[FRIAM] Book publishing advice needed

[Frank Wimberly]

Carnegie Mellon's intellectual property policy was described in a ~50 page
summary  document when I worked there.  But it was apparently more
complicated than that.  I had to testify in Federal Court regarding
software that had been developed by chemistry professor and Nobel Laureate
John People and his students.  A company named Gaussian Inc was selling the
software and one of my tasks was to keep the version made available by the
Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center current. PSC is jointly operated  by CMU
and Pitt and it makes supercomputers and software available to
researchers.  The simplified understanding was that any artifact created by
CMU researchers could be sold commercially but that the University could
not be charged for its use.  When I asked for Gaussian 94 (a new version
was released every two years) the company stalled for weeks and eventually
said we had to buy it.  To shorten the story, after months of litigation
and just before the judge was to issue his ruling, an out-of-court
settlement was reached which was confidential.  IP is a complex area.

---
Frank C. Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
Santa Fe, NM 87505

505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM

On Tue, Jul 7, 2020, 7:05 AM ∄ uǝlƃ <gepropella at gmail.com> wrote:

> Continuing down the open access thread and the ethics of Schwartz' JSTOR
> theft, libgen, and sci-hub:
>
> Retractions and controversies over coronavirus research show that the
> process of science is working as it should
>
> https://theconversation.com/retractions-and-controversies-over-coronavirus-research-show-that-the-process-of-science-is-working-as-it-should-140326
>
> From the article: "The database provided by the tiny company Surgisphere –
> whose website is no longer accessible – was unavailable during peer review
> of the paper or to scientists and the public afterwards, preventing anyone
> from evaluating the data."
>
> The point I made in response to EricS's worry that emphasizing paper
> consumption over book consumption was that the paper publishing process is
> more agile and, I argue, can stick more closely to the referent(s). With
> that agility comes some of the criticisms of Science™ (as well-expressed by
> Dave recently). To my mind, those criticisms target the wrong thing.
> They're failures of us to understand that there is no unified scientific
> method [†] and, along with *openness* comes an understanding that the whole
> process is messy and intensely social. I think it was Randy Burge who used
> to repeat a mantra like "Not being right, but getting it right." That
> journals (as well as newspapers) don't *require* open source and open data
> at the outset boggles me.
>
> Coincidentally, this popped up in my queue the other day:
>
> Let's talk about why people are moving left....
> https://youtu.be/2g0qUxgwHmo
>
> Ed's story about authors seeing very little compensation for their work,
> Nick's plea for a way to harvest the minds of non-academics, the ethics of
> Schwartz' theft, are all *old* issues targeting the same problems with late
> stage capitalism now being targeted by BLM and antifa. Perhaps the
> incentive and motive systems are the causes; and outcomes like libgen are
> the symptoms.
>
>
> [†] I'm currently (slowly, as usual) reading a nice little book called
> "Ignorance" https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13574594-ignorance that
> makes this point nicely. I put the book down in disgust when he started
> yapping about quantum mechanics. Why does everyone always do that even if
> they admit upfront they don't know what they're talking about? [sigh]
> Anyway, I got over it and have started again.
>
> On 7/7/20 4:59 AM, Edward Angel wrote:
> > I have to negotiate the terms with the university, I can, however, make
> anything I develop open source. It took a while for universities to agree
> that that that decision is totally up to the faculty member.
> --
> ☣ uǝlƃ
>
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