[Insight-developers] Q: current procedure for code contributions? : Waking up from the MATRIX

[Luis Ibanez]

Hi Kris,

Excellent point !
Thanks for reminding me about the licensing.

--

The Copyright of Material posted to the Insight Journal
is kept by the authors. As opposed to most Journals
and conferences that appropriate your work and require
you to transfer the copyright of your papers, the Insight
Journal only requires you to authorize the Journal and the
readers to use your work under the conditions of the
"Creative Commons Attribution" license.

      http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/

The copyright of your source code, since it is intended
to be added to ITK must by transfered to the ISC (Insight
Software Consortium).


As you pointed out, it is important for authors to know that
in most cases they *DON'T* own the copyright of their work in
the first place. Typically employers own the copyright of
work performed by employees.


The submission process do not require signed letters. We consider
your click on the check box of the license, to be an electronic
signature. We consider the use of physical paper to be obsolete,
and the use of physical mail to be an eccentricity that should be
reserved for sending nostalgic post-cards. An efficient modern
Journal *MUST* be fully-electronic.



The Journal don't require you to do patent searches,
mainly for two reasons:


1) Everything is patented: from the Peanut-butter and Jelly
    Sandwich to the binary encoding of bytes, to the cosinus
    transform, to the use of rigid transforms in images
    registration.  Even swinging in a playground swing !!
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/careers/careerstemplate.jsp?ArticleId=i120204

    The Patent system is in a more shameful and decadent state
    than the publishing system. A patent evaluator spend an
    average of 4 hours on a patent claim. Even less than a
    reviewer spend on a paper. Then it assign the exclusive use
    of the idea to the patent holder for the following 25 years !!!


2) The language of patents is such that even if you are reading
    the patent of your own method, you may not recognize it.



If you "know" that your algorithm is patented, we don't want it in
the Insight Journal. Because patented algorithms are *USELESS* for
the community.

A patented method cannot be used for academic research nor commercial
applications without an express authorization from the patent holders.
Note that Universities are not exempt from these obligations.


IMHO Patented methods should be posted as "Advertisement" and should
be charged for using Journals as publicity platforms.


It is very unfortunate that academia have assigned value to Patents
because over time the result is that there is no remaining material
in the public space. When universities patent human genes (just because
they sequenced them), and companies patent the use of the mouse click,
then there is no room for anybody else to do any creative contribution.


The fact that Academia and Industry, value the number of papers and the
number of patents in your CV, lead to make of us all monsters like
Lord Kelvin, blinded by the brightness of our narcissism.

Soon we will be proclaiming that

          "There is nothing new to be done in science"

Just as Lord Kelvin dare to say in 1900. He just missed the Theory of
Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Superconductivity, the Transistor, the
Laser...


--


Note that all these Intellectual Property issues are not exclusive
problems of the Insight Journal, nor the Open Access Journals. You
already have the same problems when you submit to standard decadent
Journals. The difference is that in the context of Open Access these
issues at least get discussed publicly.

IEEE for example does not require you to disclose patents. Therefore,
when you publish patented methods, you are inviting readers to infringe
those patents. Arguably, this could be considered entrapment.
http://spincom.ece.umn.edu/icassp/node94.html



    Regards,



       Luis




------------------------
Kris Thielemans wrote:
> Dear Luis
> 
> Impressive...
> 
> I guess you need to add something about licensing though. Annoying things
> like 
> - does the author agree with the usual ITK license
> - does the author actually own the work, or is it his/her employer
> - is there any code included not originated by the author, and what's the
> licensing status of that.
> - do you require signed letters 
> - do you require patent searches
> 
> Aaarghhh.
> 
> Kris
> 
> 
>