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SigntificLurching Towards Open Science
Openness is rocking the scientific world. Accept it or proceed at your own risk. As an article last week in Nature points out: scientists are posting unprecedented amounts of experimental data online in “open notebooks”.
But wait.
Science in academia is becoming more closed, driven by regulatory shifts in how funding is tied to ownership of research products. As the …more than a quarter-century after President Jimmy Carter signed it into law, the Bayh-Dole Act, sponsored by the former Senators Birch Bayh, Democrat of Indiana, and Robert Dole, Republican of Kansas, is under increasing scrutiny by swelling ranks of critics. The primary concern is that its original intent — to infuse the American marketplace with the fruits of academic innovation — has also distorted the fundamental mission of universities.
Over the last 25 years, while Bayh-Dole streamlined a conflicting quilt of regulations that governed who owned what products of federally-funded research, it helped cultivate an infrastructure of university licensing and patent offices that don’t share the scientific ideal of broadly shared knowledge. They want to generate licensing revenues for the university, although for all but an elite bunch, it’s a red herring:
To date, Ms. Washburn says, data gathered by the Association of University Technology Managers, a trade group, show that fewer than half of the 300 research universities actively seeking patents have managed to break even from technology transfer efforts. Instead, two-thirds of the revenue tracked by the association has gone to only 13 institutions.
These two stories actually aren’t that incongruous. Digging deeper in the Nature story, we discover that in fact, the scientists openly publishing experimental data are largely doing it as a pre-emptive defense against future patent challenges. By posting their lab results early, they can create an unassailable public record of their unique contributions. Openness is a strategy for future restrictions.
On the surface, this seems a very different model than we’ve seen elsewhere, where open IP repositories like Liunx became a hub for specialized services and custom extensions. No one contributes code to open source projects hoping that this will be good documentation for future software patents. I’m not sure if there is a 1-to-1 correspondence, but it’s certainly a potentially ugly turn for the open science movement.
Finally, it’s interesting to see the supertanker of national governments around the world finally turning onto the open science course. Following the lead of US and UK finding institutions like the NIH an Wellcome Trust , Australia’s latest innovation policy framework, Venturous Australia, recommends requiring open access to research data from publicly-supported science. It seems that the policy wonks who think about innovation in Australia get that, and want to find a way to pull industry and academia along kicking and screaming. (Thanks to Mathias Crawford, a new researcher on IFTF’s X2 project sciencex2.org , for spotting this)