I have been waiting to chime in on this, and this is really a point I think
people miss. Universities are businesses, at their core. The term
non-commercial really doesn't make sense to me - someone is making money on
it, and advancing their institution. I prefer to refer to them as
non-profit and/or not-for-profit, and rely on the IRS definition with all of
its implications.



A disclaimer - I am the owner of one of those non-university, for-profit
businesses that seeks to make a living in certain scientific endeavors. And,
like Andy, I have made some of my resources available free of charge for the
academic research community. While I know my thoughts on the topic may not
be shared by others, I would like to offer my perspective.



Regarding the original post, I think any effort to spread the costs around
to many users is a very efficient way to build a world-class atlas set.
Nothing else exists of the quality and quantity - I've spent a lot of time
looking around. When I needed a good hippocampus with a different
anatomical definition, I supported the Hippocampal Protocol financially, as
did a number of other funding organizations and businesses. ADNI is the
another prime example of this - even though it is very open access, many
large businesses joined in with the federal funding to make it happen.
However, with no big-guns funding, a project like this needs to find the
funding in the best way it can, and this seems to me to be quite reasonable
and workable. And probably it would not be done in any other way right now.
I will be buying a subscription to the service sometime next year. It is
feasible business plan to make a unique offering work in a tough
environment.



Before starting my business, I thought long and hard about some of the
issues people have brought up about the world of business in science. Of
course I have heard of all the evils of big pharma and other businesses for
many years. But, bottom line, I have generally found little to separate
academia from many businesses in the scientific fields. EVERYBODY NEEDS TO
MARKET THEIR PRODUCT. EVERYBODY NEEDS TO GET PAID. Your university
requires your lab to be funded to keep you on staff, and they take a
substantial cut off the top to supply needed facilities and services as well
as advance their own goals. That is their business model, to hire
researchers to bring the money, and build the institution off their work.
As to marketing, I often see big-guns research institutions marketing their
newest finding as a breakthrough - even though it is simply a confirmatory
study of something published by others year before. And the best ones at
that kind of marketing game are the top names in the business.



To me, it looks like a double standard exists in a number of ways. As a
business, I am asked to pay $4000 for a booth at SFN this year to give away
my software. Conference attendees from most institutions can't take a pen,
meal, etc. from me. But software that takes hundreds of thousands of
dollars to create and fine-tune (not counting the grant funds it took to
create the open-source platform I base it on) - taking it for free is not a
problem. There is an assumption by many in academia that businesses aren't
really interested in good science, only making money for their investors.
Avoiding taking the 50-cent pen or the $20 meal, but gladly accepting very
expensive, specialized software doesn't make sense if your goal is to avoid
any hint of potential bias in your research.



As for free and open data and software, who pays for the scans, the
programmers, the servers to host the data, etc.? And for some notable
institutions, their high-paid PI's? Regarding some comments earlier, I that
that just because it isn't paid for by each researcher doesn't mean it
should be instantly considered to be more scientifically or socially
acceptable. Most of what is freely available was paid for in large part by
the Federal government because they saw a need to support it. They wouldn't
want to keep paying many different groups to develop software with the same
functionality, especially if they are created to different standards and
produce different results. While this may have been very good in some ways,
I think it has taken away the competitive spirit that is needed to really
create top-quality software and push the limits on performance and creative
solutions. The potential market is gone, with little motivation to improve.
For some other less popular tools and data, the federal funding to create
shared tools is just not there. That is the area left for small business to
fill, and it isn't a very large or profitable market.



In the instance of image analysis software, my field, there is currently a
disconnect between that used in research, and what has been developed with
the rigor and standards needed so that it can be used in clinical trials and
healthcare. One of my goals is to bridge that gap and level the field,
providing without charge to the non-profit academic research community a
basic version of the same software we are developing for clinical trials and
eventually, as an FDA cleared tool for biomarkers. I have built my pipeline
on an open-source platform that is commercializable, and I think giving back
is important. But I have an NIH SBIR to support it, and was required to
show how I protect my intellectual property as a part of the application.
So as part of that, I don't release the source code. Yet some feel that
isn't right - they need to have my full source code to deem software as
socially acceptable for the research community. To provide source code
takes away any intellectual property upon which you build your business - no
IP, no business. And many of the end users of the software wouldn't know
what to do with the source code anyway. So for me, open source is not an
option, even though I gain from the open source tools. And for my work to
have a positive effect on clinical research, it isn't necessary that it be
open source. I freely discuss my methods and am happy to share what I can.



If we want to look at the motivation of money in science further, let's look
a different look at academic research. Very few scientists get paid to do
whatever they want, to follow their imagination and creativity and really
break through the tough questions. If they wish to be funded they choose
from a list of current, relevant topics that someone will pay them to work
on, taking the next small step in understanding the bigger picture. In
essence, a researcher is applying for a contract to do only what the funding
organization deems useful. One may not like to admit it, but the money truly
is driving the field. NIH, NSF or whomever is funding the grants is
deciding what areas of scientific pursuit are worthy of funding, trying to
direct the advance of knowledge as quickly and efficiently as possible.
However, the funding organizations may also be completely missing the areas
that could really have an impact on health and advances in understanding
nature. And clearly, with the frantic writing of multiple proposals that
some researchers now do to attempt to get funded, not every grant proposal
is well thought out, well designed, or will have the impact that merits the
money it requires. But some get funded because they market their ideas well
and the concept is currently "sexy" in the field. And conversely, many great
proposals never get funded. The high level applications are boring, filled
with discussion and concepts the reviewers don't have the perspective to
appreciate. A few truly good ideas that could change lives are probably
being missed, simply because they don't fit into the incremental method of
discovery that we are stuck in.



I am very grateful for those resources that are "free and open", and I
provide what I can in this way. This once-radical concept has accelerated
many areas of research. But I don't know of any substantial resource that
was actually free - somebody paid for it, often with the understanding that
it would be made freely available. And I, for one, do not agree that it
makes it more socially acceptable or scientifically appropriate; it simply
meets the needs of the funding organization. If lack of that resource is a
roadblock for the field, it is much more expedient and fiscally responsible
for the funding organizations to ensure it is made available to all.
However, as I have said earlier, the long-term affect may actually limit the
quality of tools, since there may be less motivation to create something
better. There is just no money in it.



Would science in general move faster if all data and tools were required to
be free and open? I expect some areas would, but for those areas that
depend on services like those NeuroMorphometrics provides, I know that it
wouldn't. It would grind to a halt. You can't find many researchers who
care enough about accuracy, reliability and validity of the data to pay for
the labor intensive resources this atlas set provides. If you didn't charge
something, you couldn't even keep the power on to make it available. And if
you charged what it actually cost to create an set of 60 manually traced
segmentations for each request, most researchers would find some easy (and
usually sloppy) way to get the job done instead. And many of the end users
simply wouldn't ever know the difference or even care. The software runs,
makes pretty pictures, and gets papers published so they can move on to the
next grant proposal.



Ron Pierson



Brain Image Analysis, LLC