It seems a truism that science and technology function best when new discoveries and ideas can circulate freely and find the widest audience. But governments and businesses face constant pressures toward secrecy. Ideally, society should strike a balance between transparency in government and the privacy that citizens have come to expect, between openness in research and the protections that commercialization requires.
Individuals and companies have launched initiatives recently that enhance open access in many welcome ways. Patrick O. Brown and Michael B. Eisen have served as effective champions for the burgeoning open-access movement in fundamental research. Eisen and Brown are among the founders of the Public Library of Science and were instrumental in its successful launch of several new journals that are freely available online, including a medical journal inaugurated in October 2004. They worked behind the scenes to persuade Congress and the National Institutes of Health to increase public access to taxpayer-funded research, and they guided the formation of new policies that require that all scientific articles generated by NIH grants be deposited in PubMed Central.
A substantial endowment of intellectual property to the public domain came from IBM. The tech giant waived royalties permanently on 500 of its software patents and counterpart patents in other countries, in essence providing a substantial endowment of intellectual property to the fertile community of “open source” programmers. Although the 500 patents represent a small fraction of Big Blue's portfolio, they reinforce numerous other steps that make IBM a noteworthy leader in embracing the open-source movement. IBM buttressed Linux by offering the operating system on a number of its products years ago, and the company has assigned many of its own programmers to develop new software for that free and open platform.
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Freeing information of a different kind, MyPublicInfo, Inc., launched in 2004 a novel and valuable service that, for an affordable fee, allows citizens to view the complete contents of public records attached to their identity. Whereas credit reports have been available for a long time, MyPublicInfo gathers a much broader dossier from legal, government and educational records. The company wisely takes pains to authenticate the identity of its customers so that it does not inadvertently abet the very identity thieves that it aims to thwart.
Customers of MyPublicInfo may be unpleasantly surprised to see how much of their “private” information is available in the public domain—and how much of it is erroneous. In the same vein, Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania and Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont introduced legislation earlier this year that would give Americans more control over information that businesses and government agencies collect on them. The Personal Data Privacy and Security Act requires data brokers to let people see what information the brokers have about them and allows citizens to correct many kinds of inaccuracies in the databases. The bill is scheduled for consideration by the Senate this year.