John Sulston, Free market must serve, not restrain, research, Financial Times, November 30, 2006. Sulston won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 2002 and works actively for open access and open data. Excerpt:
...[A] truly free market is not easy to achieve. It requires that participants have reasonably equal access to knowledge and opportunity. This does not come about simply by the removal of regulation. In science, as in business, there must be structures that ensure the well endowed do not use their position to block competition. In science this means that publication of papers, which are the tangible measures of achievement, should be accompanied by the open release of all information and materials required for the reported research, so that others may build on the work rather than needlessly duplicate it.
Since the end of the cold war and the subsequent triumphalism in the west, these principles have been under attack. “Free” is increasingly interpreted to mean unbridled competition, whether between individuals, companies or nations. This change is having its effect on science. Public companies are obliged to their shareholders to pursue maximum profitability. The disadvantage of depending on the free market for research and development is that areas that do not have the potential to yield financial return are neglected. Such areas are extensive in human health. Ninety per cent of the disease burden of humanity is served by less than 10 per cent of biomedical spending....
The persistence of this huge wealth gap is a tragedy. International relations are run on extremely competitive lines. When the EU or the US fails to get its way in trade negotiations they bypass the multilateral solution in favour of so called free trade areas. This is imperialism by another name. All the bilateral agreements of the US, for example, have included intellectual property clauses that favour its industries. The consequence is a race to the ethical bottom in trading standards....
There are serious consequences to acquiescing in this. Inability to work in certain areas, such as neglected diseases, is one. There are the restraints on data sharing, which is the essential foundation of science – for it is this rich medium that nourishes the shoots of future development. In the international consortium for sequencing the human genome we fought hard to keep the data open and were successful. Others are not faring so well. In both proteomics and meteorology, commercial considerations impede the open access that is needed for fields to move ahead. Another example is the practice of pharmaceutical companies manipulating data from drug trials....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 12/01/2006 09:47:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
