Montreal Neurological Institute going ‘open’ to accelerate science | Hacker News Reader

Montreal Neurological Institute going ‘open’ to accelerate science

science.sciencemag.org

29 pointsbrahmwg9 comments

One way to deal with the "complexity of the problem" is to actually keep patentability and license out the patents to start-ups or established companies that can actually do something with them. I guess this would require more effort to match up/recruit the institution's patents (assuming they have any useful ones) to companies that might be interested. But economically, in terms of getting their research translated to the bench more quickly, this is an established model that might be more effective in the long-term.

Indeed, "Participation is voluntary, and researchers can pursue patents on their own, but MNI will not pay the fees or help with the paperwork." This basically shifts responsibility from the institution to the researcher; not sure how this is a good idea.

Patents and licenses seem like financial solutions, but aside from keeping people funded, how would they help with complexity? I suspect much of the complexity is in the basic science, and the "open science" approach is meant to make it easy for many people with fresh ideas to contribute.

If you read the article, the "complexity" refers to the lack of translation from bench to clinic. IP is the fundamental currency to attract investment to get scientific discoveries through the regulatory process. You can still have "open science" in the sense you are using this term and have patents; see CRISPR/Cas9 as a prime example.

I'd suggest reading a bit farther into the article:

"[Rouleau] says the kind of early-stage science that the institute does is not really worth protecting. “There is a fair amount of patenting by people at the institute, but the outcomes have not been very useful,” he says, adding that the institute would rather provide data that others could use to develop patentable medicines. “It comes down to what is the reason for our existence? It's to accelerate science, not to make money."

I think the main point is that most scientific discoveries don't need to make it through some regulatory process, because they are knowledge (and not technology). I think CRISPR is a good example of something that does benefit from that model, though.

There are many reasons for why the "outcomes have not been very useful," so there's not much point in speculating. Suffice it to say if patents have been filed in the past (i.e. some number of people thought their research was worth protecting) and researchers at a given institution are still allowed to file patents on their work, it makes no sense to take away the supporting resources that the institution is supposed to provide to help in filing patents.

I don't mean to diminish the value of patents, but in this case, it's safe to say there is biological complexity limiting the translation to treatment. As someone working in this area, I wish there were more potentially patentable material...

This is kind of exciting. I wonder if we'll be able to play with BigBrain:

https://muhc.ca/newsroom/article/first-ever-3d-atlas-brain-b...

> They include freely providing all results, data, software, and algorithms;

Wait, what? That's unheard of in science. They're really all going to be publishing their source code? All of it?

The MNI already has quite a bit of free software, such as MINC:

http://www.bic.mni.mcgill.ca/ServicesSoftware/MINC

But they really are going to publish everything else? That's amazing!

This is becoming a bit of a movement, without the underlying software to examine, scientific results cannot be fully verified independently, entropy makes the software conditions hard to replicate to repeat the exact experiments, so it's good to see a big name on board.

It will be interesting to see how the open collaboration requirement works in practice. Presumably it only requires the external collaborators to agree to openness, and not their institutions.

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