In my Computer Science curriculum last year, everyone is tasked to create something that has to do with programming. (Not actual rule, but you get the gist of it.) All of us must hand in the project, with research papers, for academic purposes.

I thought about having the research papers be accessed freely by the public for public consumption, but since I'm naïve about all of this stuff, what do the more experienced think about this? As for the 2 years period, since technology evolves at an exponential rate, it may be possible that some of the academic projects may get defunct, or that there are newer updates that improves/removes the old functions that were used during the research.

The poll question contains "X years", signifying that it may or may not be just 2 years. It could be 50 years for all I know. Possibly 75 years due to copyright laws, maybe even 100 years after death of the creator/bankruptcy of a company according to future laws.

I think it should be up to the author unless it becomes a standard, then it should become open/free/cheap after x years as to stop an unfair advantage.

The professors working at the tax funded(Nothing is free afterall) universities in some european countries have their salaries paid for by the tax payers, thus it is quite reasonable that their work should belong to the public.

There is a difference between the projects and published articles.

The articles students write and publish should be more accessible. Computer Science programs are more liberal in this generally because the CS students and departments nearly always put the articles and papers on their web sites for a time.

The projects they create, however, are a different story.

Many times the projects serve as a springboard for further research. At graduate schools the projects tend to grow for many years and spawn into many future projects.

When I attended graduate school I was studying graphics and I was employed as by the school as a "research assistant". Those projects belong to the school, just as my projects today belong to my employer, but they were also projects created by students for use in their courses.

(Strange how I still think of it as "our lab", even though I haven't been a student there for many years.)

Our lab had sold many of our creations.

The "Magnetic Lasso" in Photoshop and "Intelligent Scissors" in GIMP both came from the same family of research projects in our lab. There is still much active work in interactive segmentation and editing.

Google Maps has ties to the lab's terrain research, where in 1998 we were publishing papers like "Interactive Display of Very Large Textures" that worked much like Google Maps, adding heightmap rendering but not as much as Google Earth.

We've had handwriting recognition techniques, "Live Surface" medical visualizations, automated generation of 3D models from photographs, and much more.

Many of these projects have been sold or licensed for considerable amounts of money.

And that is just from one lab. The CS department has many, each one creating very useful projects by students as part of their studies.

So:

Papers? Yes, release them. This helps further future research and is funded by many sources. Papers are the condensed knowledge and are very valuable to outsiders.

Projects? No, keep them. The implementation details are less portable than the research papers themselves, and the projects help future research at the school.

I don't understand how releasing the project interferes with the school's further research at all?

In the EU, you own what you wrote (papers or programs) except if it's contract work, which precludes a contract that either states clearly what you are to make, or a general employment as programmer or artist or such, and of course... being paid.

Some companies (mostly the three major US consulting companies) are trying to outmanueuver the law by making people sign work contracts that basically say they own anything you produced while employed, including what you wrote in your free time. This is of course entirely illegal, but most people accept it out of fear of losing their job and being ostracised.

SimonForsman's stance on public universities is ethically correct. Public universities (all materials and employees, including e.g. professors and research assistants) in the EU are paid exclusively by tax funds. Insofar it is only just and reasonable that what they produce belongs to the public. Of course, students aren't being paid, so that's a different thing.

In practice, it happens that university employees patent/sell their work anyway, and there exist non-profit associations which are freed from paying tax and governmentally subsided, which develop technologies using governmental funds, patent them, and enforce the patents, worldwide. Did I hear anyone cough MP3?

Also, in practice, if you write something that's outstanding, all of it belongs to your professor (even if he didn't do a thing). And you had better shut up about it, if you're interested in ever having an academic career.