Open access for scientific research drives Shane Mueller to develop open source software | opensource.com

abernard102@gmail.com 2013-12-16

Summary:

"Scientific software tools have long lived in the conflict zone between open source ideals and proprietary exploitation. The values of science (openness, transparency, and free exchange) are at odds with the desires of individuals and organizations to transition scientific tools to a commercial product. This has been a problem in neuropsychology and neuroscience for decades, and extends outside the bounds of software. Typically, a psychological test (for example, a set of questions used to identify a personality trait) may have been developed over a series of experiments to produce a coherent, sensitive, and a valid predictor of the trait. The questions themselves are often not useful unless these psychometric properties have been assessed using a large sample of people, a process that typically involves sponsored research from a federal agency. The norms may be published and can be used as a reference to anyone with access to them, but the test itself is intellectual property owned by a researcher, university, or other organization that developed it. This creates a conflict whereby public funding is used to develop tests that may only be available commercially, creating a publicly-subsidized system of rent-collectors and sharecroppers. Many tests live in an area of benign neglect where they are treated as 'open source', but they really are not. One well-known example of a test is the Mini-Mental State Exam (MMSE), introduced by Folstein et al. in 1975. Physicians, psychologists, and psychiatrists found it incredibly useful: a fast (5-minute), free test that could reliably tell if someone was suffering cognitive impairment (perhaps because of a stroke or brain injury). It was widely used, copied, and redistributed for decades, was the subject of thousands of follow-up research studies, and became the de facto standard for screening. However, since becoming widespread, the original authors licensed the test to a company that requires a small usage fee per test (see Newman and Feldman, 2011). The value of the test is derived as much from the community that has used and studied the test for the past decades as from the original research developing the test, yet the test is now protected, and efforts to develop a replacement test (see Fong's Sweet 16) have been accused of copyright violations by the MMSE copyright holders. One solution to these problems is for researchers to develop and promote open source testing. But developing open source psychological tests face a number obstacles. These include: competition from tests that are now free but may not always be; the reluctance of clinicians and researchers to use new tests without available norms; the difficulty in obtaining funding for developing norms for work-alike tests; the threat of legal action against work-alike tests; and even the difficulty in publishing those norms in journals that look at the research as not novel enough.  Unfortunately, the costs of this are substantial, and are borne by the health care system (which must pay licenses for clinical tests) or by the federal agencies who fund research grants that purchase licenses to use those tests. My own research efforts have the aim of improving this situation, by bringing open source software to the psychology community.   Ten years ago, I began developing an open source software platform for psychological and neuroscience tests and experiments, called the Psychology Experiment Building Language (PEBL). PEBL was only possible because it leveraged a number of other open source libraries, including the gnu cpp compiler, GNU Bison, and FLEX, the excellent SDL gaming libraries(including sdl_image, sdl_ttf, sdl_net and the third-party sdl_gfx, and waave libraries), and other open source tools for developing image and sound stimuli (GIMP, Inkscape, and Audacity) ... "

Link:

http://opensource.com/life/12/12/developing-open-source-tests-psychology-and-neuroscience

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.new oa.licensing oa.comment oa.copyright oa.software oa.tools oa.floss oa.neuro oa.psychology oa.pebl oa.libre oa.ssh

Date tagged:

12/16/2013, 16:52

Date published:

12/16/2013, 11:52