Liveblog: TACD IP: Openness

[Kevin Donovan retrieved this post from yesterday, which I had somehow lost. Thanks much!]

The next panel is on openness. First up is Konstantinos Karachalios of the European Patent Office.

• Civility is important. The field is very polarized. Our publication contains others’ vision.
• The definition of patents is openness — see its etymology. The opposite is secrecy (latent). But the patent system has come to mean its opposite in public perception. How can a system survive meaning its opposite?
• Openness and transparency are major components of social trust. Patents are a pivotal element of the knowledge economy. Patent offices offer a framework of global governance — you may criticize TRIPS, but at least there’s something there to criticize. Patent offices have been assigned to focus on innovation
• Backlogs are a serious problem. It’s a latent patent thicket.
• Transparency and availability of information about patents is a serious issue.
• How much is an ICT standard worth? If there are patents in it, it’s a goldmine. Proposal: coordinate competition authorities and patent offices, and link it with standardization bodies.
• Technology transfer to developing countries: if this fails, other Millennium Development Goals will fail. Climate change: can’t progress until people know how much it will cost.
• Patent system must look outside its narrow, legal/technical field and engage more broadly with social dialogue.

Next is Tim Hubbard of the Wellcome Trust. Genome informatics. Title: “Openness and privacy: can you have your cake and eat it?”

• Open data, releasing it as you collect it, is a recent idea. Human Genome Project drove this model. Has been adopted as a requirement of many funders — must include data access policy in grant requests.
• Value of open data: maximize investment, enable competition/collaboration
• Openness has risen in other fields: OA literature, open source software
• 2003 report by Wellcome Trust did the economic analysis which lead to its OA policy. Others have followed. Remaining problems: name control, permission problems (e.g. data mining)
• Pubmed Commons: Comments, tags
• Recommendation: Success of open data and OA literature hasn’t yet lead to mandates everywhere — should become a standard.
• Data sharing: Cultural attitudes are a problem (credit/attribution, adjusting to new competitive environment — people interpreting your data before you can). Other practical problems (e.g. standardization).
• Privacy: genome sequences and genotypes are anonymized, but potentially re-identifiable. Individual data will be limited to bona fide researchers, but summaries will be publicly available — but we’ve shown that these can be re-identified too. But will your registered researchers share it with unauthorized third parties?
• In the future, the whole of the UK NHS will have DNA data attached. Plans for connecting this to research. People like to contribute to health research, but don’t want their data leaked or misplaced. UK: significant lack of trust about this.
• Hard for data to be anonymous and useful. Need to be able to do research with fine granularity of data.
• Potential solutions: Make it fuzzy (but hard); change in social values; do everything behind closed doors (literally) — but slows research; or run researchers’ code on the mainframe system, but the results are only released as summary data
• Latter: Can’t make it perfectly leak-proof, but if you make it “good enough”, most legitimate researchers will use it; make it hard and illegal to discourage bypassing
• Is this a model of a generic implementation for openness + privacy? [But everyone has to trust the honest broker]
• But conflict with profit motive, even in public sector
• Recommendation: establish principles regarding private data
• Recommendation: standards for data formats and implementation

Next: Heather Joseph of SPARC.

• Need for openness in scholarly arena. Raising awareness of lawmakers of benefits of openness, but need to see it more in policy. Keeping policymakers convinced of benefits, even for biomedical research (other fields worse), is tenuous. But initial recognition that communicating results is an essential part of research. And growing view among public that openness in research is good, and an essential component of investment in research.
• Need for policy framework to remove access and permission barriers to maximize investment. But uptake so far mostly limited to biomedical research. And there’s pushback from opponents.
• Time to move from =”data management plans” to greater push for OA to data.
• Incoming administration does seem to value communication of science. Key posts filled to date have been filled to some extent with scientists who demonstrate this.
• OA policies should be made throughout administration — whether through executive order or regulation — and not as part of IP policymaking.
• OA policies are low overhead, aren’t punitive, and take advantage of the Internet to maximize existing public investment in research, fueling innovation and economic growth

Q&A:

• Perens: (1) Patent system is seen as opaque because IP policymaking is undemocratic (WIPO). (2) To protect personal data, give it IP protection and require users (e.g. companies) to get my permissions or face class action suit. (3) Are we talking about just OA to research literature or about overturning Bayh-Dole? A: (1) Patent offices must be advocates for transparent. (2) IP protection probably won’t help much when a junior official loses a laptop of private data on the train. (3) Have to draw distinction between OA literature and patents — many Congressional offices ask about relation to Bayh-Dole.
• Love: If there was an access to knowledge treaty, what specific issues would you want to include? Hubbard: OA data and literature; mandated protection of private data, to make it useful for research; greater openness to economic data; standards for government data. Joseph: OA literature and data — need to repeat the value of this to any innovation, competitiveness, A2K agenda. Karachalios: Define a technology commons. See climate change: can’t continue with private thinking in the face of public challenges. Hubbard: Everybody seems to think they’ll make a fortune from tech transfer, but it causes a significant disruption to other activities. Another prisoner’s dilemma.
• Jonathan Band: Crown copyright — having U.S. government works in the public domain creates a lot of value. But other countries hold copyright on government-created works. We should advocate for a change to this.