A complex controversy worth following

“When you have a chance, take a look at the 268 page draft Recommended Principles & Practices to Guide Academy-Industry Relationships from the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). If well-crafted, such principles are badly needed. If you don't have enough reasons of your own, here's a personal favorite of mine. After the disastrous gulf oil spill of April 2010 , BP hired scientists to study its extent and effects. The BP contract , however, prohibited researchers from "publishing their research, sharing it with other scientists or speaking about the data that they collect for at least the next three years....[It required them] to withhold data even in the face of a court order if BP decides to fight such an order...[and] stipulate[d] that scientists will be paid only for research approved in writing by BP...."  For undermining the integrity and availability of research, I gave BP a "Worst of 2010" award in my review of OA developments for that year . Imagine if we could have said, at the time, that the very idea of such a contract violated AAUP principles for industry-sponsored research. The AAUP draft principles are already controversial. John Vaughn of the Association of American Universities (AAU) has already criticized them for putting faculty interests ahead of university interests, and undermining Bayh-Dole tech transfer. The draft doesn't mention open access or open data. It comes closest in these three principles: Principle 3. Academic Publication Rights: Academic publication rights must be fully protected, with only limited delays (a maximum of 30-60 days...) to remove corporate proprietary information, confidential information, and/or to file for patents prior to publication. Sponsor efforts to obstruct, and/or sponsored research agreements that do not permit, the free, timely, and open dissemination of research data, codes, reagents, methods, and results are unacceptable.... Principle 17. Exclusive and Nonexclusive Licensing: Universities, their contracted management agents, and faculty should avoid exclusive licensing of patentable inventions, unless such licenses are absolutely necessary....Exclusive or monopolistic control of academic knowledge should be used sparingly, rather than as a presumptive default....[T]he preferred methods for disseminating university research are nonexclusive licensing and open dissemination, to protect universities’ public interest mission, open research culture, and commitment to the advancement of research and inquiry through broad knowledge sharing. To enhance compliance and public accountability, universities should require all invention management agents to publicly and promptly report any exclusive licenses issued together with written statements detailing the necessity for the exclusive license and why a nonexclusive license would not suffice.... Principle 20. Diverse Licensing Models for Diverse University Inventions:Universities and their invention management agents should develop multiple licensing models for diverse categories of academic inventions, reflecting differing objectives and commitments made by faculty investigators and inventors, varying practices in the wider community and in different industries, and models appropriate for the conditions that present at different stages of the development of those specific technologies....Faculty investigators/inventors and their management agents should work cooperatively to identify effective licensing and/or distribution models for each invention with the goal of enhancing public availability and use. This may involve more established models (exclusive or nonexclusive licensing), or more emergent ones (patent pools, open sourcing, and public licensing, offered by institutions like Creative Commons for copyright-based work). The AAUP welcomes comments on the draft. Send your thoughts to Greg Scholtz, director of the AAUP’s Department of Academic Freedom, Tenure, and Governance at . See the coverage of the draft principles in the Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed .”