The Royal Society calls itself "a Fellowship of the world's most eminent scientists and... the oldest scientific academy in continuous existence." Its Fellows and Foreign Members have included Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Ernest Rutherford, Albert Einstein, Dorothy Hodgkin, Francis Crick, James Watson and Stephen Hawking.
After the UK Government unveiled its pretty reasonable response to the Hargreaves Report (analysed by me yesterday), the lobbying begins:Leading trade bodies for the film and music industries have warned the government that it must move quickly to implement an effective system to crack down on pirate websites, after Vince Cable announced that plans to block illegal file-sharing websites have been scrapped.
Geoff Taylor, chief executive of music industry body the BPI, said the government must urgently broker a deal between internet companies and rights holders to implement a fast-track procedure to crackdown on piracy or "a failure to do so will see some of this country's world-leading industries irreparably damaged on this government's watch".
"Every day blatantly illegal foreign sites flout our laws, rip off consumers and musicians and wreak huge damage on our creative sector," he said. "Government must now act urgently to put in place effective means to protect consumers, creators and UK jobs from the impact of illegal foreign sites".
Geoff, I think you missed this bit in the Government's response:the Government will in future give limited weight in IP policy-making to evidence that is not sufficiently open and transparent in its approach and methodology, and we will make it clear where we are taking this view. IPO will set out guidance in Autumn 2011 on what constitutes open and transparent evidence, in line with professional practice.
So, you say "illegal foreign sites...damage our creative sector": let's see your evidence, including full data and details of its methodology. So far, I've not found a single, independent report that shows this - indeed, the Hargreaves team specifically lamented the lack of this kind of objective research into the effects of file sharing in their report.
You see, the interesting thing is that there is an increasing number of studies - some anecdotal, some more rigorous - that show exactly the opposite: that piracy actually drives more sales (I include links to a few of them in my submission to the Hargreaves enquiry.)
So before you start calling for piracy to be curbed, it might be a good idea to sort out the evidence you will be submitting in support of that: rhetoric on its own is no longer enough. After all, if you find the studies I cite are confirmed by others conducted elsewhere, perhaps on a larger scale, you should actually be calling for *more* piracy, not less....
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Open access is about making copies of publicly-funded research available freely online. This stems from the belief that (a) having paid for it, the public has a right to see it and (b) a general view that access to knowledge should not be restricted to those that can pay for it (not least because it is precisely those that *cannot* pay who need it most).
Against that background, and of the growing success of open access in bringing knowledge to the developing countries, this is disgusting:From 4 January Elsevier Journals withdrew access in Bangladesh to 1610 of its publications, including the Lancet stable of journals, which had been available through the World Health Organization’s Health Inter-Network for Access to Research Initiative (HINARI) programme. HINARI was set up in 2002 to enable not for profit institutions in developing countries to gain access online to more than 7000 biomedical and health titles either free or at very low cost.
Springer has withdrawn 588 of its journals from the programme in Bangladesh and Lippincott Williams and Wilkins 299 journals. The American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Society for Animal Science have withdrawn access to, respectively, two and three of their journals.
To add insult to injury, some of the articles published in those titles are by researchers who now cannot read them:Tracey Koehlmoos, head of the health and family planning systems programme at the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research in Dhaka, said, “We are a little less than 300 scientists eking out world class research on a shoestring budget without the purchasing power capacity of a big university in the West. HINARI has been our lifeline. My colleagues publish in many of these journals, and now we won’t even have access to our own papers.”
Companies publishing academic journals typically enjoy a profit margin of 30%; providing them free to scientists in *non-profit organisations* in developing countries will have an infinitesimal effect on their bottom lines.
It's sheer, unadulterated greed that seeks to squeeze some money out of those that have precious little of it, in effect stopping them spending it elsewhere where it is sorely needed. It wouldn't surprise me to learn that people will die as a knock-on consequence of that diversion of resources.
I do wonder how the well-paid fat-cats running these huge publishing conglomerates (disclosure: I once worked for part of Reed-Elsevier, so I have some experience of these things) look at themselves in the mirror after making decisions like this.
But at least their selfish and callous action does helpfully underline one of the big problems with copyright: the fact that it allows companies that didn't even produce the research that they publish, and to which they very often add very little value themselves, to decide who gets to read what ought to be the common heritage of humanity. In other words, it's an intellectual monopoly that is wielded with only profit maximisation in mind.
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I've written before about the idea of applying openness/open source ideas to science, but here's an interesting new project that attempts to go much further:our fundamental goal is to render transparent the black-box of scientific research by affording all individuals an opportunity to both access and participate directly in the scientific research process. To achieve this goal, we are working toward developing an entirely research-based scientific curriculum, and three additional resources (the discussion forum, research microfinance platform, and research log platform) which shall function to dynamically feed information to this curriculum - thereby ensuring the accuracy of the information contained within it, and its ability to maintain par with the course of scientific research.
In addition, each of these resources will also serve to increase the accessibility of the scientific research process for non-researchers by allowing individuals to (1) directly invest in research projects (via the research microfinance platform), (2) pose questions directly to researchers working at the cutting edge of scientific research (via the discussion forum), and (3) observe the progress of ongoing publicly-funded research (via the research log platform).
Not quite sure how this will scale, but anything whose "fundamental goal" is "to render transparent the black-box of scientific research" sounds good to me.
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I've written much about open access on this blog; but generally that's been about open access to articles in academic journals. Another huge class of material paid for by the taxpayer is academic books. So, applying the same logic as for articles, shouldn't we all have free access to digital copies? That's what Free Our Books thinks:Public funds pay vast majority of the academic research; the results should therefore be public. Inexpensive electronic publishing should make this possible. But private publishing companies still own these results, and restrict access to them by charging exorbitant fees. In the case of academic journals, publishing companies are making huge profits by requiring publicly funded universities to pay very high subscription fees on behalf of students and academics.
We, the citizens, through the state, pay for the production of academic books and research papers twice, first through salaries and research grants, and second through the purchase of books and journal subscriptions. This is how the the most fundamental principles of academia, to study and to share its findings, are obstructed, and its operation is made far more expensive and cumbersome. Good news is that this has been partially recognised and Research Councils UK (RCUK) has pushed hard (2005) in the direction of both mandatory self archiving (2006) of all research outputs and open access in general.
When it comes to books, the argument, however, isn't as simple and as straight forwad as in the case of Guardian's campaign Free Our Data - whose name we're reusing. Nor has it been problematised widely, like it has been in the case of journals and RCUK recommendations. Significant contribution of editors, subeditors, proofreaders and other working on texts being produced (wages) and personal gain of authors of best selling works (share of sales) complicates the issue. In short, open access and self-archiving of publicly funded books, whose importance for social sciences and humanities is enormous (unlike in physics and maths) is yet to be widely discussed and there aren't immidiately obvious solutions visible. That is, unless we treat books, as we think we should, as just another form of research output - both when funded directly by one of RCUK councils, or by the individual universities.
(Via Open Access News.)
One of the persistent myths peddled by lovers of intellectual monopolies is that you need things like patents to promote innovation. The idea is that patents encourage new research, which then feeds into more research, and the world is a better place.
Not so, according to some rigorous new research into the effects of intellectual monopolies on science:Scientific freedom and openness are hallmarks of academia: relative to their counterparts in industry, academics maintain discretion over their research agenda and allow others to build on their discoveries. This paper examines the relationship between openness and freedom, building on recent models emphasizing that, from an economic perspective, freedom is the granting of control rights to researchers. Within this framework, openness of upstream research does not simply encourage higher levels of downstream exploitation. It also raises the incentives for additional upstream research by encouraging the establishment of entirely new research directions. In other words, within academia, restrictions on scientific openness (such as those created by formal intellectual property (IP)) may limit the diversity and experimentation of basic research itself. We test this hypothesis by examining a “natural experiment” in openness within the academic community: NIH agreements during the late 1990s that circumscribed IP restrictions for academics regarding certain genetically engineered mice. Using a sample of engineered mice that are linked to specific scientific papers (some affected by the NIH agreements and some not), we implement a differences-in-differences estimator to evaluate how the level and type of follow-on research using these mice changes after the NIH-induced increase in openness. We find a significant increase in the level of follow-on research. Moreover, this increase is driven by a substantial increase in the rate of exploration of more diverse research paths. Overall, our findings highlight a neglected cost of IP: reductions in the diversity of experimentation that follows from a single idea.
This work basically shows that recent attempts to introduce intellectual monopolies into science in order to "promote innovation" have actually been counter-productive. our results offer direct evidence that scientific openness seems to be associated with the establishment of entirely new research lines: more specifically, increased openness leads to a significant increase in the diversity of the journals in which mouse-articles in the treatment group are cited, and, perhaps even more strikingly, a very significant increase in the number of previously unused “keywords” describing the underlying research contributions of the citing articles.
In this context at least, it's openness that leads to more innovation, not its polar opposite. (Via Open Access News.)
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Interesting figures from new research:Marrakesh Records and Human Capital surveyed 1,000 15 to 24-year-olds highlighting not just how important music is to young people, but their changing attitudes to paying for content. 70 percent said they don't feel guilty for illegally downloading music from the internet. 61 percent feel they shouldn't have to pay for music. And around 43 percent of the music owned by this age group has not been paid for, increasing to 49 percent for the younger half of the group.
But the battle to get them to pay for music has not been lost entirely:
This age group felt £6.58 is a fair price for CD album, but that a downloaded album should be just £3.91 and a single 39p - almost half the price charged by Apple's iTunes Store.
Clearly, if the music industry wants to stand any chance of retaining people's willingness to pay for content, it had better move its prices down to this level pretty sharply. If they don't, it's not hard to predict what will happen the next time they carry out this research.
Despite the fact that South Africa is at the forefront of open source usage, it seems to be taking a very bad turn as far as open knowledge is concerned:The Intellectual Property from Publicly Financed Research Bill was signed into law yesterday.
This stems from a mistaken belief that:the best way to get research re-used for the benefit of the economy is to lock it down, and award a monopoly to one person, rather than opening it to everyone.
This could set South African research back seriously.
More info is always good, especially when it's about open source. So here's what sounds a worthy endeavour:My name is Zbigniew Braniecki and I'm a sociology student at Leon Koźmiński Academy in Warsaw.
The goal of this survey is to extend our knowledge about nature of volunteer participation in the Internet open communities. To learn why people participate and what keeps them going.
It will allow us to better understand how open communities (should) work and who the people building them are.
The survey is made of two parts, socio and psychological. It will be most helpful if you make it to the end.
The whole survey will take you no more than 12 minutes to complete.
Thank you for your help. The results will be publicly available on the Interent.
It's amazing where open source may lurk. Who would have thought that the mobile giant Vodafone had a page devoted to the subject? And yet it does. (Via Dana Blankenhorn.)
One of the winners of the the 2007 essay contest on "Equitable access: research challenges for health in developing countries" is the following passionate diatribe against the murderous inequity of patents:The usual, if untenable, reason for granting patent monopolies is that excess revenue is spent on research for new drugs and that this stimulates further research and leads to more innovations. On the contrary, there is hardly any pharmaceutical company that spends more than 15% of its annual revenue on research. The rest goes to other things: advertising, marketing, lobbying, etc. Their research on diseases found in developing countries has always been insufficient. New drugs for the treatment of tropical diseases are rare and far between, and are often not the result of pharmaceutical industry research. Research is expensive and requires lots of money, no doubt. It takes resources to generate innovation. However, maintaining pharmaceutical patents is even more expensive. Like Belding Scribner’s shunt, innovation must address needs and reach the people who have those needs; otherwise it is not innovation.
What we need is a paradigm shift, a new way of organizing, promoting and financing research and innovation, one that would ensure an intercontinental balance of interests and research priorities.
(Via Open Access News.)
Well, after yesterday's post about a paper drawing fascinating parallels between today's patent trolls and yesteryear's patent sharks, here's another zinger from academia, one of whose authors has just won this year's Nobel-ish prize for Economics. And look what it says:the software industry in the United States was subjected to a revealing natural experiment in the 1980’s. Through a sequence of court decisions, patent protection for computer programs was significantly strengthened. We will show that, far from unleashing a flurry of new innovative activity, these stronger property rights ushered in a period of stagnant, if not declining, R&D among those industries and firms that patented most.
We maintain, furthermore, that there was nothing paradoxical about this outcome. For industries like software or computers, there is actually good reason to believe that imitation promotes innovation and that strong patents (long patents of broad scope) inhibit it. Society might be well served if such industries had only limited intellectual property protection. Moreover, many firms might genuinely welcome competition and the prospect of being imitated.
What's interesting about this - aside from the fact that a respected economist is arguing against patents for industries like software, and using maths to prove it - is that the whole idea of welcoming competition so that everyone can build on the communal advances is incredibly close to the underlying dynamic of open source, which gets better much faster because it can always draw on the work of others.
So essentially the result of the paper is that industries like software work better (a) without patents and (b) when they operate according to the open source development model. Imagine. (Via Slashdot.)
The EU is at it again:An EU-funded consortium will address one of the perceived barriers for the adoption of open source software and prove once and for all that software which is free and publishes its source code, is capable of outperforming anything else on the market. ‘Flossquality.eu’ is an initiative made up of the three EU research projects: QUALOSS, FLOSSMETRICS and SQO-OSS, demonstrating a strong commitment between partners involved in different projects. The intention is that this initiative will facilitate access to information by disseminating news via a joint RSS feed. ‘Flossquality.eu’ will transform the cooperative way of working between these corresponding projects into hard evidence regarding software quality in an open source.
So there we have it - whatever it is. Still, spending all these Euros on something to do with open source must be a good thing. Probably.
It's happening, slowly:Novartis, the Basel, Switzerland, drug giant, has helped uncover which of the 20,000 genes identified by the Human Genome Project are likely to be associated with diabetes. But rather than hoard this information, as drug firms have traditionally done, it is making it available for free on the World Wide Web.
"It will take the entire world to interpret these data," says Novartis research head Mark Fishman. "We figure we will benefit more by having a lot of companies look at these data than by holding it secret."
The data and more information is available from the Diabetics Genetics Initiative site at the Broad Institute. (Via Slashdot.)
So, the Royal Society has spent three years putting together a study into the "best practice in communicating the results of new scientific research to the public," and come up with 24 pages of patronising, anachronistic codswallop.
At a time when the prospect of making a large chunk of all human knowledge freely available online is at least feasible (even if there are massive forces of reaction ranged against it - but then I do like a challenge), their Royal Socships can think of nothing better than fretting over whether scientific research is the kind of stuff 'you would wish your wife or servants to read'. As if there were any choice in the matter in the age of the Internet.
The result of those three years of deep cogitation boils down to deciding, well, we'll just keep all this tricky science stuff to ourselves, eh?, and maybe feed a few crumbs to those press johnnies from time to time to keep the public quiet. After all, just because the hoi polloi paid for most of it, doesn't give them any right to see the damn results, oh no. Now, do pass the port - clockwise, mind.
One indication of Microsoft's inability to handle the threat of the free software model is that fact that it keeps changing its strategy.
Back in 1999, it tried to show that Windows was more powerful than comparable GNU/Linux systems. It commissioned some research from a company called Mindcraft, which showed that Windows was indeed faster for many tasks. There were bitter arguments about the validity of these tests and their results, and several re-runs as each side tried to bolster its own position.
But what is interesting about this episode is that the weaknesses that were exposed in the GNU/Linux system were simply fed into the development process and fixed in the next release. This indicates one of the great strengths of open source. Solving problems is just a matter of skill; what is hard is pinning them down in the first place. Ironically, Microsoft did the Linux community a huge favour by spending lots of money finding the weak areas of its rival, which were then fixed.
Since GNU/Linux was soon manifestly as good as Windows in terms of performance, Microsoft was forced to change tack. In June 2001, Steve Ballmer famously told the Chicago Sun-Times that "Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches". However, the business world was clearly less impressed by Ballmer's verbal tantrums than the his sales teams, and the outburst backfired badly. It merely showed Microsoft to be running scared.
More recently, the company has apparently adopted a more conciliatory attitude to the free software world - a recognition of the fact that its customers are using it. But clearly, in closed rooms around the company, it is still searching desperately for something it can against open source.
One emerging tack was evident in a fascinating article that appeared in a magazine aimed at Microsoft Certified Professionals. In it, there was a glimpse into how the Microsoft world views the free software threat. Of particular note is the assertion that "Microsoft invests north of $6 billion a year on R&D", and that "nobody in the Linux world" does anything comparable. The implication would seem to be that Microsoft is therefore a hotbed of creativity and innovation, whereas all free software can do is limp along with tired old tricks.
An extensive and thorough debunking of this assertion came from D C Parris in LXer. All the points he raises are good ones, but I'd like to focus on one in particular.
The statement that Microsoft is serious spending sums on research is true: you only have to look at Microsoft's Research division to see the wide range of work going on. Moreover, to Microsoft' credit, much of this work is made freely available in the form of published papers.
But the second part of the argument - that open source companies taken together spend nowhere near as much as Microsoft - is specious. The whole point about free software is that it represents the communal efforts of thousands of people around the world, most of whom receive no remuneration for their work. Indeed, money probably couldn't even buy the kind of obsessive attention to detail they routinely provide: it comes from passion not payment.
The new argument that the quotation from the above article is putting about comes down to this: that something given freely is worth nothing. In a way, this is the fundamental error that those who do not understand the open world make. In fact, the issue is much larger, and goes to the root of most of the key problems facing the world today. Which is why the "opens" - open source, open genomics, open content and all the cognate approaches - are so crucial: they lie at the heart of solving those same problems.
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