Was the research publicly funded? If you receive funds from NSF, for
example, you are expected to share and "make widely available and
usable" software and inventions created under a grant (section VI.D.4.
of the Award and administration guide). I don't know how enforceable
that clause is, however.
_______________________________________
Roger S. Rowlett
Gordon & Dorothy Kline Professor
Department of Chemistry
Colgate University
13 Oak Drive
Hamilton, NY 13346
tel: (315)-228-7245
ofc: (315)-228-7395
fax: (315)-228-7935
email: rrowl...@colgate.edu
On 5/12/2015 12:48 PM, James Stroud wrote:
I hereby call on the broadest community of academics and researchers, including
scientists, historians, economists, sociologists, psychologists, and whoever
else has ever published a paper or read from the literature thereof, to reject
any and all papers that describe new software that itself is not released under
an open source model.
I further declare that this post is designed to ruffle feathers and incite
incendiary conversation, to provoke all-caps and evoke multiple exclamation
marks with interposed “1”s where anger prevents one from properly holding the
shift key.
My rationale for this post: I have just spent a week installing software for
structural biology (not crystallography) only to find that some of the key
utilities needed were described in a recent publication but were not OSS. The
authors have decided to stop supporting the software but have not retracted
their paper, which is completely irrelevant without the availability of the
software package they describe.
Let’s hammer this one out and come to the rational conclusion that non-OSS
software should not be awarded publications.
James
