[FRIAM] Book publishing advice needed

Tue Jul 7 10:46:29 EDT 2020

At least at CMU there are people competent enough to make decisions about the merits of faculty work. At one point at UNM, the intellectual property person at UNM declared that any software we produced, even for a class, had to be turned over to him and he would make the decision as to whether or not it had commercial potential before we could put it on our websites.The guy knew nothing about software and was also pretty incompetent as a IP lawyer. 

Long ago I was an expert witness on a case in which the Feds went after someone who had manipulated the thermostats in a Sandia building.They were using pretty draconian computer hacking laws to go after him. We were able to convince the prosectors to drop the case at least partly on the argument that almost everything has an embedded processor so their argument would convert thousands of actions into computer crimes.

Ed 
_______________________

Ed Angel

Founding Director, Art, Research, Technology and Science Laboratory (ARTS Lab)
Professor Emeritus of Computer Science, University of New Mexico

1017 Sierra Pinon
Santa Fe, NM 87501
505-984-0136 (home)		 	angel at cs.unm.edu <mailto:angel at cs.unm.edu>
505-453-4944 (cell) 				http://www.cs.unm.edu/~angel <http://www.cs.unm.edu/~angel>

> On Jul 7, 2020, at 7:39 AM, Frank Wimberly <wimberly3 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 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 <mailto: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 <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 <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 <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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