How Open Source Could Benefit Academic Research

Most academics are under tremendous pressure to keep anything of potential commercial value closed; releasing code as open-source generally requires permission from above. (In fact, I know of one professor of biology who had to fight to get a line in his contract explicitly allowing him to open-source everything.) And it's not like most of them need encouragement; none of us are getting rich off NIH grants (well, most of us aren't) and we effectively hit a salary ceiling early in our careers, so the prospect of a few thousand dollars extra in licensing revenue is more than most can resist. In several cases that I'm aware of, the licensing money is used to support research activities - sometimes enough to pay for an entire employee, or pay for meetings that wouldn't happen otherwise. Note that in many cases the code itself is still available, just not under a license that allows distribution, which usually makes it difficult or impossible for anyone who wants to build on your work to do so.

Of course it's not always this simple - junior researchers have very little control, so many of us end up releasing code under proprietary licenses when we'd much rather open-source everything. I also know of many cases where paranoia and competitiveness, rather than avarice, are at fault - in these cases, the code itself is hidden and the software released as binary-only (which as far as I'm concerned should be unacceptable for anything published in a peer-reviewed journal, regardless of the license used). Regardless, there are simply too many incentives to retain full control.

This is a completely idiotic situation, of course, and it has been holding back science for years - I know of multiple cases where university researchers were effectively doing R&D for private companies (not always willingly!) with very little in return. I've also seen researchers prevent widespread adoption of their work (and hamper their career advancement) because of tight-fisted behavior. One asshole even charges other academics to obtain his software, with the result that some people avoid using it altogether. Frankly, since I have to deal with this bullshit on a near-daily basis, as far as I'm concerned a repeal of the Bayh-Dole act (and its equivalents in Europe), at least where software is concerned, would be a huge leap forward for academic computational research. The bonus I get from licensing fees is simply not worth the trouble and missed opportunities.

Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/KtscQi2XP2k/story01.htm

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