Tag Archives: open science

Beyond the repository? The CERN Innovation in Scholarly Publishing Workshop (OAI7). June 22-24 2011

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I was in a very expensive and sultry Geneva in late June to attend the CERN workshop on innovations in scholarly publishing, among a record attendance of over 260 delegates. Perhaps this level of attendance is a sign that Open Access is maturing and becoming mainstream as it moves on from an emphasis on access alone to the exploration of how openness enhances the effectiveness of science and increases the impact of the contribution that it can make. The programme also reflected a level of maturity in the system, a second-generation approach that took it for granted that we were talking about a well-established system with repositories already set up and functioning and open access journals well established (and growing fast). The focus was less the setting up and management of scholarly repositories or the creation of digital publications than the semantics of an integrated research communication system. In fact a key perception at the conference was William Nixon’s suggestion that the ‘repository’ will disappear into the wider workflow of research communication (an ironic statement from someone who is the Service Development Manager of the University of Glasgow repository).

The overall focus was therefore on how to get extra mileage from repositories, interlinking data, publishing effectively and garnering government support for Open Access and Open Science. Cameron Neylon, Senior Scientist in Bio-molecular Sciences at the ISIS Neutron Scattering Facility at the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), argued in his talk on the Technical, Cultural and Legal Infrastructure to Support Open Scientific  Communication that repositories are a ‘temporary scaffolding’ awaiting the time that we have ‘reasserted the traditional values of research and built the pillars and foundations that will make openness an embedded part of what we do’. Neylon’s core argument was that, while we can resolve the technological issues to build a viable architecture for data analysis, reuse and discovery and have the legal infrastructure needed, what is not there yet is the cultural infrastructure – the commitment, the communities, the assumptions and the practices that could make open science work. The ‘real values’ that he articulated were those of reproducibility, making a difference to the community, getting process, data and narrative to relate to one another and ensuring accuracy and validity.

Related to these perceptions, there was a very useful session on advocacy. Monica Hammes from the University of Pretoria spoke on the Open Access Conversation, a cogent and detailed account of the mind-changing process that is needed and the partnerships that need to be developed to get a university to adopt and mandate open access, arguing that one has to anticipate the emotional responses of the people one is trying to persuade, recognising where their interests lie. Heather Joseph of SPARC in Washington, speaking on advocacy at the national and international level, demonstrated how the wording and the logic of arguments have to be distilled and clarified in order to reach government.  Given the powerful lobbying capacity of the big publishing companies in their push for enclosure, she argued that any advocacy initiatives have to be well argued, supported by persuasive data, be very strategic and need to be built on alliances and communities. Continue reading →

Innovation policy

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The Australian federal government has just completed a review of its National Innovation system. Australian research and innovation policy-making tends to be broadly consultative, wide-ranging  and forward-looking, so I was interested to compare this with what the South African government is doing. Our IPR Act of 2008 is Bayh-Dole on steroids, insisting on commercialisation and patenting wherever possible, and apparently treating open innovation as the exception, not the rule. And speaking of rules, the Regulations impose layers of bureaucratic filters between the researcher and the innovation outcome.

I am still working through the Australian document to absorb its detail but it has some valuable insights and the overall thrust is clear: there needs to be a balanced system, in which commercialisation is but one strand of the innovation role that universities can play. Far from taking Bayh-Dole as gospel, there is a critical evaluation of such strategies and a re-evaluation of  what innovation policy should look like in the 21st century.

Moreover, the Australian government and the participants in the policy process are aware of the pitfalls in excessive patenting. They review the past record, warn against the damage that can be done by patent law that is not rigourous enough and advise against policies that could create patent thickets. Most interesting, there is a strong argument for this arena to be opened up, so that the participants in the innovation system have a strong say, rather than this being the exclusive domain of lawyers. This is a lesson that I think South African universities might need to learn – it appears that our academics are not engaging with the South African legislation, thinking that this is the domain of professionals.

This Australian policy document reminds me of a recommendation from Arie Rip at an  early stage of the South African higher education policy process (2000):

The common mimetic route is to define the nature of capacity-building in terms of what is now seen as important. This may well be a recipe to become obsolete before one’s time … [T]he world (of science and more generally) may well evolve in such a way that present-day exemplars will be left behind. So developing countries should set their sights on what is important in 2010, rather than what appears to be important now – however difficult this will be politically. 1

The IPR Act of 2008 is unfortunately trapped in the ‘mimetic route’ that Rip warns about here. But what about Australian thinking in 2009? Here are some extracts that give some insight into the thinking that will inform policy review down south:

On the commercialisation of research:

Research commercialisation is not a core role for universities. Nevertheless, universities can play a vital role in the commercial process. In cases where the benefits of research are best achieved through commercial engagement, universities should, where possible, attempt to partner with appropriate stakeholders to achieve these goals. Such instances are in the minority and universities more commonly play a role of commercial significance through provision of vital research advancement, workforce training and substantial international links.

On the protection of intellectual property rights:

[T]here is a caveat which is increasingly important: The development of intellectual property is cumulative. In the words of Sir Isaac Newton, we stand on the shoulders of giants. Because new knowledge always builds on old knowledge, the property rights we have erected to encourage innovation can actually obstruct it.

On the need to open up the question of patenting and IP beyond the legal profession and the IP industries:

Nevertheless the consideration of policy … is dominated by IP practitioners and by the beneficiaries of the IP system. We need the expertise of lawyers in this as in many other areas of policy but it is imperative that IP policy make the transition that competition policy made over a decade ago now, from a specialist policy area dominated by lawyers, to an important front of micro-economic reform.

On access and dissemination for social and economic benefit

Along with the rise in support for access to information has come a growing recognition of the need for users to be able to search and interact with data and content. Legal frameworks must also be developed to facilitate access and reuse. This points to the need for an Australian National Information Policy (or Strategy) that optimizes the generation and flow of ideas and information in the Australian economy. As the National Competition Policy (NCP) involved systematically scanning Australian institutions to optimize the operation of competition to enhance outcomes so National Information Policy would scan Australian institutions to optimize the generation and dissemination of information for social and economic benefit.

Thus for instance, unless it seriously undermines its commercial objectives of sale of product, the ABC should err on the side of making its content available over theinternet unless this has large opportunity costs. The presumption against free availability might be overcome where it would involve the foregoing of substantial commercial revenue from the sale of the content or there are large costs of hosting the necessary internet bandwidth (although in this latter case, peer to peer means of distribution should also be explored as should the diversion of funding from other activities and/or additional funding).

The advantages of  open science

To drive cumulative knowledge creation researchers and others must have access to high quality data and information on developments not just in their field but beyond. For instance, Jeff Furman and Scott Stern have calculated that Biological Resource Centres that are repositories of biological materials (including cell lines, microorganisms and DNA material) have boosted cumulative scientific knowledge by three times more than alternative institutional structures 2.Australian physicist Michael Nielsen has stressed the importance of unlocking scientific information in scientific journals to make it more easily discoverable, searchable and useable to enable the cross-disciplinary search for knowledge:

We should aim to create an open scientific culture where as much information as possible is moved out of people’s heads and labs, onto the network, and into tools which can help us structure and filter the information. This means everything – data, scientific opinions, questions, ideas, folk knowledge, workflows, and everything else – the works. Information not on the network can’t do any good.3

There is a lot more in this report – I recommend that South African researchers read it as they engage with our legislative process with an eye to preserving their expertise and independence in the process of ensuring that their research has maximum national impact.

1. Rip, A. (2000) Fashions, Lock-ins and the Heterogeneity of Knowledge Production. In Kraak, A. (ed.) Changing Modes: New knowledge production and its implications for Higher Education in South Africa. Pretoria: Human Sciences Research Council.

2. Furman, J. and Stern, S., Standing Atop the Shoulders of Giants: The Impact of Institutions on Cumulative Research, National Bureau Economic Research Working Paper. 2004.

3. http://michaelnielsen.org/blog/?p=448

IPR Act Regulations promulgated – the death knell for open science in South Africa?

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The Deprtment of Science and Technology has published the Regulations for the implementation of the IPR Act of 2008. These have serious implications for researchers and the universities and research institutions they work in and even more dire implications for open access and open innovation in South Africa. I set out below my preliminary reading of what these Regulations might mean. However, they are not very well drafted and contain some confusions, so it would be good to share reactions from researchers on how they see this affecting their research practices. The time for responding is short – we have until 8 May. How this relates to what is happening in the rest of the world will follow in subsequent blogs, as will feedback as UCT and other institutions grapple with what this means for how research will be carried out in South Africa.

A brief recap for those who are not familiar with the Act.

The full name of the Act is The Intellectual Property Rights from Publicly Funded Research and Development Act, 2008. (I blogged the Draft Bill last year here and here and here and here and here) In 2009, one would expect a piece of legislation dealing with publicly funded research to be dealing with access to research, but that could not be further from the case of this legislation. To put it briefly, this is designed to ensure that all publicly funded research gets intellectual property protection for the purposes of commercialisation. This seems to be the only way that this legislation can conceive of public benefit from research. Open innovation, open science, open access and open source have to get special permission from the bureaucrats before they will be allowed.

The provisions of the Act

Before looking at the Regulations, researchers need to grapple with the basic definitions and provisions in the Act:

  1. The central provision of the Act is that universities carrying out research from public funds have to assess and report on all research carried out in the university that might have the potential for IPR protection and commercialisation. (Which being translated means they are patentable – but beware; it means more than that, as set out below.)
  2. If the university/researcher does not want to lock down the IP in the research, then this decision has to be made according to the guidelines provided by the national IP Management Office (NIPMO) and it has to be notified of this decision. NIPMO then reviews this decision and can, if it disagrees with the university, acquire ownership of and obtain statutory protection for the IP in this research. In other words, the university and its researchers no longer have the right to make their own decisions on how best to ensure the impact of their research.
  3. Research funded by private organisations only counts as not being publicly funded if the full cost of the research is covered, including all direct and indirect costs (15b). Does this mean that if you are running a research programme with donor funding, but UCT supports your office and computer infrastructure, your research is subject to this Act?

How is intellectual property defined in the Act?

In other words, what does this really mean for researchers and who would be affected by it? The primary focus of this legislation is clearly patents, but those researchers who think that their work has nothing to do with patents in South African law need to think again.

The definition of IP in the Act excludes copyrights in published works, and includes ‘creations of the mind’ that are capable of being protected under South African and foreign IP law. That means that software and business processes, patentable in the US but not in SA, have to be considered in terms of this Act. Databases, which are protected under the EU database provisions, would also fall under this legislation. Trademarks, artistic works and designs would presumably have to be considered, too.

It is clear therefore that researchers in humanities, social sciences, business school, and architecture cannot sit back on the assumption that these provisions would not apply to them because what they do is not normally patentable. Nor can any unit working with open source software development. The scale of what this might mean for the university IP office and for individual researchers is daunting; even more so the volume of forms to be filled in. But most of all, it is the loss of freedom for researchers and the university to make their own decisions on how to manage the dissemination of their work and how to ensure its impact that is most threatening.

What do the Regulations say?

When a decision is made on whether or not a piece of research requires protection, the only basis on which the researcher or the university can make this decision on their own is that it is not patentable (2 (2)). In any other case, a form has to be filled in and the decision referred to NIMPO. The criteria that NIMPO will apply include the sector, potential contribution of the research, commercial and social potential and the ability for this work to be protected under any law anywhere in the world.

Provisions are then made for what happens if the State takes over the IP rights (2(8)) and what happens if permission is given for them to be waived (in which case they have to be offered to the funders of the research or, where there is no private funding, to the researcher concerned) (2 (9,10,11)).

Researchers will need to think about how this sits with the funders of research that they carry out.

Open science, open access and open source

There is confusion in the Regulations between public domain, open source and open access (see Andrew Rens’s blog on this question), but Section 2 (12) appears to be trying to say that where a the university wants to make research open access or develop open source software, it has to fill in a form and apply to NIMPO. If the need to make the research open comes from the requirements of cooperative research agreements or funder requirements, then this has to have prior approval from NIMPO. According to the Regulations, NIMPO then decides whether this agreement is in the best interests of the country or not (2 (14)).

It looks as though the university and its research departments will not be able to join collaborative research ventures or accept funding from donors who require open dissemination without government permission.

Andrew Rens thinks this might be unconsitutional – see his Aliquid Nova blog.

Given the requirements of some of UCT’s largest research funders, this is somewhat startling. This would also be threatening to a department like the Centre for Educational Technology, which has contracts with an international consortium, Sakai,  that requires assurance that all software developed has no IP restrictions and is open source.

How is this going to affect UCT’s research collaborations and research funding agreements?

The NIPMO Structures

What skills will the NIMPO Advisory Board, which will oversee all this, bring to bear? It will consist of people chosen for their ‘knowledge and experience in intellectual property management, commercialisation, technology transfer, and business skills’ (4 (6)). In other words, people without special research knowledge or familiarity with disciplinary fields will be making decisions about how research could best impact on the country.

Revenue sharing

Researchers do get the right to revenue earned from the commercialisation of their research (7(1). However, the deductions that can be made before this happens sound somewhat threatening, as they include expenses for ‘filing, prosecution and maintenance of statutory protection; bank fees and other charges for collecting revenues due; defence, validation and enforcement of IP rights; legal advice; market research, marketing and sales, travel costs and admin expenses, up to R1 million (7 (2)). In truth, there is not much likely to be left after all this. If I were a researcher in this position, I would not be holding my breath. Perhaps, like the music recording industry, the creator will land up owing more than is earned.

Licences

There are detailed provisions for how NIPMO will intervene in the granting of exclusive licences, offshore deals, assignment of rights. In the case of exclusive licences granted, NIPMO can walk in and reverse these licences if they think that commercialisation is not adequate.

Auditing and retrospective licensing

Then there is a retrospective clause that says NIMPO can audit a university’s disclosure of IP. The university is required to fill in forms twice a year detailing the IP governed by the Act and how it has been commercialised. Then NIMPO can audit annually. If it finds that any IP has not been declared, then it can retroactively enforce assignment of the rights (11 (2)).

Does this mean that the university’s ability to contract with donors who require assurances of open IP management will be compromised? How could the university offer such assurances if they can be reversed by NIMPO at a later date?

This will surely mean that super-caution will be exercised by submitting everything for approval before research contracts begin. And what effect would that have on research effectiveness?

Research collaboration

When it comes to dealing with private organisations and institutions, the university could licence a share of the IP to a co-owner. If the university enters into a collaborative research agreement, it must retain ownership of any pre-existing IP and commercialise this in line with the Act; retain IP rights in what it produces, or jointly own IP. It must ensure the commercialisation in SA of this collaborative research.

If the partners in the collaboration require open licences, then NIPMO has to approve before the university can enter such an agreement. NIPMO will publish guidelines on how universities have to manage such collaborations (12 (3)).

How will universities manage their research collaborations with this level of interference? And what effect will this have on research output and its social and economic impact?

Making connections – Open learning Southern African style

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On the second day of the Southern African Regional Universities Association (SARUA) Open Access conference last week, the penny suddenly dropped. From the start, the signs were good – the conference, which followed on from the SARUA Vice-Chancellors’ triennial congress, was, after all, focused on open access. The Chair of SARUA, Professor Njabulo Ndebele of the University of Cape Town, the Botswana Minister of Education, J D Nkate and the CEO of SARUA, Piyushi Kotecha, opened the conference with strong statements on the value of Open Access in their respective constituencies. This is echoed on the SARUA website which, unusually for a university association site, acknowledges the importance of dissemination as a core value and makes a clear statement of its commitment to Open Access both as one of its programme areas and as a core principle, as well as its policy for its own communications. The central statement is perhaps this:

Promoting Open Access for increased quality research, enhanced collaboration, and the sharing and dissemination of knowledge, is a central principle for SARUA’s work. The Association is already engaging with groups and networks of expertise and good practice locally and globally in order to support the development of Open Access benefits for HE.

At the conference, the comments of these opening speakers did not therefore appear to be glib statements of openness as a worthy value, but seemed firmly embedded in a recognition of the need to create equity for the developing world in its contribution to global knowledge. What emerged, particularly from Piyushi Kotecha, was a vision which could move SARUA universities on from the current post-colonial reliance on the North for standards for research competence, to a situation in which they could promote their own competence as knowledge producers. As Alma Swan commented later in the proceedings, she thought that, with hindsight, the Open Access movement should perhaps have named itself Open Dissemination, to get away from the implicit dependence on access to knowledge from the North-West that can sometimes emerge in development-speak. And it goes further than Open Access alone. Universities in the southern African region, Piyushi Kotecha went on to say, need to explore open research and open science in order to become research intensive in the next 10-20 years, making a contribution not only to global scholarly communications, but also creating links between research, teaching and learning, and ensuring the contribution of universities to socio-economic development in the region.

This is an enlightened view and if it does indeed underpin future policy initiatives by universities and governments in the region, it could well help move the SARUA constituency on from the contradictions and blockages that currently undermine the effectiveness of South African research dissemination policy, to a more effective role in achieving research impact. This could go some way to giving the region a leadership role on the continent.

This was great, but something continued to nag at the back of my mind. In the Minister’s speech and in some of the questions and comments from the Vice-Chancellors attending the conference, there seemed to be a slippage between Open Access as I would understand it – dissemination and publication systems that, as Alma Swan summed it up, are ‘freely available, publicly available and permanently online’ – and another vision that was only obliquely alluded to, of Open Access as access to universities for students. This question continued to hover as Amanda Barratt, of the UCT Law Library (which, incidentally, hosts Lawspace, the UCT law department repository) talked illuminatingly on open access and human rights and the failure of proprietary IP systems to deliver necessary development goals, particularly in an African context. Something began to crystallise as Andrew Rens, of the Shuttleworth Foundation spoke about Text, Hypertext and Rent Seeking, charting the differences between the linear and contained world of printed text and the fluidity of the read-write web, a clash, as he vividly put it, between ‘the fundamental concept of the web and copyright as a series of little buckets’.

More connections emerged as Johannes Britz, echoing what Amanda Barrett had said, spoke of the importance of education as a human freedom, citing the unhappy statistics of education and research on the continent. He charted the difference between the old information world in which richness had to be sacrificed for the sake of wide reach and the new digital paradigms in which we can combine reach and richness. However, 80% of the world lives, he said, where infrastructure is lacking for unbundled,digital information and education is therefore dependent on physical objects such as books. He brought this down to a moral issue – the bread principle, as he called it. If we can make information and distribute it for a very marginal cost, then we have a new economic model that could serve those deprived of access to education. This is a moral imperative, but IP gets in the way. What also gets in the way is the excessively high cost of telecommunications in countries like South Africa and many other African countries. This means, he said, that the moral agenda becomes a money agenda. The bottom line, he argued, is that access to information is a basic human right and information infrastructure is fundamental to making access work.

It all came together just after Derek Keats, of the University of the Western Cape, had talked about the ways in which web 3.0 could break out of the narrower confines on university walls and the covers of books, offering abundance rather than the limitations of a physical environment. In addition, social networking environments allow students to become producers as well as consumers of knowledge. This, he said, is a ‘rip-mix-burn’ environment that allows for the creation of cross-institutional or even non-institutional learning environments. The Vice-Chancellor of the Eduardo Mondlane University in Mozambique responded to this with considerable excitement. ‘I was in a dark tunnel’, he said ‘and now I can see a light.’ He explained that his perception of the scarcity/abundance argument was that in Africa we have an abundance of students and an abundance of thinly populated land. However there is scarcity of lecturers and physical infrastructure. Having listened to the earlier speeches and then bringing to bear what Derek had said, he could now see the potential for ICTs and Open Access to help a country like his. ‘We should go where the students are living, take the money that we would have used for infrastructure and reach them where they are.’ He could see, he said, how Open Access and social networking tools can fundamentally change attitudes towards teaching and learning.

This linked back to some of the things that Christina Lloyd, of the Open University, had talked about. She described the steps that the OU had had to take over the years to accommodate students who came to university courses without formal entry requirements. This needs very careful curriculum design, introductory courses front-loaded in terms of support – and with continuing high levels of support to meet student needs. Provision needs to be modular and very high levels of assessment are built in. When it comes to technology gaps, she said that she thought that Africa did not have to be held back by infrastructure limitations as it had already leapfrogged in its use of mobile technologies as part of its blend. What she said about the curriculum also resonated for Africa – that we need to maximise the potential of learning online through the use of social networking as part of student support.

This all suggests that in the context of higher education in southern Africa, open access, combined with innovative use of mobile
technology and a recognition of the transfomative potential of social networking, offers considerable potential to move research and teaching away from anachronistic hierarchical and locked-in models inherited from the colonial era. Open access can therefore mean not only improved research communications and a greater global contribution by African research, but the use of open education and social networking might offer great potential in under-resourced countries to provide access for greater numbers of students to a well-supported, relevant and effective higher education system.

Patents and open science – and that Bill again!

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Today is the last day for submissions on the Draft Bill for IPR for Publicly Funded Research. So it was good to see a very balanced and insightful article, Sharing the fruits of science by Glerry Toomey in University Affairs on the question of patents and the value of open science. In contrast to the obsessive insistence of the South African Draft Bill on patenting everything that can be patented and on commercialisation as the only way of getting benefit from research, Toomey makes it clear that international science is now taking other directions:

We … know that the social behaviour of modern science, and of the broader domain of innovation, is marked by a continual tug-of-war. At one end of the rope we find the forces of collaboration and sharing. At the other end are the instincts to compete and to protect one’s hard-earned intellectual property. While both kinds of behaviour lubricate scientific discovery and technological innovation, IP protection via patenting, with a view to future profits, has become a dominant trend in recent decades, particularly in the life sciences.

But now an international scientific counterculture is emerging. Often referred to as “open science,” this growing movement proposes that we err on the side of collaboration and sharing. That’s especially true when it comes to creating and using the basic scientific tools needed both for downstream innovation and for solving broader human problems.

Patenting has a role to play, the article argues, but the mistake that has been made in recent years is a failure to ‘distinguish between the research tools and basic knowledge’ of science and the inventions with industrial application that the patent system was designed for.

The article tracks a number of open science projects and links these to the recognition of scientific discovery as the generator of public good. He quotes at length Dr Richard Jefferson, a biotechnologist now living in Australia, the founder of an international research unit in Canberra called CAMBIA, which promotes open science.

Dr. Jefferson distinguishes between the development of basic scientific tools and the application of those tools, between “discovery and invention.” He sees scientific discovery as a social enterprise – not only serving as midwife to marketable inventions, but also delivering publicly valuable products for which markets or profit margins may be small. That includes alleviating poverty and hunger, especially in the developing countries, preventing or curing the diseases of the disadvantaged, and improving human stewardship of natural resources. So, while open science is described as a pragmatic way of doing research, it also has a social and ethical backbone. Terms like global public goods, common heritage of humankind and human rights recur in the literature on open science.

This would seem to be very much in line with the policy of the Department of Science and Technology, which argues for the need for research to contribute to national upliftment. On the other hand, Toomey claims, the commercialisation of public research, driven by the Bayh-Dole Act in the US some 27 years ago led to a ‘filing frenzy’ resulting in a tendency to privatise the tools and platforms of science.

This has not povided beneficial to the universities:

For universities in the technologically advanced countries, says Dr. Jefferson, the promise of getting fat cheques in the mail from patenting the fruits of their biosciences research projects has simply not materialized. He maintains that offices of technology transfer are “generally losing money” and that there’s ample evidence that private biotechnology enterprises, as a commercial industry, have fallen flat as well.

The article ends by suggesting that there needs to be a total rethink of the role of intellectual property, as a powerful tool for creating social value, through providing the platforms and sharing the improvements that result.

I would suggest that the South African Department of Science and technology needs to consider these arguments before enacting any legislation on IPR rights in university research. In promoting a Bill that looks backwards to 25-year-old US legislation, proven to have had many negative consequences; in insisting on a very wide-ranging definition of what research needs to be protected for patenting purposes, the Department would be locking the country into a backward-looking paradigm, just when exciting new prospects are available for delivering real development impact from public research.

Thanks to Peter Suber’s Open Access News for drawing my attention to this article