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of approach may not be able to cope easily with the other, and the overhead involved in coping with an
unfamiliar approach can be considerable.
As one illustration, the committee heard from a professor of computer science, accustomed to the
NSF approach to proposal writing, who reported that while many biology departments have grant
administrators who provide significant assistance in the preparation of proposals to NIH (e.g., telling
the PI what is required, drafting budgets, filling out forms, submitting the proposal), his department (of
computer science) was unable to provide any such assistance—and indeed lacked anyone at all with
expertise in the NIH proposal process. As a result, he found the process of applying for NIH support
much more onerous than he had expected.
10.3.6 Issues Related to Intellectual Property and Publication Credit
Issues related to intellectual property (IP) are largely outside the scope of this report. However, it is
helpful to flag certain IP issues that are particularly likely to be relevant in advancing the frontiers at the
intersection of computer science and biology. Specifically, because information technology enables the
sensible use of enormous volumes of biological data, biological findings or results that emerge from
such large volumes are likely to involve the data collection work of many parties (e.g., different labs).
Indeed, biology as a field recognizes as significant, and even primary, the generation of good experi-
mental data about biological phenomena. By contrast, multiparty collaborations on a comparable scale
are unusual in the world of computer science, and datasets themselves are less significant. Thus, com-
puter scientists may well be taken aback by the difficulties in negotiating permissions and credit.
A second issue arises that is related to tensions between open academic research and proprietary
commercialization of intellectual advantages. Because of the potential that advances in bioinformatics
will have great commercial value, there are incentives to keep some research in bioinformatics propri-
etary (hence, not easily accessible to the peer community, less amenable to peer review, and less
relevant to professional development and advancement). In principle, this is not particularly different at
the BioComp interface than in any other research area of commercial value. Nevertheless, the fact that
traditions and practices from two different disciplines (disciplines that are at the forefront of economic
growth today) are involved rather than just one may exacerbate these tensions.
A third point is the potential tension between making data publicly available and the intellectual
property rights of journal publishers. For example, some years ago a part of the neuroscience commu-
nity sought to build a functional positron emission tomography database. In the course of their efforts,
they found that they needed to add substantial prose commentary to the image database to make it
useful. Some of the relevant neuroscience journals were reluctant to give permission to use large ex-
tracts from publications in the database. To the extent that this example can be generalized, it suggests
that efforts to build a far-reaching cyberinfrastructure for biology will have to identify and deal with
intellectual property issues as they arise.^82
(^82) In responding to this report in draft, a reviewer argued that by taking collective action, the major research institutions could
exert strong leverage on publishers to relax their copyright requirements. Today, many top-rated journals require as a condition
of publication the transfer of all copyright rights from the author to the publisher. Given the status of these journals, this
reviewer argued that it is a rare researcher who will take his or her paper from a top-rated journal to a secondary journal with
less stringent requirements in order to retain copyright. However, the researcher’s home institution could adopt a policy in
which the institution retained the basic copyright (e.g., under the work-for-hire provisions of current copyright law) but allowed
researchers to license their work to publishers but not to transfer the copyright on their own accord. Under such circumstances,
goes the argument, journal publishers would be faced with a situation of rejecting work not just from one researcher but from all
researchers at institutions with such a policy—a situation that would place far more pressure on journal publishers to relax their
requirements and would improve the ability of researchers to share their information through digital resources and databases.
The committee makes no judgment about the wisdom of this approach, but believes that the idea is worth mention.