit.

For some "things" though, this doesn't work, because it's not possible to control the spread of the benefit so that the provider can make a profit. Economists call these "positive externalities". Education and basic research are classic examples. Ford may derive benefit from having a educated populace, but it won't pay for people's educations, because other firms would derive the benefit, too.

I think the answer to the question is clear: Universities should "open" all research results. If research has a containable economic benefit, it can be done by a private firm, and the public shouldn't be subsidizing it in the form of salaries, grants, facilities, etc.

When public universities pursue IP revenue, they are succombing to the natural desire of any organization to grow -- but that urge needs to be kept in check by government looking out for the taxpayers bottom line. If increasingly more can be done for society by the private sector, then the public sector needs to be able to shrink. (And if not, then not.)

Bioinformatics software distribution

[fasta]

The Silicon Valley article is a bit misleading, and doesn't accurately reflect the range of distribution alternatives being used for Bioinformatics software. It is certainly true that many Universities claim ownership of computer software copyrights, but it is important to appreciate that there many levels at which the implementation of these policies is decided. For example, both the WU-BLAST and the HMMer packages were developed by researchers at Washington U. in St. Louis. WU-BLAST [wustl.edu]binaries are available to academics after an appropriate license is signed, and licensed commercially. HMMer i is available under the GPL but a commercial license is also available. [wustl.edu]

Likewise, the FASTA [virginia.edu] package, can be freely downloaded by both academic and commerical users, but must be licensed from the U. of Virginia to be redistributed. This has allowed the software to be widely used by researchers and also incorporated into commerical packages.

As a Bioinformatics researcher and software author, my goal is to have my research and software be used as widely as possible. This improves my ability to obtain future external funding, to get my papers cited, etc. etc. Even at universities like Wisconsin and Stanford, which derive enormous sums from IP licensing, these funds are less than 10% the value of NIH and other external funding. Thus, it is not hard to argue that software licensing policies should maximize the likelihood of external funding, and the widest possible distribution (though not necessarily GPL) is likely to have the greatest impact and long term benefit. (Moreover, once software becomes widely used, it is much more valuable commercially.)

Thus, while a university's Vice-President for Research may be interest in IP licensing, a Dept. Chairman may be more interested in faculty success in obtaining external funding, and a broader software distribution.

Disturbing Trend

[bcilfone]

This is just part of the trend to distribute risk among the public while privatizing profit. Welcome to America.

Re:Reduces the stature of science?

[elflord]

If they have a choice between grabbing free research off the internet, and paying $5 for that same paper, they will immediately place more importance on the $5 copy. One way to increase the public's view of open source may - ironically - be to charge a higher price for it.

This is not true, in my experience. No-one with any sense naively accepts selling price as a true measure of worth. The academic community has a process of peer review and publication. Research that is published in a reputable journal, or produced by a reputable scientist will be valued highly. Research, whether "open source", or sold for $5, $1000,000, by a crackpot will be ignored.