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In my 1996 paper, “But that Speaking Makes it So”: The Role of Narrative in the Formation of Community, I wrote:

The creation of a narrative — the telling of a story — is a means of smoothing out the rough edges of existence, a means of transforming raw experience into the webs of significance which constitute culture. Indeed, narrative is such a basic component of culture, of humanity, that we never actually have access to “raw experience.” Nothing exists for us “but that speaking makes it so,” and it is this speaking which provides the coherent meaning in our lives, rather than leaving them a series of discontinuous, unrelated events.

I was speaking from a literary-critical point of view, but Michael S. Gazzaniga’s brain research suggests that this is actually how the brain deals with the world:

Gazzaniga suggests that one of the modules in the human brain should go under the name of the “Interpreter.” This system — located in the left hemisphere, along with the speech center — is what concocts a coherent narrative out of all the brain’s activity, and the annals of neuroscience are now full of bizarre neurological conditions and deft experiments that reveal this constant creative act at work. Of great importance to Gazzaniga’s argument are some oft-cited experiments purportedly demonstrating that conscious awareness of making a decision registers only after the brain has primed itself for that course of action, and sometimes even after the action has been performed. Gazzaniga calls this living in “a post-hoc world.” … According to Gazzaniga, the stories the Interpreter tells tend to be bravely forward-looking, all about steering the ship of fate into uncertain waters, equipped with free will and unity of purpose; but these parables of moral courage are no more than specious retrospective rationalizations for things we do automatically.

via Cathy Gere’s review in Atmospheric Disturbances: On Michael Gazzaniga | The Nation.

According to Gere, for Gazzaniga these “specious retrospective rationalizations” suggest a dis-unified consciousness that then calls into question the entire concept of free will: “If our brains act according to the causal laws governing all matter, in what sense can we be said to be free?” In legal terms, Gazzaniga suggests that this finding potentially undermines the criminal requirement of mens rea (the “guilty mind” element of most crimes): if our actions are in many situations automatic, and our explanations of them — our decision-making moral sense, as it were — only post-hoc, then “‘My brain made me do it’ threatens to become a get-out-of-jail-free card available to everyone, not just to sufferers of fetal alcohol syndrome or schizophrenia.”

Gere contests this conclusion by arguing that there is a difference between automatic reflexes — ”primed by millenniums of natural selection” — and rational, deliberate consideration done before an act. She discusses the legal concept of “diminished responsibility”: the idea that, for example, children have a less-developed sense of moral thinking, and thus should not be held as responsible for their actions as an adult. Insanity — a complex area of interaction between medicine and law — is another site where the law recognizes that some people — but certainly not all people — lack the ability to properly consider their actions. (Although neither seems to mention it, this is pretty much the difference between murder “with malice aforethought” and manslaughter in American common law.)

Gazzaniga gestures at one standard of legal insanity — the “policeman at the elbow” test — but Gere says all he does is “wag an admonishing finger” at the notion. Gere suggests that Gazzaniga’s absolute standard is that one either has reason or not, and that one is thus either responsible or not for one’s actions. She argues that reality — and the law — is more complex in its evaluations that this, and that Gazzaniga fails to acknowledge this complexity.

In criticizing Gazzaniga’s overly simplistic, and overly worried, notions about what his findings do for the idea of responsibility, Gere writes that “the concept [of responsibility] has been refined by witnesses, judges and juries ever since naturalistic accounts of mental illness began to gain traction, and it seems fairly robust as an intuition about justice.”

Although I would agree with Gere in many respects, I am not convinced that the (American, at least) legal system has really developed a “fairly robust” (in the sense of having a common, stable agreement on the matter) sense of how responsibility should function. There are numerous definitions of “insanity” in various states, and the standards have gone back and forth as first doctors suggest grounds for diminished responsibility, and then the public reacts against a sense that criminals are “getting off too easily” by virtue of an insanity defense, and push for tightening the rules.

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Jared Lee Loughner, for example, the accused shooter of numerous people in Arizona (including U.S. Representative Gabrielle Gifford), was declared “unfit to stand trial” in federal court due to schizophrenia. Under federal law (revised due to popular anger after John Hinckley, the man who tried to assassinate President Ronald Reagan, was found not guilty by reason of insanity in 1982), this does not mean he is somehow not guilty. He can be forced to take medication until he is deemed “fit,” and can then be tried. Arizona state law is different: in Arizona, even if Loughner is found to have been completely insane at the time of the killings (and therefore “not responsible” in at least some sense), he would first be committed to a mental institution if convicted, then transferred to prison if he recovers his sanity. There is no such thing in Arizona as “not guilty by reason of insanity” anymore.

In the end, although I do not share Gazzaniga’s worry about the likelihood that his findings will result in reducing criminal liability, I am not convinced by Gere’s argument that the law has already established a more “robust” approach to the question. For me, the question of diminished responsibility, especially as a consequence of mental illness, is still a contested area of the law that is neither settled nor necessarily just.

But despite this quibble, I do agree with Gere that there is more risk that the legal rules that establish diminished responsibility  are being eroded than is the fundamental concept of individual responsibility itself: “the concept of diminished responsibility is almost as much a pillar of the Anglo-American legal system as responsibility itself, and its actual erosion — as in the tabloid-stoked trend in Britain of trying minors as adults — is at least as troubling as its still-theoretical extension to all of us.”

For me, at least, just because we construct a post-hoc narrative about an action does not mean we cannot still be responsible for that action, nor do I think there’s a real risk that the legal system will disagree.

At least at the University of California, San Diego, the process involves tech transfer officers — 6 for the life sciences, 3 for other kinds of technology, and 1 who does both — reviewing the research done at UCSD. They look for innovations that may be potentially turned into marketable intellectual property. According to Dr. Montisano, a life sciences tech transfer officer at UCSD, they do not “police faculty.” As a result, they sometimes do not learn of new technology until after publication, which immediately causes the loss of international patent rights, and puts U.S. patent rights on a 1-year timeline.

If they do manage to intercept the technology in time — either through researchers submitting it to them directly, or by discovering it after publication — they review the innovation, and may file a provisional patent application to preserve their rights (this allows publication). They then have a year to convert that to a full patent.

Once they have provisional protection in place, the office looks for a good licensee for the technology. They first put a description of the innovation on the UCSD web site, making it available to interested parties who may be seeking such technology. They also identify and actively target potential companies for licensing, focusing on those they know do work in the field and who may be interested in the technology.

The point, according to Dr. Montisano, is to get the technology out into the world through commercialization, not to make a fortune, and UCSD looks for licensees on this basis. Such a focus emphasizes the public nature of the university, and emphasizes the role of the tech transfer office as the buffer zone between private and public enterprise — they license innovations for money, but do so with a goal of benefitting the public.

Additionally, the distribution process also protects researchers from undue market influences. The university owns the invention, not the professor, or grad student, or research tech. 50% of the incoming money goes to the university as a whole, while the remaining 50% is split by the department between those who developed the invention and the department. Thus, even the incoming money is diluted and sifted, buffering the researchers themselves from direct contact with the commercial players.

More rules are in place when it comes to researchers profiting or being overly involved in the commercial enterprise while retaining their role at the university. A university researcher cannot be the executive of a licensee company nor a board member, but can sit on a scientific advisory board. Such a researcher can own shares in the company, though, suggesting at least one way for the market to more directly intrude on an individual academic. Nonetheless, to be full involved in directing a licensee, a researcher must leave the university and their post as an academic and fully enter the commercial world.

Finally, the office itself is insulated from the money involved. Although they bring in millions to the University of California, UCSD’s technology transfer office is funded entirely by the state. No funding comes through a percentage of license fees and no officer receives specific bonuses for signing deals. This emphasizes their focus on the public service of commercializing technology, rather than on their use as market-enablers.

Madey v. Duke

Even after Madey, many researchers continue to ignore patent protections, and continue their work as if they didn’t need to license technology. The result has been increasing claims by license-holders, and a growing sense by researchers that this is complicating their scientific pursuits and introducing extra costs and restrictions.

Universities, now large licensors themselves of new technology thanks to Bayh-Dole and technology transfer offices, have turned to, in the language of Professor Robin Feldman, “open transfer” agreements to lossen up these restrictions. Such agreements are added to agreements when universities license their technologies for industry to develop, and permit both the licensing university and any other nonprofit they allow to use the technology for education and research. This approach co-opts the mechanisms of the market, rather like open-source licensing does, to permit the continued free sharing and publishing in the academic community.

What do these clauses look like? In the case of the University of California, San Diego, Article 2.2 of the sample agreement for licensing captures this “open transfer” provision:

2.2 Reservation of Rights. UNIVERSITY reserves the right to:
(a) use the Invention, and Patent Rights for educational and research purposes;
(b) publish or otherwise disseminate any information about the Invention at any time; and
(c) allow other nonprofit institutions to use and publish or otherwise disseminate any information about Invention and Patent Rights for educational and research purposes.

Part (a) and (b) are relatively standard in all licensing agreements, commercial or not. Most industry licenses also permit the licensor to use their own technology. Part (c) is the interesting part, as it permits other nonprofit institutions to also use and even publish on the technology, provided it is for educational and research purposes. In other words, what the Federal Circuit has taken out of common law, university tech transfer offices have recreated through their own market-focused and neoliberal license agreements.

This approach suggests that, despite efforts to commercialize the “ivory tower,” there remain creative resistance that seeks to maintain the traditional values and benefits of an academic research environment.

There are, of course, numerous challenges for tech transfer offices. Within the university, most scientists are “in it for the science” and not for the money, according to Dr. Montisano. University researchers have the tendency to publish first, forcing his office to chase after them to try to prevent the loss of patent rights (publishing first loses most international rights immediately, though U.S. law allows for a year’s grace). Outside the university, industry values focus on profit first — even if many researchers have been taught to value the science by universities first.

Diagram from James A. Severson, Ph.D., of Veratect Corporation, Kirkland, WA

Industry prefers to restrict use of its technologies to those explicitly licensed—and such licensees generally must pay for the privilege of their use. Methods and materials are kept close, as trade secrets, unless licensed out for approved use. Competitors must be kept from access to preserve corporate profits. Universities, on the other hand, have generally taken a much broader approach to technology use and sharing. Researchers in universities must “publish or perish,” and getting describing methods and approaches garners a researcher the most benefit when readership is broad. One-upping academic competitors is still a key goal, but the method is through demonstration and publishing successes, not through profit-making and market dominance.

The Bayh-Dole Act attempted to bridge the divide, and technology transfer offices are the means of its implementation. Prior to Bayh-Dole, ”legislators were concerned that for a variety of reasons, the government” — formerly the federal government owned the research it funded — ”had proved ineffective as a shepherd of the inventions created with federal research dollars” (see Open Source, Open Access, and Open Transfer: Market Approaches to Research Bottlenecks). By many measures, the results have been phenomenal: at the end of fiscal year 2009, UCSD alone had more than 400 licenses active around the world, with a steady increase since 2000. Also in 2009, UCSD’s technology transfer office distributed more than fifteen million dollars to inventors ($9 million), joint titleholders ($432 thousand) research labs and departments ($2.5 million), and the UC general fund ($2.5 million).

All the money suggests some obvious problems created by the “intrusion” of a neoliberal, market-focused approach into the “ivory tower” university environment (assuming such pure extremes ever existed). For a cash-strapped state government like California’s, why not emphasize this market-connected activity and turn universities into self-supporting institutions? Such an approach risks compromising the university focus of basic research and — perhaps even more importantly — ignores the less commodifiable teaching and research done at such institutions, especially in the humanities. Even within the sciences, forcing research to fit into license agreements and patent arrangements may impede the flow of data, slow down innovation by restricting information sharing, and, ultimately, force university researchers away from basic sciences that form the core of future applications.

Related articles

• Technology Transfer and the Third Way (kfwhite.wordpress.com)
• Columbia University’s Tech Transfer Guru, Orin Herskowitz, on Turning IT, Biotech, and Cleantech Ideas Into Businesses (xconomy.com)

Barrett has written a few times about a medical lab named Doctor’s Data, that he feels is helping certain medical practitioners defraud patients through misleading results. Here’s one example of such a report. You’ll notice that it’s pretty detailed in explaining why Barrett has problems with the use of these reports.
- Quackwatch Sued For Suggesting Medical Lab Quackery

This goal, as you might expect, sometimes gets Quackwatch in trouble. Last summer, Doctor’s Data filed a lawsuit against Quackwatch for “restraint of trade; trademark dilution; business libel; tortious interference with existing and potential business relationships; fraud or intentional misrepresentation; and violating federal and state laws against deceptive trade practices.” (Doctor’s Data, Inc. v. Barrett et al.)

From my reading, the main complaint seems to be that Barrett has gone through the test report produced by Doctor’s Data, along with the context in which medical practitioner’s request testing, and found it wanting in medical utility. Even more defaming, according to the suit, is that he wrote that primarily “nonstandard practitioners” make use of Doctor’s Data.

His description of the testing process suggests that practitioners first give patients heavy metals (“provocation”), then order a test for heavy metals, then tell them they need chelation therapy when the test results come back saying patients have elevated levels of heavy metals in their systems. His conclusion? “Provoked testing is a scam.” He goes on to review the advice endorsed by Doctor’s Data’s vice president — recommending chelation therapy — as “very, very, very, very wrong.”

Doctor’s Data took umbrage with Dr. Barrett’s criticisms, and sued. First, though, they sent a cease and desist letter, demanding a retraction, but failing to identify the specific statements at issue. After a further letter that also neglected to name specifics, Doctor’s Data filed suit in federal court in Illinois.

Without paying PACER to access the various filings, I can’t glean much more about the details and progress of the case. At first glance, it seems like a classic example of a potential SLAPP lawsuit — that is, a suit designed specifically to silence critics, whatever the merits of the criticism. Illinois does have anti-SLAPP legislation, known as the Citizen Participation Act (CPA) and, apparently, Barrett’s attorneys have indeed filed an anti-SLAPP motion.

It’s unclear to me whether such an action will be successful under the Illinois statute, since the CPA is focused primarily on protecting speech concerning government or public concern. That said, it seems to me, calling out possibly fraudulent medical activity falls on the side of discussing an issue of public concern.

Of course, defamation is an actionable offense, provided the defamatory statements are not true (truth is an absolute defense) nor mere opinion. First Amendment protections, of course, are considerations, which is likely why Doctor’s Data focused on the business aspects of the case (benefits to Quackwatch as a business — although it appears to be a nonprofit — and harm to Doctor’s Data’s business). Barrett, then, would likely emphasize that he is acting in the public interest, as journalists do, and is not, for example, trying merely to damage Doctor’s Data’s business or to act as a competitor.

I’ll be curious to see where this goes next. My prediction on the outcome? Likely favorable to the defendant — but that’s just my opinion.

Related articles

• The Quackwatch Lawsuit Attacks Free Speech And Science (blogs.forbes.com)
• Doctor’s Data Sues Quackwatch (sciencebasedmedicine.org)

Certainly textual and citation analysis approaches are not new. The scientific community has been analyzing citation patterns to determine influence since the 1960s and the development of the Science Citation Index. In the law, Shepherd’s and KeyCite are two competing methods to help determine the influence of legal cases through citation analysis.

My idea, though, is to use similar techniques to try to measure the impact of new technologies on both courtroom decisions, both substantively and — for lack of a better term — stylistically.

As an example of the first concept, X-rays were developed around 1895 by Wilhelm Röntgen. How soon after their development did courts begin to refer to them? CCTV (surveillance cameras) were first used in the U.S. around 1968 — how long was it before courts began to grapple with the issues? Did it take more or less time than with X-rays? (Obviously I would need a number of other examples.)

My second concept is to see if, for example, the number of citations in opinions — or the length of opinions, for that matter — increased or decreased as technology changed. Did the introduction of typewriters correlate to increases in opinion length or number of opinions per year per judge? Did the development of citation indexing systems like KeyCite increase the number of citations? Have online and electronic systems increased the number of citations? Similarly, have the types of citations changed? (One way to grossly measure this would be to look at how old the cases cited are when viewed from the perspective of the new decision.)

Here’s a few examples of related ideas:

• Network Analysis and the Law: Measuring the Legal Importance of Precedents at the U.S. Supreme Court
• The Hazards of Precedent: A Parameterization of Legal Change
• History of Citation Indexing (from Thomson Reuters)

Thoughts? Opinions? Anyone done similar work to this, perhaps in another field? What tools might work best?

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• Harvard reference or citation generator (dairyscience.info)
• Papers with more references are cited more often (ebiquity.umbc.edu)
• Social citations: using Mendeley API to measure citation readership (iphylo.blogspot.com)
• Impact Factors (healthlinks.washington.edu)

The main idea is that each side should take charge of their own fate, in a kind of courtroom analog to capitalism and free-market individualism, and that this self-determination is the best way to produce fairness and truth. The judge serves merely as the umpire ensuring each side follows the rules, which themselves are designed to create a level playing field between the parties. The jury must decide whose facts to believe.

This presents problems when the facts at issue are steeped in scientific dispute. In the American system (and, perhaps to a lesser extent, in all countries following the Anglo-American legal approach), science and scientific evidence emerges and is interpreted through the actions of the parties involved. Expert witnesses testify for a particular side, and are employed by a particular side.

This also presents some problems for scientific experts, who have historically grounded themselves in disinterestedness and objectivity. How does one keep out the influence of one’s employer, either out of self-interestedness or just a lack of access to anything but what one’s own side provides?

While the U.S. judicial system has developed a number of methods to deal with these problems — from various rules of evidence, to standards for judging scientific evidence from Frye to Daubert — there are still problems for scientific expertise in the courtroom. As just one example, how do you enforce rules against perjury if an expert is testifying to a theory? How are lay juries — consisting of specifically of people unfamiliar with the evidence, the case, and the facts — supposed to evaluate and decide between competing scientific claims?

Scientists and others have come up with a number of suggestions, but all of them have involved too many changes to the process for lawyers and judges to agree on implementing them. Appointing experts as direct advisors to the court, for example, interferes with traditional ideas of the judge as a neutral umpire, merely refereeing each side’s zealous advocacy. (Contrast this with European methods, which place approved experts in direct service to the judge, who, incidentally, often gathers evidence as well as overseeing the trial.) Putting scientists into the jury isn’t too popular with lawyers either — typically, special knowledge disqualifies you instead, because lawyers don’t want jurors with preconceived knowledge or ideas.

But at the very least, why not allow experts — jurors who are “people having ordinary skill in the art” — in the jury on patent trials? Or how about eliminating juries for patent trials entirely? (England, our common-law mother, did this already.) But the Constitution can make such distinctions between types of cases problematic, and in any case, lawyers and judges are invested in the current system. Questioning its fairness in one kind of case might lead to questioning it in other situations.

So what to do? How can juries possibly decide between equally compelling and apparently valid scientific theories? Do we need to change the system? Or can lay juries do just fine, despite the scientific complexities of many cases?

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• The Daubert Standard (socyberty.com)
• SFgate.com Chevron: Outtakes prove collusion with expert (sfgate.com)

In “Islam and Science,” an article written for the Oxford Handbook of Religion and Science, Nasr attempts to give a broad overview of the relationship of Islam to modern science and technology.

First, he criticizes the approach of viewing Western science as a continuation of Islamic science, and therefore accepting it uncritically as fitting in well with Islamic thought. Nasr points out, however, that this perspective ignores the “agnostic science of nature” in the Western tradition, along with the “shift of paradigm” during the European Scientific Revolution that sharply distinguishes modern Western science from Islamic science.

Second, in a related manner, he criticizes the acceptance of Western science as “value-free,” as opposed to contemporary perspectives of science  —  even in the West  —  of science as based “on a particular value system and a specific world-view.” The implicit value system of Western science, he suggests, needs instead to be criticized “from the Islamic point of view.”

Importantly for Nasr is the question of the values and especially the ethics of science. He believes that “knowledge and its implications cannot evade ethical implications.” Modern science attempts to relegate alternative claims to knowledge, especially ethical claims and most especially knowledge based on religion, to “poetry, myth, or, even worse, superstition.”

He suggests that Islam needs to realize that modern science is but “a science of nature,” not the science of nature. He posits a “positive Islamic critique of modern science” that “maintain[s] the traditional Islamic intellectual space … to which Islamic ethics corresponds, withing denying the legitimacy of modern sciences within their own confines.”

Most importantly for Nasr, Muslims should not look to science to confirm metaphysical beliefs, but rather leave to science claims only about the natural world, not the supernatural one. He asks Muslims to be wary of “the prevalent view … from which God is simply absent, no matter how many modern scientists believe individually in him.” Modern Islamic scholars, he argues, unlike their traditional counterparts in the past, are “particularly bereft of responses” to the question of Transcendent Cause and the role of God. For him, older Islamic though had better answers to such questions, and this is why so many scholars are more interested in older relations between Islam and science than in contemporary ones.

So what should be done? First, he wants Muslims to stop seeing themselves as inferior to Western science and technology, and to instead approach it as at least an equal. Again, he especially suggests that Islam and its ethics has a powerful rejoinder to Western science, which while it may put a man on the Moon still cannot stop teenagers from killing each other.

Second, he recommends there be an in-depth study of traditional Islamic sources, from the Qur’an to the traditional works on the sciences and philosophy. The goal, he argues, is to create an “Islamic world-view and especially [an] Islamic concept of nature and the sciences of nature.” He wants scholars to do this within the framework of Islamic tradition, not through simple readings of decontextualized Qur’anic verses. Third, he suggests that more Muslim students should study “pure” sciences and not technology. He believes the Muslim world already has sufficient numbers of engineers, but that what it really needs are more scientists who can see beyond immediate utility.

Fundamentally, Nasr believes that “[o]nly a science that issues from the source of all knowledge, from the Knower … and cultivated in an intellectual universe in which the spiritual and the ethical are not mere subjectivisms but fundamental features … can save humanity.” He suggests that Islamic science has the potential to not only create a “veritable Islamic science” that would help the Muslim world, but also to create a science for “those all over the globe who seek a science of nature and a technology which could help men and women to live at peace with themselves, with the natural environment, and above all, with that Divine Reality Who is the ontological source of both man and the cosmos.”

A few questions to close up this synopsis of Nasr’s article:

• Which Islam and whose Islamic ethics does Nasr mean? (It’s not like Islam is one thing to all people.) Who decides?
• Does the distinction between “pure” science and technology hold up? Is it a useful distinction?
• Is there a whiff in Nasr’s writing of the “inferiority complex” he wants Islamic science to rid itself of?
• There is a certain resemblance in Nasr’s article to positions of some evangelical Christians  —  he is, for example, critical of Darwinian evolution (an “hypothesis parading as scientific fact”) and aligns himself with the Pope in regards to “protecting the unborn”  —  is this resemblance more than simply on the surface?

These are questions I may pursue further in future reading and research, but if anyone has any thoughts, please share them.

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Looked at historically, though, the turn to philosophy of science for support is not a new move. In the nineteenth century, Creationists and fundamentalists looked to Francis Bacon as their philosopher of choice. But it was a particular use of Bacon, one that applied a rather naive realist sense of evidence and empiricism.

In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, it is secular philosophers of science Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn, opponents in life, who Creationists have turned to in their attempt to make their ideas seem as “scientific” as possible. This use appears particularly ironic given that both Popper and Kuhn  —  for all their disagreements and disputes  —  were both concerned with differentiating pseudo-science from science.

But is it an ironic use? Or is the use of these two theorists, so concerned as they were with defining the nature of science, perfectly natural given that this is exactly the debate Creationists  —  especially those in favor of “Intelligent Design”  —  are involved in? (Remember too, that the gold standard for mainstream evidence and trust today requires at least the nominal appearance of science and scientific methodology.)

Put in context, then, it seems perfectly rational and even expected that believers in alternative creation stories should turn to philosophers of science in an attempt to justify the why and how of their beliefs to outsiders.

Generally, I have to wonder if their use selective, or if they rigorously and thoroughly apply Kuhn and Popper’s theories to both their own ideas and those of mainstream science? In other words, are they simply trying to “bring down” mainstream science, or are they using these theories to bring rigor to their own approaches? From my reading, their use does appear selective, and does appear to simply be focused on reducing mainstream science to their level (please correct me if I am wrong).

Intelligent Design appears to me to be a “negative” research program, not a positive one. In other words, it defines itself in opposition to mainstream theories of evolution instead of presenting its own, falsifiable theories to explain the evidence. Noting this, Francis Collins points out that evolutionary biology makes predictions, which then work (or don’t). As far as I can tell, Intelligent Design does not do this.

Finally, why have Creationists decided on Popper and Kuhn (as opposed to, say, Quine or Putnam)? I can’t answer this as yet, but it’s an interesting question.

Although there have been sporadic attempts to reverse the policy, it has been considered so successful that the US Office of Science and Technology Policy requested public input on an extension of the rules to all federally funded research. Now, a consortium of US research institutions is putting its weight behind an effort to turn the potential OSTP policy into law.

via Universities, Congress push Open Access Research law.

Open access is not without its challenges (note: putting publishers out of business is not one of them), but it’s incredibly useful. I’d love to see this kind of policy extended beyond science and into other fields as well (although most other fields do not receive the kind of federal money that science does).