[FRIAM] Book publishing advice needed

Tue Jul 7 22:20:57 EDT 2020

At some point around 2007, some lawyer in Clark Universities IP department
got a big muckety muck (I forget if it was Chief Counsel or the Provost, or
what) to send out a really overzealous email, informing us that the
university policy required profitable ideas that we came up with during our
work hours to be reported to the IP office and agreements reached regarding
what to do with them. It stupidly broad, and did not include any notion of
the ideas having been developed or even being feasible. *Any **potentially*
profitable idea had to be reported! Now!

In fact, the email implied that the rubes in the faculty could not be
trusted to judge what was potentially profitable, so any idea at all should
be reported, to allow the smart and savvy people in the IP office could
evaluate potential profitability.

As one would expect, this became the butt of several lunchtime
conversations. At some point a few of us sent lists to the IP office, after
having sat around the table coming up with as many
inane-but-potentially-profitable ideas as we could. "A math textbook that
worked through osmosis", "toilet paper rolls that pulled from both sides",
"chicken, but it tasted less like chicken", "chicken, but it tasted more
like chicken", "chicken, but with the nutrition profile of green beans",
"green beans, but actually chicken", "a brand of eyebrow trimmers marketed
specifically to academics", "a grab-bar to help people get up from the
toilet, but it was better than the one on the second floor of Dana
Commons",  etc.

I don't think any of us ever heard back from them, and the email was not
repeated in subsequent years.

On Tue, Jul 7, 2020 at 9:39 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> 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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