Does this law allow the government to break copyright owned by the paywalled distributors? Because many of them simply require submitters to transfer all copyrights of the articles to them.
The way this is currently handled is that when an author identifies that their article is funded by the NIH, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute or some others, it is automatically flagged to become public access in a year. Several of my own articles that were behind paywalls are now open access under said system.
Free access and copyright transfer aren't necessarily in opposition.
"Deep inside the $1.1 trillion Consolidated Appropriations Act for 2014 is a provision that requires federal agencies under the Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education portion of the bill with research budgets of $100 million or more..."
Restricting the law to only those three government departments excludes a lot of agencies with huge research budgets: the National Science Foundation (with a 7 billion dollar annual budget[1]), the Department of Energy, the Department of Defense, NASA, the Department of Transportation, the Department of Agriculture, etc.
In fact, the research published by the Department of Labor and the Department of Education probably has little value to the private sector compared to the research done by the departments that I listed.
Publishers provide cock-waving value. That is, most academics are concerned with advancing their careers (or lack of), and well-established journals are still a big thing for the people running the institutions.
The physical medium is long gone, but for format is still the same - essentially non-interactive PDFs which emulate the paper.
> The physical medium is long gone, but for format is still the same - essentially non-interactive PDFs which emulate the paper.
A surprising number of academics, including young academics (and myself) print out PDFs of papers. Most papers I actually use in my research end up with highlighter marks, different sections circled, annotations and notes to myself in the margins, etc.
Paper will probably still be used for as long as it is more convenient - as long as the software and hardware isn't as readily available to do what you need with the same ease. I've gotten used to using Okular with a graphics tablet for highlighting and annotations, but the biggest benefit of electronic copies is organization.
First, as I noted in a lower comment, the physical mediums aren't long gone.
Second, Publishers provide some value - they aggregate editors and peer reviewers, they provide copy editing and layout services, and yes, they produce actual physical copies of the journals.
These could be provided by other means, but most of those involve more work for the researcher. And after reading a vast swath of LaTeX layout papers, I value their layout services if nothing else.
Third, you seem to be assuming new companies aren't "disrupting the space". PLoS has been doing so for years, and PeerJ and eLife are picking up steam.
Well by physical mediums I meant distribution. If you print out PDFs, then that's exactly my point- it seems less necessary to deliver a bound magazine every month.
I confess for the three journals I read most frequently, I also get paper copies delivered, because I find I browse and have ideas cross pollinate better that way.
Reputation management. The first thing anyone will do when they see a paper is check what journal it came in to see if it's worth reading.
Any disruption would have to come from within academia, and it is coming because libraries simply cannot afford subscription packages any longer, especially packages from commercial publishers. Journals from scientific societies are less outrageously priced, although they are still bad.
When is the taxpayer going to be given the right to use inventions funded with their own money?
It's pretty terrible that some academic can take public money to fund his research, then take out a patent on the result and prevent his financiers from using an 'invention'.
Actually, the most stupid part about the whole thing it is that the government gets some rights to use these publicly-funded patented inventions. (As if the government, not the taxpayer funded it)
It is not as simple/obvious as you may think it is. It depends on what the goals of the govt are. If the govt is trying to encourage progress on cancer drugs, they can certainly give grants to stimulate that research direction. If the govt said if you get even 1 cent of grant money from us, you can't patent your drug. Well .. few researchers will take that money. The govt can of course fund a new lab that does cancer research. It can choose to make all IP that comes out of this lab public. I think in the former case, there is a bigger multiplier effect/leverage from the same amount of money (without the IP restriction).
You need to realize that IP is an artificial monopoly granted by the govt for a purpose.
I don't think that the OP doesn't understand what "intellectual property" is, they just disagree with the assessment that it's necessary (or maybe proper) for the government to grant private monopolies on scientific knowledge.
You need to realize that people can know what IP is and still disagree with you.
Maybe the OP understands what "IP" is, but it seems they do not understand the economics of research or why IP is still applicable to publicly funded research.
If one knows the concept of IP but not why it's needed in these situations, one is still arguing from a position of incomplete understanding.
I understand IP very well, and I disagree with the whole concept.
Here I'm just making a point at how stupid the system actually is. As I stated, the government gets rights to use patents funded by taxpayer money, but the taxpayer has no such rights. The government here is actually nothing but a mediator of funds from taxpayer to researcher, yet it acts as if it paid for the research out of it's own pocket.
"If the govt said if you get even 1 cent of grant money from us, you can't patent your drug. Well .. few researchers will take that money."
And why is that a bad thing? If they have an idea that they think they can make a lot of money by patenting, they're going to do that research anyway with non-government funding (e.g., start a company and raise venture capital). So why waste taxpayer money funding it? Better for the government to fund something like basic scientific research that's not patentable (and on which applied research depends).
The viewpoint "if the govt pays for it, it should be free" ... doesn't sound right to me. Let me offer why. This is equivalent to saying, if you raise VC funding, the VCs should get all the wealth you create since they put up the money.
A VC can choose who they fund and under what terms - most importantly, they can choose not to fund something. The same isn't true for taxpayer funded research - it's money that government has forcibly taken from people to fund some arbitrary research in which the taxpayer has no say whatsoever.
I was with you until you said "arbitrary research in which the taxpayer has no say whatsoever". The people on the NIH/NSF/whatnot panels are as a rule very aware of their duty towards the taxpayer and do their best to allocate the scarce funds to whoever deserves them most.
The taxpayer had no say in whether he wanted his money stolen so that some other guys can decide who can waste much of it. I was making it clear that this is nothing like a VC model, which is voluntary. If we were to make the comparison, it would be that people could chose themselves what research, if any, to fund.
The issue with panels allocating taxpayer money, is that their interest is still in government. That is, they will fund research in which government has an interest or is neutral, and consequently, any research which is potentially harmful to government is scrapped (even if it would be beneficial to the taxpayer.)
One might not think there's a distinction between what benefits the government and what benefits the taxpayer if one believes in the fairy tale that governments exist to benefit the people.
The people on the NIH/NSF/whatnot panels are as a rule very aware of their duty towards the taxpayer and do their best to allocate the scarce funds to whoever deserves them most.
Really? Am I really reading this?
Were the panels doing their duty when they awarded Felisa Wolfe-Simon her grant? Was the panel doing their duty when Leo Paquette, sitting on one, kaiboshed a young researcher's grant and stole the idea for himself? How about the panel that awarded a grant to Geoffrey Chang, in spite of having six retractions due to careless (and quite frankly stupid) crystallography? Is he really "someone who deserves it the most"? This is just the tip of the iceberg. I could list about 20 more off the top of my head.
I would go so far as to say as a rule they do not allocate scarce funds to whomever deserves them the most.
There are a lot of misconceptions about research in your questions, but suffice to say that in most research, the vast majority of "ideas" don't pan out. In fact, a lot of research is so risky that no entity short of the government will invest in it. That may seem like a "waste of taxpayer money", but without taking a very long view, truly groundbreaking advances won't come about.
>In fact, a lot of research is so risky that no entity short of the government will invest in it.
Government is actually incredibly bad at funding risky research because in the end it is accountable and needs to show some level of result. Even the moonshot had concrete goals and mileposts that needed to be met or else the whole thing was called off.
Meanwhile, there's this crazy guy who discovered something incredibly risky that many of his peers didn't believe was true and did it outside of the government:
I never said "all important discoveries come from the government". The Polio vaccine and penicillin and the theory of evolution and the last Nobel Prize for Graphene and a bunch of other things came out of non-government funded research.
That has no bearing on the fact that most of the biggest advances cannot be had without significant long term investment without guaranteed outcomes that most private investors are extremely unlikely to fund. I mean, have you seen the sort of research proposals professors write that actually get grants from the NSF?
Beyond things like DARPA and NSF and the like, think of things like the various National Labs. Nobody's winning Nobel Prizes every year at these labs, but year after year they do work that pushes the boundaries of human knowledge to enable future discoveries.
You're conflating Private with 'for-profit'. Private includes entities that are nonprofits, like Janelia Farms, or, in the case of Mitchell, Glyn Research Ltd. American Cancer Society, American Heart Society etc. also give out very interesting long-term, high risk grants.
Yes, I have seen some of the shit that professors write for the NSF, and I'd rather they not be using taxpayer money to fund their intellectual masturbations, or hiking trips to the rainforest, or scuba diving expeditions (among other travesties).
"If the govt said if you get even 1 cent of grant money from us, you can't patent your drug. Well .. few researchers will take that money"
I doubt that -- researchers do not have many sources of funding available to them. Grant money basically dictates the direction of research in the majority of fields. Grants come with all kinds of annoying strings attached (in grad school, I was once paid from a grant that specifically forbade us from purchasing desktops or laptops; we could, however, purchase rack mounted servers) and researchers still take them.
What you need to understand is that researchers are usually more interested in padding their CVs than in getting patent rights. A professor trying to get tenure needs to bring in grant money, publish papers, and graduate some PhD students (who in turn need to be publish papers, etc.). There is not much room for turning down funding, just like there is not much room for pursuing lines of work that the government is not willing to fund.
The short explanation goes like this: before Bayh-Dole patent rights were indeed with the federal government, but the Government did a rather poor job of turning the accumulated IP into money. Bayh-Dole was passed in the late Seventies, during the Carter-Reagan recession, and the idea was that the patents should now lie with researchers and universities because they would have a better idea how to exploit them, and it was unsaid that with this alternative funding channel open federal research expenditures could be reduced.
The long version is that it is really complicated. A whole new ecosystem has grown up around this environment, and the patent system as is is very suitable for actual commercial processes but not at all for basic methods used in processes.
You can argue that anything done at a university was done with university facilities (and certainly by the individual researchers). You can also look at it from the angle of efficiency (which way of commercializing a university's research is the best way of doing more research there). Congress did both, and they came up with Bayh-Dole.
I'm not saying that this is the best environment, but it is the environment that we have, and these arguments are not outrageous. Besides, this is the environment that biotech startup are coming from, and top universities are making big dollars from royalties. That's why I said that it's really complicated.
Universities charge the government for use of their facilities. It is an overhead rate often of 60+% on top of the costs of paying researchers, buying lab supplies, etc. Frequently there is triple dipping, where a university gets a grant for a piece of equipment, charges the grants directly for use of that equipment, then also claims they need to be paid in the overhead for making the equipment available. Anyone familiar with the finances sees it as ridiculous.
From my (albeit limited) experience in two large state universities, one of which with a direct focus on research, and two much smaller local colleges, your statement is a bit inflammatory, and isn't 100% accurate.
All grants are allowed to charge indirect costs to the grant fund. These indirect costs are used to cover the cost of facilities, maintenance and all the little bits that no one ever thinks about. No one buys a piece of equipment expecting there to be no maintenance whatsoever. These indirect costs are always governed by an agreed-upon rate set between the host institution and the funding entity. The federal government in particular has very clearly spelled out rules regarding this. For example - the grant that funds my work right now has a very clearly legislated indirect cost rate of 8%. If our indirect costs exceed that 8% monthly, we can lose our funding.
Now where we get into the part where you're not 100% accurate, and I believe being a bit inflammatory is the triple dipping. Institutions can get a grant to purchase equipment, and then charge the same grant for the use of the equipment. The institution can charge for the personnel hours that run the equipment on related projects, they can charge that indirect cost that we discussed earlier, but that's about it. It's not as if they can just make up a number and charge the government that much to use the equipment for related projects. There are circulars from the Office of Management and Budget that dictate what you can and can't do with your money - for example, colleges and universities have to adhere to the cost principles outlined in OMB A-21, available here: http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/circulars_a021_2004 if you want some light reading.
On top of the basic OMB circulars, all federal grants have additional legislation that add further stipulations to how money can be spent, but come from any number of 1000 sources, so I'm not going to cite them. Anyway, the institution cannot just charge the government for use of the equipment.
Secondly - they are not paid 'overhead' for making the equipment available. They are paid an indirect cost rate to maintain, store and generally keep the facility running for grants. This rate is very clearly spelled out in any grant documents. I've not seen 60+% in any grant I've ever worked with. In smaller institutions they tend to be around 10-20%. On the larger campuses, the average indirect rate was 32%.
Anyone familiar with the finances know that there are legislation and regulation in place to dictate all of this, and while it may be convoluted, it's really not as predatory as you make it out to be.
> I've not seen 60+% in any grant I've ever worked with. In smaller institutions they tend to be around 10-20%. On the larger campuses, the average indirect rate was 32%.
I run a company that has won many Federal grants and subcontracted a lot of work to universities in the Boston and Cambridge area.
Let's look at the current indirect rates for universities I've worked with:
1) Harvard: up to 69.5% for Federally funded research [1]
2) MIT: currently 56%, but in 2010, it was 68% [2]
3) Boston University: 63.7% [3]
4) Northeastern University: 54.5% [4]
60% as an average is much closer to what I see than 32%. The Boston Globe says the national average is 52% [5].
P.S. On a tip from a friend, I'll add that MGH's indirect rate is 74% [6]
You've seen how well our patent system works. If the findings were not patented by somebody, Big Corp. would just download the whitepaper, print it, submit it to the patent office and get the patent.
So let's say I discover a potentially groundbreaking new pathway that can be exploited by a new drug candidate to attack a major disease. Now who is going to go put in $350 million to get that drug candidate through PhI/II/III and beyond, with little guarantee of success, if they have no IP protection to stand on? Why would any rational investor fund such an endeavor when anyone else can step in once all the hard work (averaging $5 billion per successful drug) is done and reap the rewards?
This is indeed the scenario in drug development. Academic research can only take it so far. Someone then has to assume financial risk and bring academic findings to the clinic.
True, but what is the fundamental problem in allowing academics to patent their drug development research? Without a system like that drugs like Lyrica wouldn't exist.
Come on you can't compare web development to drug development. Ditto with the guy talking about polio. With the current regulatory landscape we need patent protection to incentivize anyone entering this industry. And even then you have CEOs of major biotech firms calling startups a delusional risk given the low probability of success.
Patenting is unneccessary. It also causes a lot of problems like siloization and reduplication of effort, which adds to the cost of drug R&D. The structure of the academic-science-industry complex has become so distorted that I'm not sure CEOs of biotech firms are the most competent people to be developing drugs. Ask any PhD (even those who are in the industry) about what they think of how pharma picks what to put into their pipelines, and you will nearly unanimously get a dispirited answer that is some combination of herd behavior, lack of creativity, legal departments, CYA, and just plain dumb business management.
An example: Pfizer closed down their Lansing michigan plant and wanted to force their employees to relocate to San Diego, without doing a real analysis of the decision, and on the eve of the move came to find out that the one person running their fermenter culture system didn't want to move - he wanted to raise his daughters on a farm and San Diego was too expensive for his pay grade. So they lost the ability to basically do every bioassay that they were doing in Lansing. Three years later, I had the opportunity to work next to the massive san diego pfizer campus. The facility was 2/3 empty and pfizer was struggling to find extra tenants and toying with a 'bio-incubator' idea.
I'm sure we could agree on how the system is fucked, but where is the alternative? Fact is, people in this thread who are railing against academics holding patents don't seem to get how the system is built in the first place. If they do, they should be proposing alternatives, not just scoring cheap political points against Big Pharma and Big Academia.
you don't need to 'propose alternatives'. You just do it. Make a drug. Don't patent it. Get it approved. Sell it. I mean, this is what I'm working on (see the damn link). Is that good enough?
That was a bit of a simpler time, approval-wise. After animal tests Salk first tested the polio vaccine on himself, then on his wife and children. Soon thereafter he tested on a group of children from the Polk State School for the retarded and feeble-minded. Then he lobbied for permission to do mass tests.
So, a few things:
1. this testing environment would not fly today, as it should not have then. Testing on children who may not have the ability to give informed consent is unethical.
2. polio was the most dreaded disease in America, for many reasons. More people contributed to the development of a treatment--through the March of Dimes--than for any other disease up to that time. Even though the vaccine was feared and widely known, the mass tests were fiercely opposed by some. When the positive results of the test were announced, the nation treated the news much like the end of a war with exultation, presidential awards, and ticker-tape parades.
3. the polio vaccine was relatively safe and straightforward, as killed vaccines generally are. The killed vaccine was first tested in culture to make sure it was dead. Unlike many other pharmaceuticals, where the effectiveness even after a test can be murky and side-effects abound, a killed vaccine is relatively easy to understand. Testing a drug that may lessen the impact of a particular type of cancer is considerably harder, both in itself and because of today's protective regulations.
4. the polio vaccine was developed by a very small team run by a zealot. The resources required were considerably less than the resources required to develop other drugs. Look at the development of the sulfa drugs for a counter-example: Bayer delayed their widespread release even after they had concluded they were effective and patented them because they wanted to make sure their patent was valid (source: "The Demon Under the Microscope", by Hager.) Bayer had spent a lot of time and money developing the drugs and wanted to make sure they got a return. (Ironically, it was quickly realized that the patented sulfa drugs were in fact a combination of active and inactive parts and the active parts could not be patented; and soon after penicillin was introduced, sidelining the sulfa drugs. It's a fascinating story, well worth the read.)
Source for info about Salk: the excellent "Splendid Solution: Jonas Salk and the Conquest of Polio" by Kluger.
Note how I used the plural vaccines. Sabin's vaccine was also unpatented.
Also your objection "Testing on children who may not have the ability to give informed consent is unethical." is nonsense. Polio is a fundamentally childhood disease. Not developing a drug that saves children (but not adults) because children cannot give 'informed consent' is unethical, too. If you think there aren't childhood diseases that we are trying to cure in the contemporary era, you are crazy.
And he did all of his initial human testing outside of the US--mainly in the USSR and Eastern Europe. I think the idea that the cost of testing has changed is still valid.
What I meant--but articulated poorly--was that the children selected for the tests were from a school for the differently abled because they were, at the time, seen as less valuable. That idea is no longer acceptable.
"Now who is going to go put in $350 million to get that drug candidate through PhI/II/III and beyond, with little guarantee of success, if they have no IP protection to stand on?"
You, as the final stage of your research, using government money.
What most people are missing here is that government money only gets you as far as the discovery, and that's if you're lucky enough to, you know, discover something. More likely, you run out of money with nothing to show. I have no cites handy, but the success rate of drug R&D is pretty darn low.
Say you do get something. Now you want the government to also be involved in the commercialization of the discovery? I think people would argue they are already involved enough, what with the FDA and all.
Further: the person making the discovery spent half a decade of their lives after college to get a PhD, and very likely many years of post-doc, to be extremely specialized in an extremely narrow area of some field. Now you want them to be product managers and manufacturers and businessmen as well?
This is one problem patents solve: Division of labor. Let those who are good at science and technology do their thing, and let people who are good at commercializing do their thing, and let IP ensure one both sides have means to reap appropriate rewards.
The point is sending the patent into the public domain so anyone can exploit it. You could argue that the monopoly of the patent creates an incentive to monetize it. I am skeptical of that, but if it's true, then the government could auction the patent instead and at the very least recoup some of their money from it. If no one wants to buy it, then it can go into the public domain.
I tend to agree, but you could argue that as US taxpayers are paying for the research it would be stupid/unethical/incorrect not to maximise any potential profit from its results.
(Note: I'm not a US citizen, I'm British. s/US/UK/ and the basic result is the same...)
>It's pretty terrible that some academic can take public money to fund his research, then take out a patent on the result and prevent his financiers from using an 'invention'.
Wouldn't that mean that researchers would be less motivated ?
No, it means motivation would come from elsewhere, we're -as a society- just sinking further and further into a mindset where money is the one and only way for anything to get done. Sickening.
The hammer was invented in spite of the fact it was impossible to control the proliferation of its design.
Many researchers aren't businessmen, the simply want to scratch an itch, and not want to work tedious day jobs. If they can make a living while doing something they enjoy, all is great.
Except that very rarely does wanting to scratch an itch coincide with obtaining funds to do so. As a result, the researcher needs to make concessions to his own research goals, or the quality of it, in order to convince people who don't understand it that it has some value, in order to finance it. If not, they're gonna be stuck researching something they have little or no interest in, or back to the day job. This is the real motivation killer.
It's a complex situation, as other posters have noted.
Here's another complication. Often, faculty need multiple sources of funding over the years to support their research, including federal grants, university support (direct through money or indirect through facilities and staff), and industrial support through gifts and grants. As well, the intellectual heavy-lifting is done by the faculty and their students.
If you believe in intellectual property rights, then who of all of these stakeholders deserves ownership of those rights?
Personally, I lean against faculty patenting their inventions. I'd rather the IP is open to the public. Even if a faculty member wants to commercialize their research, I think they are better off competing in the marketplace rather than through IP arsenals.
But, I understand the other point of view. Patent licensing is a lucrative source of revenue for universities (e.g., UFL and its Gatorade revenue) and inventors. As well, it's at least uncomfortable and perhaps unfair if opportunistic companies were able to commercialize on a faculty member's invention without renumeration or attribution.
I agree with some of your sentiment, but you shouldn't blame the academics. There are many academics who are no longer allowed to use things they invented them because the patent goes to the university.
As a well-known example, John Pople wrote a program called Gaussian while at Carnegie Mellon. Carnegie Mellon licensed the program to Gaussian Inc. When John Pople moved to Northwestern, he was banned from using the program he wrote, as was all of Northwestern University. Before the passage of Bayh-Dole, Gaussian was given out for free by Carnegie Mellon. Once Bayh-Dole gave them clear rights in the code, everything changed.
You think that is bad? There is a whole class of small company that all they do is apply for government development grants and contracts which amount to funding to develop IP which otherwise wouldn't exist. The company then gets to keep all the IP they developed on the governments dime and if they made anything worthwhile sell it to the government at exorbitant prices.
I hope PACER follows suit soon. We are paying under the guise of the government having the burden of being the sole provider when it could very easily be distributively hosted with a verification system built-in. Doesn't eliminate all costs but that's never been the point. The point is to pay for costs that make sense.
The compromise that intellectual property strives for is to encourage innovation by rewarding inventors with time-limited exclusive rights in exchange for disclosure. The world gains the knowledge through the disclosure, the inventor gains the opportunity to commercialize and earn rewards through the advantage that time-limited exclusion gives them, and once the IP reverts to the public domain, everybody gets the chance to use the invention.
But, factors like patent sharking, the ridiculous extension of copyright terms, the inability of patent offices to properly assess issues like novelty and obviousness, and so on, make it possible for all parties to abuse this compromise.
I think the spirit of the compromise is valid. I think its implementation today has become flawed, but not irreparably so.
I guess you'll just have to wait until someone else works out the details. Soon you will discover that not much is going to get done sitting on your hands waiting for everyone else to do the work.
Yes! Very good news, and it's only the start. We need to keep pushing for more top-quality open access journals, open access to data sets, and open access to scientific software.
I try my best to stick to this myself, and I've open-sourced all my PhD research code for the exact reason that I know that it's non-negotiable, given that public funding has enabled me to pursue something I love and further science as a result.
I'm all for this, and I've even brainstormed ways with a few others in my field of actually trying to put together a community-based, peer-review system that makes use of arxiv.org.
Terrible headline, as almost all taxpayer funded research is already available to the public.
This is about making it more conveniently available. Currently, you might have to go through a paywall for online access, or visit a library for free access. This should make much of it available online at no cost.
Actually, a lot more than most people realize is fairly easily available online (with publisher permission) for cheap via DeepDyve [1], including from publishers that we normally think of as being very expensive.
Here's a page at DeepDyve that lets you browse by subject, journal, or publisher [2], which should give a good idea of what they have available.
Not as nice as open access, of course, but still pretty useful.
78 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 178 ms ] threadFree access and copyright transfer aren't necessarily in opposition.
"Deep inside the $1.1 trillion Consolidated Appropriations Act for 2014 is a provision that requires federal agencies under the Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education portion of the bill with research budgets of $100 million or more..."
Restricting the law to only those three government departments excludes a lot of agencies with huge research budgets: the National Science Foundation (with a 7 billion dollar annual budget[1]), the Department of Energy, the Department of Defense, NASA, the Department of Transportation, the Department of Agriculture, etc.
In fact, the research published by the Department of Labor and the Department of Education probably has little value to the private sector compared to the research done by the departments that I listed.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Science_Foundation
/sarcasm
The physical medium is long gone, but for format is still the same - essentially non-interactive PDFs which emulate the paper.
A surprising number of academics, including young academics (and myself) print out PDFs of papers. Most papers I actually use in my research end up with highlighter marks, different sections circled, annotations and notes to myself in the margins, etc.
Second, Publishers provide some value - they aggregate editors and peer reviewers, they provide copy editing and layout services, and yes, they produce actual physical copies of the journals.
These could be provided by other means, but most of those involve more work for the researcher. And after reading a vast swath of LaTeX layout papers, I value their layout services if nothing else.
Third, you seem to be assuming new companies aren't "disrupting the space". PLoS has been doing so for years, and PeerJ and eLife are picking up steam.
But I understand your other two points.
Any disruption would have to come from within academia, and it is coming because libraries simply cannot afford subscription packages any longer, especially packages from commercial publishers. Journals from scientific societies are less outrageously priced, although they are still bad.
It's pretty terrible that some academic can take public money to fund his research, then take out a patent on the result and prevent his financiers from using an 'invention'.
Actually, the most stupid part about the whole thing it is that the government gets some rights to use these publicly-funded patented inventions. (As if the government, not the taxpayer funded it)
You need to realize that IP is an artificial monopoly granted by the govt for a purpose.
You need to realize that people can know what IP is and still disagree with you.
If one knows the concept of IP but not why it's needed in these situations, one is still arguing from a position of incomplete understanding.
Here I'm just making a point at how stupid the system actually is. As I stated, the government gets rights to use patents funded by taxpayer money, but the taxpayer has no such rights. The government here is actually nothing but a mediator of funds from taxpayer to researcher, yet it acts as if it paid for the research out of it's own pocket.
And why is that a bad thing? If they have an idea that they think they can make a lot of money by patenting, they're going to do that research anyway with non-government funding (e.g., start a company and raise venture capital). So why waste taxpayer money funding it? Better for the government to fund something like basic scientific research that's not patentable (and on which applied research depends).
The issue with panels allocating taxpayer money, is that their interest is still in government. That is, they will fund research in which government has an interest or is neutral, and consequently, any research which is potentially harmful to government is scrapped (even if it would be beneficial to the taxpayer.)
One might not think there's a distinction between what benefits the government and what benefits the taxpayer if one believes in the fairy tale that governments exist to benefit the people.
Really? Am I really reading this?
Were the panels doing their duty when they awarded Felisa Wolfe-Simon her grant? Was the panel doing their duty when Leo Paquette, sitting on one, kaiboshed a young researcher's grant and stole the idea for himself? How about the panel that awarded a grant to Geoffrey Chang, in spite of having six retractions due to careless (and quite frankly stupid) crystallography? Is he really "someone who deserves it the most"? This is just the tip of the iceberg. I could list about 20 more off the top of my head.
I would go so far as to say as a rule they do not allocate scarce funds to whomever deserves them the most.
Government is actually incredibly bad at funding risky research because in the end it is accountable and needs to show some level of result. Even the moonshot had concrete goals and mileposts that needed to be met or else the whole thing was called off.
Meanwhile, there's this crazy guy who discovered something incredibly risky that many of his peers didn't believe was true and did it outside of the government:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_D._Mitchell
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_D._Mitchell*
I never said "all important discoveries come from the government". The Polio vaccine and penicillin and the theory of evolution and the last Nobel Prize for Graphene and a bunch of other things came out of non-government funded research.
That has no bearing on the fact that most of the biggest advances cannot be had without significant long term investment without guaranteed outcomes that most private investors are extremely unlikely to fund. I mean, have you seen the sort of research proposals professors write that actually get grants from the NSF?
Beyond things like DARPA and NSF and the like, think of things like the various National Labs. Nobody's winning Nobel Prizes every year at these labs, but year after year they do work that pushes the boundaries of human knowledge to enable future discoveries.
Yes, I have seen some of the shit that professors write for the NSF, and I'd rather they not be using taxpayer money to fund their intellectual masturbations, or hiking trips to the rainforest, or scuba diving expeditions (among other travesties).
I doubt that -- researchers do not have many sources of funding available to them. Grant money basically dictates the direction of research in the majority of fields. Grants come with all kinds of annoying strings attached (in grad school, I was once paid from a grant that specifically forbade us from purchasing desktops or laptops; we could, however, purchase rack mounted servers) and researchers still take them.
What you need to understand is that researchers are usually more interested in padding their CVs than in getting patent rights. A professor trying to get tenure needs to bring in grant money, publish papers, and graduate some PhD students (who in turn need to be publish papers, etc.). There is not much room for turning down funding, just like there is not much room for pursuing lines of work that the government is not willing to fund.
The short explanation goes like this: before Bayh-Dole patent rights were indeed with the federal government, but the Government did a rather poor job of turning the accumulated IP into money. Bayh-Dole was passed in the late Seventies, during the Carter-Reagan recession, and the idea was that the patents should now lie with researchers and universities because they would have a better idea how to exploit them, and it was unsaid that with this alternative funding channel open federal research expenditures could be reduced.
The long version is that it is really complicated. A whole new ecosystem has grown up around this environment, and the patent system as is is very suitable for actual commercial processes but not at all for basic methods used in processes.
Also: Stanford v. Roche
I'm not saying that this is the best environment, but it is the environment that we have, and these arguments are not outrageous. Besides, this is the environment that biotech startup are coming from, and top universities are making big dollars from royalties. That's why I said that it's really complicated.
All grants are allowed to charge indirect costs to the grant fund. These indirect costs are used to cover the cost of facilities, maintenance and all the little bits that no one ever thinks about. No one buys a piece of equipment expecting there to be no maintenance whatsoever. These indirect costs are always governed by an agreed-upon rate set between the host institution and the funding entity. The federal government in particular has very clearly spelled out rules regarding this. For example - the grant that funds my work right now has a very clearly legislated indirect cost rate of 8%. If our indirect costs exceed that 8% monthly, we can lose our funding.
Now where we get into the part where you're not 100% accurate, and I believe being a bit inflammatory is the triple dipping. Institutions can get a grant to purchase equipment, and then charge the same grant for the use of the equipment. The institution can charge for the personnel hours that run the equipment on related projects, they can charge that indirect cost that we discussed earlier, but that's about it. It's not as if they can just make up a number and charge the government that much to use the equipment for related projects. There are circulars from the Office of Management and Budget that dictate what you can and can't do with your money - for example, colleges and universities have to adhere to the cost principles outlined in OMB A-21, available here: http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/circulars_a021_2004 if you want some light reading.
On top of the basic OMB circulars, all federal grants have additional legislation that add further stipulations to how money can be spent, but come from any number of 1000 sources, so I'm not going to cite them. Anyway, the institution cannot just charge the government for use of the equipment.
Secondly - they are not paid 'overhead' for making the equipment available. They are paid an indirect cost rate to maintain, store and generally keep the facility running for grants. This rate is very clearly spelled out in any grant documents. I've not seen 60+% in any grant I've ever worked with. In smaller institutions they tend to be around 10-20%. On the larger campuses, the average indirect rate was 32%.
Anyone familiar with the finances know that there are legislation and regulation in place to dictate all of this, and while it may be convoluted, it's really not as predatory as you make it out to be.
I run a company that has won many Federal grants and subcontracted a lot of work to universities in the Boston and Cambridge area.
Let's look at the current indirect rates for universities I've worked with:
1) Harvard: up to 69.5% for Federally funded research [1]
2) MIT: currently 56%, but in 2010, it was 68% [2]
3) Boston University: 63.7% [3]
4) Northeastern University: 54.5% [4]
60% as an average is much closer to what I see than 32%. The Boston Globe says the national average is 52% [5].
P.S. On a tip from a friend, I'll add that MGH's indirect rate is 74% [6]
[1] http://osp.fad.harvard.edu/content/fa-cost-rates-federal-spo...
[2] http://osp.mit.edu/rates/facilities-and-administrative-fa-ra...
[3] http://www.bu.edu/osp/files/2012/03/RateAgreement22Feb2013.p...
[4] http://www.northeastern.edu/research/raf/files/Indirect-Cost...
[5] http://www.boston.com/news/nation/2013/03/17/harvard-mit-thw...
[6] http://resadmin.partners.org/RM_Home/Documents/2011%2005%200...
You don't know that for sure. On the other other hand we do know things, like without the open source ethic Wikipedia wouldn't exist.
An example: Pfizer closed down their Lansing michigan plant and wanted to force their employees to relocate to San Diego, without doing a real analysis of the decision, and on the eve of the move came to find out that the one person running their fermenter culture system didn't want to move - he wanted to raise his daughters on a farm and San Diego was too expensive for his pay grade. So they lost the ability to basically do every bioassay that they were doing in Lansing. Three years later, I had the opportunity to work next to the massive san diego pfizer campus. The facility was 2/3 empty and pfizer was struggling to find extra tenants and toying with a 'bio-incubator' idea.
http://indysci.org/projectmarilyn
So, a few things:
1. this testing environment would not fly today, as it should not have then. Testing on children who may not have the ability to give informed consent is unethical.
2. polio was the most dreaded disease in America, for many reasons. More people contributed to the development of a treatment--through the March of Dimes--than for any other disease up to that time. Even though the vaccine was feared and widely known, the mass tests were fiercely opposed by some. When the positive results of the test were announced, the nation treated the news much like the end of a war with exultation, presidential awards, and ticker-tape parades.
3. the polio vaccine was relatively safe and straightforward, as killed vaccines generally are. The killed vaccine was first tested in culture to make sure it was dead. Unlike many other pharmaceuticals, where the effectiveness even after a test can be murky and side-effects abound, a killed vaccine is relatively easy to understand. Testing a drug that may lessen the impact of a particular type of cancer is considerably harder, both in itself and because of today's protective regulations.
4. the polio vaccine was developed by a very small team run by a zealot. The resources required were considerably less than the resources required to develop other drugs. Look at the development of the sulfa drugs for a counter-example: Bayer delayed their widespread release even after they had concluded they were effective and patented them because they wanted to make sure their patent was valid (source: "The Demon Under the Microscope", by Hager.) Bayer had spent a lot of time and money developing the drugs and wanted to make sure they got a return. (Ironically, it was quickly realized that the patented sulfa drugs were in fact a combination of active and inactive parts and the active parts could not be patented; and soon after penicillin was introduced, sidelining the sulfa drugs. It's a fascinating story, well worth the read.)
Source for info about Salk: the excellent "Splendid Solution: Jonas Salk and the Conquest of Polio" by Kluger.
Also your objection "Testing on children who may not have the ability to give informed consent is unethical." is nonsense. Polio is a fundamentally childhood disease. Not developing a drug that saves children (but not adults) because children cannot give 'informed consent' is unethical, too. If you think there aren't childhood diseases that we are trying to cure in the contemporary era, you are crazy.
What I meant--but articulated poorly--was that the children selected for the tests were from a school for the differently abled because they were, at the time, seen as less valuable. That idea is no longer acceptable.
You, as the final stage of your research, using government money.
Say you do get something. Now you want the government to also be involved in the commercialization of the discovery? I think people would argue they are already involved enough, what with the FDA and all.
Further: the person making the discovery spent half a decade of their lives after college to get a PhD, and very likely many years of post-doc, to be extremely specialized in an extremely narrow area of some field. Now you want them to be product managers and manufacturers and businessmen as well?
This is one problem patents solve: Division of labor. Let those who are good at science and technology do their thing, and let people who are good at commercializing do their thing, and let IP ensure one both sides have means to reap appropriate rewards.
I wonder if the US government could offer free licensing to all national companies, which would seem to be the best of both worlds?
(Note: I'm not a US citizen, I'm British. s/US/UK/ and the basic result is the same...)
Wouldn't that mean that researchers would be less motivated ?
The hammer was invented in spite of the fact it was impossible to control the proliferation of its design.
Many researchers aren't businessmen, the simply want to scratch an itch, and not want to work tedious day jobs. If they can make a living while doing something they enjoy, all is great.
Except that very rarely does wanting to scratch an itch coincide with obtaining funds to do so. As a result, the researcher needs to make concessions to his own research goals, or the quality of it, in order to convince people who don't understand it that it has some value, in order to finance it. If not, they're gonna be stuck researching something they have little or no interest in, or back to the day job. This is the real motivation killer.
Here's another complication. Often, faculty need multiple sources of funding over the years to support their research, including federal grants, university support (direct through money or indirect through facilities and staff), and industrial support through gifts and grants. As well, the intellectual heavy-lifting is done by the faculty and their students.
If you believe in intellectual property rights, then who of all of these stakeholders deserves ownership of those rights?
Personally, I lean against faculty patenting their inventions. I'd rather the IP is open to the public. Even if a faculty member wants to commercialize their research, I think they are better off competing in the marketplace rather than through IP arsenals.
But, I understand the other point of view. Patent licensing is a lucrative source of revenue for universities (e.g., UFL and its Gatorade revenue) and inventors. As well, it's at least uncomfortable and perhaps unfair if opportunistic companies were able to commercialize on a faculty member's invention without renumeration or attribution.
Complicated topic.
As a well-known example, John Pople wrote a program called Gaussian while at Carnegie Mellon. Carnegie Mellon licensed the program to Gaussian Inc. When John Pople moved to Northwestern, he was banned from using the program he wrote, as was all of Northwestern University. Before the passage of Bayh-Dole, Gaussian was given out for free by Carnegie Mellon. Once Bayh-Dole gave them clear rights in the code, everything changed.
But, factors like patent sharking, the ridiculous extension of copyright terms, the inability of patent offices to properly assess issues like novelty and obviousness, and so on, make it possible for all parties to abuse this compromise.
I think the spirit of the compromise is valid. I think its implementation today has become flawed, but not irreparably so.
But good starts are good.
I try my best to stick to this myself, and I've open-sourced all my PhD research code for the exact reason that I know that it's non-negotiable, given that public funding has enabled me to pursue something I love and further science as a result.
I'm all for this, and I've even brainstormed ways with a few others in my field of actually trying to put together a community-based, peer-review system that makes use of arxiv.org.
This space NEEDS innovation!
This is about making it more conveniently available. Currently, you might have to go through a paywall for online access, or visit a library for free access. This should make much of it available online at no cost.
Actually, a lot more than most people realize is fairly easily available online (with publisher permission) for cheap via DeepDyve [1], including from publishers that we normally think of as being very expensive.
Here's a page at DeepDyve that lets you browse by subject, journal, or publisher [2], which should give a good idea of what they have available.
Not as nice as open access, of course, but still pretty useful.
[1] http://www.deepdyve.com
[2] http://www.deepdyve.com/browse/