Tag Archives: Open Access News

Patents and open science – and that Bill again!

Leave a reply

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

American publishers hire a “pit bull”

Leave a reply

The most startling news this week, picked up from Peter Suber’s Open Access News and then in Slashdot draws attention to an article by Jim Giles in Nature: PR’s pit bull takes on Open Access. In this article, which is available online (thanks are due to Nature), it emerges that the Association of American publishers and some of their members, including Elsevier, Wiley and the American Chemical Society have apparently hired a PR agent to defend them against what they see as a threat to their livelihood from open access publishing. The devil, though, is in the detail – the detail of whom they have hired.

As Jim Giles writes:

The author of Nail ‘Em! Confronting High-Profile Attacks on Celebrities and Businesses is not the kind of figure normally associated with the relatively sedate world of scientific publishing. Besides writing the odd novel, Eric
Dezenhall has made a name for himself helping companies and celebrities protect their reputations, working for example with Jeffrey Skilling, the former Enron chief now serving a 24-year jail term for fraud.

Although Dezenhall declines to comment on Skilling and his other clients, his firm, Dezenhall Resources, was
also reported by Business Week to have used money from oil giant Exxon Mobil to criticize the environmental group Greenpeace. “He’s the pit bull of public relations,” says Kevin McCauley, an editor at the magazine O’Dwyer’s PR Report.

Now, Nature has learned, a group of big scientific publishers has hired the pit bull to take on the free-information movement, which campaigns for scientific results to be made freely available. Some traditional journals, which depend
on subscription charges, say that open-access journals and public databases of scientific papers such as the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH’s) PubMed Central, threaten their livelihoods.

From e-mails passed to Nature, it seems Dezenhall spoke to employees from Elsevier, Wiley and the American Chemical Society at a meeting arranged last July by the Association of American Publishers (AAP)….

The consultant advised them to focus on simple messages, such as “Public access equals government censorship”. He hinted that the publishers should attempt to equate traditional publishing models with peer review….

Dezenhall also recommended joining forces with groups that may be ideologically opposed to government-mandated projects such as PubMed Central, including organizations that have angered scientists. One suggestion was the
Competitive Enterprise Institute, a conservative think-tank based in Washington DC, which has used oil-industry money to promote sceptical views on climate change. Dezenhall estimated his fee for the campaign at $300,000%u2013500,000.

In an enthusiastic e-mail sent to colleagues after the meeting, Susan Spilka, Wiley’s director of corporate communications, said Dezenhall explained that publishers had acted too defensively on the free-information issue and worried too much about making precise statements. Dezenhall noted that if the other side is on the defensive, it doesn’t matter if they can discredit your statements, she added: “Media massaging is not the same as intellectual debate.

Officials at the AAP would not comment to Nature on the details of their work with Dezenhall, or the money involved, but acknowledged that they had met him and subsequently contracted his firm to work on the issue.

It is worth reading the Nature article in full. I remain open-mouthed. At least, I suppose, it means that open access is serious enough for the publishers to see it as a threat and that is a good thing. However, for scholarly publishers to be caught out in
such an expedient exercise of truth-bending is another matter – all the more so in the intellectual environment in which they operate. I am particularly surprised at Wiley, which in my dealings with it in the past has emerged as a company with a concern for quality and the ability to think out of the box – to an extent unusual among their peers. So to see them descend to tactics such as this is disappointing. I would have thought that a company like Wiley should have the nerve and the intelligence to
ride the wave, to learn where scholarly publishing is heading and position themselves ahead of the game. I do believe there is a role for good publishers in the Open Access movement and I also believe that Open Access is the way scholarly publishing is going.

Surely, also, these publishers should be paying more attention to their client base. That is where they need good and intelligent PR. The peer reviewers they are using as fodder for their (false) arguments are volunteers from the universities, as are their authors. Their customers, the university libraries, are unhappy with the very high inflation rate of their products, the students in the USA are complaining about the price of textbooks. Should they not be focusing their PR efforts in that direction?

I suppose the bottom-line question, addressed to the academic community that provides these people with their living is the classic one: ‘Would you buy a used car from someone like this?’ Are these to be the guardians of the quality of your scholarship?