I have had University Council tell me I cannot open source code I have written implementing patented algorithms. It is unfortunately more common than most people think, and often not acknowledged in publications.
While I look forward to reading this book, I recommend interested people balance it somewhat with one of the books by Uttal. Neural Theories of Mind and The New Phrenology are both good reads that raise theoretical and practical hurdles to reverse engineering brains.
Those are my favorite. I used those a ton in grad school and I highly recommend them. The only downside is that they are pretty large.
For my walk-around notebook that I carry to meetings for notes, etc, I use a quad ruled Moleskine. The pages aren't numbered, but they are permanently bound.
"Researchers must also go through IRBs (independent review boards) at their institution prior to engaging in research that deals with human subjects. If the collected data is going to be made available publicly, it makes the process more arduous."
That is not really my experience. Getting IRB approval to release human data just means proper de-identification which one should do anyway. For example, generally subjects are given randomly generated IDs with only the PI having the master list.
"I don't think there is anything particularly nefarious about their copyright policy (which explicitly allows authors to post freely available copies of their articles for non-commercial purposes.)"
This is no longer strictly true as of last year. IEEE now explicitly forbids authors from posting the officially published versions of papers. You can post preprints though, which are often better since it includes content you had to cut to avoid huge over-length charges, and any errata or updates.
Every year I struggle with whether to renew my IEEE membership, whether to continue to publish in their journals, and whether to review for those journals.
We use a system built on sakai at my university. While it isn't horrible, it isn't brilliant either.
In the CS department we have a command-line utility for submitting homework and grades, and the classes just have a simple website. Everybody likes that system more than the one based on sakai, which should give you a good idea of how much functionality sakai brings.
Additionally, everybody is now using a system called piazza[1] as an online forum for the class instead of using the one provided by sakai. I rather like it and it has met considerable success in most of the classes that deployed it. Of course, some of my professors are very enthusiastic about this system; one of them even has a testimonial on piazza's main page.
I found Sakai, at least in the "T-Square" rebranding used at Georgia Tech, pretty annoying also (as of a few years ago), but at least it isn't sucking millions of dollars from their budget. At the time (possibly now fixed?) it had a very strong single-session assumption that would cause weird things to happen if you did obvious tabbed-browsing things like opening multiple users' assignments in new tabs. The "solution" was big red warnings at the top of every page about how you shouldn't do that.
I think that tax preparation services were salivating at the prospects. Mine sent a letter with our tax prep organizer explaining the change and offering their services to prepare them for me.
