IRBs and the [unjustifiable] limits of academic freedom?

From Clay Spinuzzi's blog:

Alas, no. Because any self-respecting institutional research board would balk at raw qualitative data being stored on a machine or server that is not owned and properly secured by the university. My IRB, for instance, specifies that data must be password-protected and stored on a hard drive that is encrypted at rest.

Let's first admit that I'm taking this quote out of context. Spinuzzi is considering using a "clouded system" (my quote) for aggregating qualitative data -- essentially storing data in a space like Google Docs. We had some discussion about this sort of ethical issue when we thought about putting grades in a Google Doc spreadsheet. Can you really ensure its protection? As I pointed out with Google's inability to protect anonymous blogs on Blogger, the answer is clearly no, both in theory and practice.

Though I wrote the blog post too quickly, without editing carefully enough (which is to say I've a misprint in the part he quotes *sigh*), B.r.e.n.d.a.n. R.i.l.e.y. (for whom Google Alerts provided the digital version of burning ears; I'm fudging his name here so he won't feel compelled to check this out until I'm done editing this time!) commented on my earlier blog on intellectual ownership. He and Laurie Taylor wrote the article I linked to earlier that does a very good job explaining open source from an academic context.

Here's an overly liberal quote from his blog.

This attitude does depend, as ruffin seems to acknowledge, on an idea that one must give up one’s claims on “intellectual property,” at least to some degree. He writes:

Others can still use your content to teach for pay. Your dean could still throw fifteen sections of the class on the books using your open content without asking, and now he could do it even if your university doesn’t claim to own the materials by virtue of some esoteric server ownership pact with the devil.

Yep, they can! (Only in Higher Ed would we find this scandalous at all. If you work in any other industry and produce something as part of your work, the company is expected to take that thing and do stuff with it. The folks who came up with the Nike swoosh got paid for doing so, but they don’t maintain rights over it. My cousin who works in biomedical engineering certainly doesn’t expect to keep her research or control it. Only teachers argue that their teaching materials are anything other than “work for hire.”)

I could see feeling a little chagrined if someone started making bucketloads of money from them, but ultimately my teaching materials are another form of my scholarship–they’re what I’m contributing back to the commons. And our culture is so wedded to the idea that we own our ideas that the idea of losing control of those ideas makes us revolt.

My contention with B.r.e.n.d.a.n. and now the powers that be as I've selectively quoted them from Spinuzzi's blog comes from the quote, "stored on a machine or server that is not owned and properly secured by the university". Why is that -- university ownership -- an issue? Why should IRBs force us to keep our information within the university? Whose research is it?

Look, my issue here is the corporate university, right? There's not much I'm trying to hide. I'm actually all for Open Source and giving away scholarship. I think that's the daggum point, after all. What I'd hoped to point out in that earlier blog was that Open Sourcing something doesn't provide some idealistically pure level of protection, and that we should be awfully careful that we understand how Open works before adopting it ourselves. Even though we make an end run around copyright, your academic labor can still be exploited in ways that make Corporation U proud.

What I dislike is the way the university continues to place itself between scholarship and the public paying for it. I'm not working in "any other industry". I've worked in a few of those, and I'd prefer to work in a protected space outside of that system, a space that performs as a check and balance on the system that'd rather own my work and run it through a profit maximization machine than share it unconditionally. Working at the government, the amount of pork redistribution -- and the degree that such redistribution of public funds to the private sector was used as a register of success -- drove me crazy in a similar fashion. Strangely enough, working at a mid-sized corporation was the most honest work environment I've yet seen. At least they admitted they were just trying to make [every] buck, bless their hearts.

That the university might be using the discourse of ethics to position themselves between the scholar and his patrons (the public, thank you very much, at least at NC State and, I believe, Spinuzzi's UT Austin) bothers me like you wouldn't believe. Blackbaud? For them (a corp), this would be a smart move, an understandable move, a justifiable move.

Only in Corporate U would ethics economics coming before scholarship not be found scandalous at all. Isn't it strange that the only sites that seem safe from this sort of influence, the ones in the humanities most ready to give to the public without serious compulsion, are the ones funded by private endowments or, surprisingly, Microsoft once the possibility for long-term profit is gone?