[open-science] On no to patents and open source stats packages

[Heather Morrison]

Here are a couple of open science thoughts for the day:

Is anyone in the open science movement working to push against patents arising from publicly funded research? Open access / open data is not sufficient if any research that is patentable is exempt. Something along the lines of open source licensing would seem to be appropriate here.

Open source statistical packages: isn't it about time that universities dropped the pricey SPSS and diverted some of the funding into open source statistical packages? This is an area where free open source software could do a lot for open research. SPSS is very expensive; I wonder how many universities and colleges even in the developed world have to limit access due to the price and terms.

Personally I like PSPP.

If universities were to divert money from SPSS subscriptions to open source, I wonder if some of the IBM stats experts might be interested in a switch to working for the university sector?

best,

--
Dr. Heather Morrison
Assistant Professor
École des sciences de l'information / School of Information Studies
University of Ottawa
Desmarais 111-02
613-562-5800 ext. 7634
Sustaining the Knowledge Commons: Open Access Scholarship
http://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/
http://www.sis.uottawa.ca/faculty/hmorrison.html
Heather.Morrison at uottawa.ca<mailto:Heather.Morrison at uottawa.ca>


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