Data rights to publish Labview project as part of a journal ESI

[dbanning@uoregon.edu]

Good day all, 

First, I apologize for the dumb question. I am submitting a chemistry article for publication, in which we used labview to run chemical sensors. I have tried exporting a VI (so people can replicate what we did), and using the "print" option to list out all the dependencies and everything into a .rtf document. I am just trying to make sure that including a VI in a chemistry paper electronic supplemental information (ESI) is something that I am allowed to do (I'm thinking copyright/data rights issues). I'm probably overthinking it, but just wanted to get some opinions and I can't find an email to ask NI directly. 

[GerdW]

Hi dbanning,

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dbanning@uoregon.edu wrote:

I am just trying to make sure that including a VI in a chemistry paper electronic supplemental information (ESI) is something that I am allowed to do (I'm thinking copyright/data rights issues). I'm probably overthinking it, but just wanted to get some opinions and I can't find an email to ask NI directly. 

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It's your source code and you can do anything with it you like…

It is your source code, isn't it?

[dbanning@uoregon.edu]

Thanks for the reply! All of us listed authors on the paper wrote it. I just wanted to make sure that we were allowed to publish this work at a chemical journal...I didn't think our school license would allow us to, for instance, sell a program we developed in labview, but I just wanted to make sure there was no legal issues with publishing our work in the form of an article ESI. And I'm also curious why I can't find an email listed anywhere under "contact us" so I could get an official NI reply, or maybe I just overlooked it

[rolfk · Accepted solution]

NI is an American firm. As such you won't get a specific statement out of them other than a simple referral to their standard EULA or other existing legal document somewhere. No-one at NI is really allowed to make any legal binding agreement or even give legally relevant interpretations of anything NI does with anyone, without first consulting with their lawyers. That takes typically anywhere from a few months to forever.

That all said, you and whoever wrote that LabVIEW application, own the rights to any ideas expressed within that application to the extend that you haven't another agreement with your university, employer or grant giver. You do not own any rights on LabVIEW itself or specific implementations of algorithms used in the nodes you used for your application, but what you and your colleagues created with those nodes is yours.

So yes, as far as NI is concerned you have the right to publish a paper of your work and describe the algorithms you implemented using LabVIEW functions. It is likely even important to mention that you used specific LabVIEW functions to implement your algorithms since there are variations in implementations of mathematical and numerical functions in software that might make it impossible to reproduce your algorithm in another software environment without knowing about these differences and adjusting for them.