Open and closed

Open and closed 

Now that research is so much about grants, one gets confronted with conflicting ideas about research output. Open access and open data are deemed essential for the dissemination of knowledge - and rightly so: even with the vast expanses of the Internet, there's a lot of scientific knowledge that remains inaccessible to the people who should be able to use it, like students, especially at poorer universities that cannot afford all subscriptions to all journals. Naturally, if everything is open and digital, I wonder what's the use of publishers any longer. Editors, reviewers etc. are almost always academics who deliver services just to further their area or career. Any colleague who asked for something like that would have my cooperation and of course any colleague can set up a website for accommodating publications and datasets.

At the same time, we're asked to be careful about intellectual property (IP), both our own and that of others. We have to register background IP when we enter a collaborative venture, administer foreground IP produced in such a venture, note side ground IP produced alongside the venture, and monitor postground IP that is produced afterwards thanks to the venture. Neologisms aside, I accept that IP is important as an asset and we have to protect our institutes' rights, even if we're not talking about formal IP like patents. We have to earn money nowadays and safeguarding IP is a good way of guaranteeing that.

Obviously there's a conflict between opening the door for others to access our publications and data and closing it to protect the IP that's in these publications and data. If one reads a text of mine and learns how to do something as well as I do, what prohibits them from using this knowledge? Or should I obscure some critical details in order to have exclusive rights to the real IP? Sharing knowledge and learning from each other have been hallmarks of science and research, and I'm unwilling to change that.

Even worse is that these issues are sidetracking us from our core business to legalese and managementspeak topics that contribute nothing to the main reasons why one does research: learn and explain. I don't want to spend my days like that; I don't even want to pay managers and lawyers to protect me from that. I prefer a simpler, perhaps naive world where research is an integral part of an academic's work, regardless of grants and IP. And yes, any publication provides open access to knowledge. Free access to the publication is a different matter; as I expect students to pay tuition fees, even if only to treat the education they receive as a privilege, I expect that one pays at least a small sum to be able to read a scientific book or journal. It's not different to any other book or journal.