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As an academic researcher I find it absolutely hilarious that you think the complex social problem of incentive structure and competition will be solved by some

As an academic researcher I find it absolutely hilarious that you think the complex social problem of incentive structure and competition will be solved by some Unix OS. If you are interested just take a look at the complexity of licensing/ownership of code written by a PhD student at a Research University in United States. If you look at most of my Open Source code, I use AWS AMIs to share both data as well as OS + code, however I can do that only for side projects. The main thesis projects are typically very high value and consequences of sharing it far more complex to understand. https://github.com/akshayubhat/ https://github.com/akshayubhat/

Ericson2314 10y ago
No that is not what I think at all, see my follow-up comments below. I just think the combination of shitty tools + incentive structure is even more insurmountable. This is a tough problem that should be attacked from as many fronts as possible. > The main thesis projects are typically very high value and consequences of sharing it far more complex to understand. Commercial value, the university is just more stringent on the licensing/ownership restrictions, or something else?
- joshvm 10y ago
  Usually the university owns the code in some way and you have to check whether there are any IP issues.
- aub3bhat 10y ago
  There are several factors. 1. Commercial value. 2. Future grant applications (a competing group not sharing code will have better chance winning the grant.) 3. Future of other students and collaborators in the group. If two PhD students write a paper, the junior student might wish to write extension papers without getting scooped. And many more. Yet if a paper is important enough, independant researchers will often attempt at replication, this nowadays routinely happens in Machine Learning and Vision due to huge amount of interest. Also in several cases replication is fundamentally impossible, e.g. consider a machine learning paper that uses proprietary data from hospital attached to the university, etc.
  - Ericson2314 10y ago
    Ah, so theses are special insofar that they spawn more derivative commercial and paper-writing opportunities, and aren't singled out simply be virtue of being called "thesis".
  - jcrites 10y ago
    I totally get that researchers' incentives are not aligned toward publishing it, so no need to explain that further. There are costs and downsides and probably not enough benefit to them. That's fine. Everyone works within their system of incentives. If it's paid for by public dollars, then the code and data belong in the public domain eventually. I understand there are exceptions like hospital data affected by patient confidentiality - that's fine. However the code released by that researcher should be capable of reproducing their results with that data set plugged in (such as by someone else who has access to it). As a taxpayer, my concern for publicly funded research is maximizing benefit to the public good. I understand your point about follow-on research, and I'm not saying that I'd expect the code and data to be made available immediately with publication, but that deserves to be the case some reasonable time afterward (like a year). I understand that researchers' incentives are not necessarily aligned toward making it public; I am saying that people who fund research (including taxpayers through the political process) should require and expect it. Keeping it private indefinitely is a degree of self-centeredness that does not strike an appropriate balance between benefit to the researcher and to the public in my opinion.
    - aub3bhat 10y ago
      I never understood the meme about "public funding" translating into "public domain". Just because research is "publicly funded", does not means that the "public" owns it or even has a right to ownership. Public education is publicly funded does not means that government can ask for every drawing drawn by 9 year old in classroom to be in the public domain :) . In fact its actually opposite (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayh%E2%80%93Dole_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayh%E2%80%93Dole_Act), given that Universities can and do patent inventions from publicly funded research. Further funding arrangements themselves are very complex, a professor typically procures funding from University, NSF, NIH, private companies, donors etc. In such cases if NSF adopts a hard line approach that any research touching its dollars ought to release code under say GPL, it would make it impossible to collaborate. Finally all requirements aside, one can always release intentionally poorly written code in form of MatLab .m and compiled mex files. I have observed several such cases, where the code can demonstrate a concept but is intentionally crippled. Finally graduate students, graduate and are paid for doing research which is publishing/presenting papers at peer reviewed conferences and journals. If what funding agencies really seek is ready made software they ought to fund / pay at the same level as software developers (as many companies do).

Ericson2314 10y ago

No that is not what I think at all, see my follow-up comments below. I just think the combination of shitty tools + incentive structure is even more insurmountable. This is a tough problem that should be attacked from as many fronts as possible. > The main thesis projects are typically very high value and consequences of sharing it far more complex to understand. Commercial value, the university is just more stringent on the licensing/ownership restrictions, or something else?

joshvm 10y ago
Usually the university owns the code in some way and you have to check whether there are any IP issues.
aub3bhat 10y ago
There are several factors. 1. Commercial value. 2. Future grant applications (a competing group not sharing code will have better chance winning the grant.) 3. Future of other students and collaborators in the group. If two PhD students write a paper, the junior student might wish to write extension papers without getting scooped. And many more. Yet if a paper is important enough, independant researchers will often attempt at replication, this nowadays routinely happens in Machine Learning and Vision due to huge amount of interest. Also in several cases replication is fundamentally impossible, e.g. consider a machine learning paper that uses proprietary data from hospital attached to the university, etc.
- Ericson2314 10y ago
  Ah, so theses are special insofar that they spawn more derivative commercial and paper-writing opportunities, and aren't singled out simply be virtue of being called "thesis".
- jcrites 10y ago
  I totally get that researchers' incentives are not aligned toward publishing it, so no need to explain that further. There are costs and downsides and probably not enough benefit to them. That's fine. Everyone works within their system of incentives. If it's paid for by public dollars, then the code and data belong in the public domain eventually. I understand there are exceptions like hospital data affected by patient confidentiality - that's fine. However the code released by that researcher should be capable of reproducing their results with that data set plugged in (such as by someone else who has access to it). As a taxpayer, my concern for publicly funded research is maximizing benefit to the public good. I understand your point about follow-on research, and I'm not saying that I'd expect the code and data to be made available immediately with publication, but that deserves to be the case some reasonable time afterward (like a year). I understand that researchers' incentives are not necessarily aligned toward making it public; I am saying that people who fund research (including taxpayers through the political process) should require and expect it. Keeping it private indefinitely is a degree of self-centeredness that does not strike an appropriate balance between benefit to the researcher and to the public in my opinion.
  - aub3bhat 10y ago
    I never understood the meme about "public funding" translating into "public domain". Just because research is "publicly funded", does not means that the "public" owns it or even has a right to ownership. Public education is publicly funded does not means that government can ask for every drawing drawn by 9 year old in classroom to be in the public domain :) . In fact its actually opposite (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayh%E2%80%93Dole_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayh%E2%80%93Dole_Act), given that Universities can and do patent inventions from publicly funded research. Further funding arrangements themselves are very complex, a professor typically procures funding from University, NSF, NIH, private companies, donors etc. In such cases if NSF adopts a hard line approach that any research touching its dollars ought to release code under say GPL, it would make it impossible to collaborate. Finally all requirements aside, one can always release intentionally poorly written code in form of MatLab .m and compiled mex files. I have observed several such cases, where the code can demonstrate a concept but is intentionally crippled. Finally graduate students, graduate and are paid for doing research which is publishing/presenting papers at peer reviewed conferences and journals. If what funding agencies really seek is ready made software they ought to fund / pay at the same level as software developers (as many companies do).