>If I'm understanding right, those journals still kept it copyrighted, without copy-left provisions. It's more like the notion of open source, where the source

>If I'm understanding right, those journals still kept it copyrighted, without copy-left provisions. It's more like the notion of open source, where the source may be viewable but isn't necessarily available for redistribution. The publication, yes. The structure, no. You can go download the structure of any and every known and published protein from any organism in the world for free with no copyright restrictions from the PDB. And that structure will be heavily scrutinized and reviewed before it's accessible. That said, working in structural biology, it's incredible how quickly that field attached to open source, and in particular, free software. The big players in the field (coot, Relion, PEET and IMID) are all GPL. Additionally, software like PyMOL, Chimera, Phenix etc are available for free, sometimes with source. Those are basically all the software in the structural biologist toolset, with HKL2000 perhaps being the only paid software on anyone's workstation. I suspect there's probably multiple reasons for this phenomenon. There's not many structural biologist, and of the few that there are, many are in academia and have no money to spend on software. Additionally, the field moves so rapidly that most software is actually piecemealed toolkits from tons of labs. Also, anything algorithmic requires substantial analysis if you want to publish data acquired with it, meaning it needs to be open. Finally, 99% of structural biology is done on Linux, so there's simply a culture aspect as well.