[Insight-developers] Open Access | Science Commons

[Luis Ibanez]

http://science.creativecommons.org/

Welcome to Science Commons

Our goal is to encourage stakeholders to create areas of free access and
inquiry using standardized licenses and other means; a 'Science Commons'
built out of voluntary private agreements.

Science Commons is a project of the non profit corporation Creative Commons.

Science Commons was launched in 2005 with the generous support of the
HighQ Foundation and Creative Commons. It is overseen by members of the
Creative Commons board; including MIT computer science professor Hal
Abelson, intellectual property experts James Boyle, Michael Carroll, and
Lawrence Lessig, and lawyer and documentary filmmaker Eric Saltzman.
Bioinformatics entrepeneur and metadata expert John Wilbanks is the
Executive Director of the project.

We are guided in our work by a remarkable Scientific Advisory Board
including 2002 Nobel Laureate Sir John Sulston, 1958 Nobel Laureate
Joshua Lederberg, renowned genomics and bioinformatics scientist Michael
Eisen, prominent economist Paul David and the distinguished patent law
and biotech scholar, Arti Rai.

Science Commons is housed at and receives generous support from the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where Science Commons shares
space, staff, and inspiration with the Computer Science and Artificial
Intelligence Laboratory.


----------------

Background - Science Commons


http://sciencecommons.org/about/scbackground


A brief history on why Creative Commons launched the Science Commons
project.

The sciences depend on access to and use of factual data. Powered by
developments in electronic storage and computational capability,
scientific inquiry is becoming more data-intensive in almost every
discipline. Whether the field is meteorology, genomics, medicine, or
high-energy physics, research depends on the availability of multiple
databases, from multiple public and private sources, and their openness
to easy recombination, search and processing.

Traditions in Intellectual Property

In the United States, this process has traditionally been supported by a
series of policies, laws, and practices that were largely invisible even
to those who worked in the sciences themselves.

First, American intellectual property law (and, until recently, the law
of most developed countries) did not allow for intellectual property
protection of "raw facts." One could patent the mousetrap, not the data
on the behavior of mice, or the tensile strength of steel. A scientific
article could be copyrighted. The data on which it rested could not be.
Commercial proprietary ownership was to be limited to a stage close to
the point where a finished product entered the marketplace. The data
upstream remained for all the world to use.

Second, US law mandated that even those federal government works that
could be copyrighted, fell immediately into the public domain - a
provision of great importance given massive governmental involvement in
scientific research. More broadly, the practice in federally funded
scientific research was to encourage the widespread dissemination of
data at or below cost in the belief that, like the interstate system,
this provision of a public good would yield incalculable economic benefits.

Third, in the sciences themselves, and particularly in the universities,
a strong sociological tradition - sometimes called the Mertonian
tradition of open science - discouraged the proprietary exploitation of
data (as opposed to inventions derived from data) and *required as a
condition of publication the availability of the datasets on which the
work was based*.

Innovation in Technology and Legal Friction

Each of these three central tenets evolved from concepts that existed
even before the Industrial Revolution--at the innately slow rate of
change of the legal system. Similarly, scientific publication has a
long-standing tradition. Modern technologies, especially the evolving
use of the World Wide Web as a library, have forever changed the
mechanisms for delivery and replication of documents. In many fields,
results are published nearly as quickly as they are found. But copyright
law has evolved at a different rate. Progress in modern technology
combined with a legal system designed for a different technology-based
environment is now leading to some unintended consequences. One of these
is a kind of legal "friction" that hinders reuse of scientific
discoveries and could lead to discouraging innovation.

To counterbalance, a large and vibrant community has joined together in
support of the concept of Open Access for scientific literature -
"digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and
licensing restrictions". The U.S. National Institutes of Health have
proposed mandated Open Access to all NIH-funded research starting six
months after the print date, and there is support for the initiative in
the U.S. Congress. Most major journals have granted authors the right to
self-publish versions of their peer-reviewed papers. But the legal
questions - how can an author make her work available to the public,
while taking comfort that she retains some rights to it - have yet to be
answered.

The different rates of change between modern technology and the law
create friction in other places as well. For example, in the genetic
realm, patent law has moved perilously close to being an intellectual
property right over raw facts - the C's, G's A's and T's of a particular
gene sequence. In other areas, complex contracts of adhesion create de
facto intellectual property rights over databases, complete with "reach
through agreements" and multiple limitations on use. Legislatively, the
US is considering and the EU has adopted a "database right" which
actually does accord intellectual property protection to facts -
changing one of the most fundamental premises of intellectual property:
that one could never own facts, or ideas, only the inventions or
expressions yielded by their intersection.

The Federal government's role is also changing. Under the important and
in many ways admirable Bayh-Dole statute, federally funded researchers
are encouraged to look for potential commercial use of their research.
Universities have become partners in developing and reaping the fruits
of research. This process has yielded amazing results in many cases by
converting raw, basic science into useful products in many industries.
But as a consequence, the quest to commercialize has moved upstream in
some cases, to the fundamental levels of research and data, and that has
created complex legal requirements. While the details can get complex
when the intellectual property at hand is a novel "method" for assaying
biological activity, there are even more questions about patents
covering the genes, proteins and their inferred functions.

The sheer cost in terms of time and money of such complex, multi-party
legal work can take intellectual property "out of play" - it is simply
more expensive to do the lawyer work than the product might reap on the
open markets after the legal work is done. This hinders scientific
innovation, as the value of scientific information increases
exponentially in connection with other scientific information, and is of
the least possible value when segregated by law.

The Search for a Solution

These facts have not gone unnoticed. Numerous scientists have pointed
out the irony that, at the historical moment when we have the
technologies to permit worldwide availability and distributed processing
of scientific data, legal restrictions on transfer make it harder to
connect the dots. Learned societies including the National Academies of
Sciences, federal granting agencies such as the National Science
Foundation, and other groups have all expressed concern about the trends
that are developing. Any solution will be need to be as complex as the
problem it seeks to solve, which is to say it will be interdisciplinary,
multinational, and involve both public and private initiatives.

Enter Science Commons

Science Commons is an exploratory project to apply the philosophies and
activities of Creative Commons in the realm of science. Science Commons
works in three project areas: Publishing, Licensing, and Data.

* Project: Publishing   http://sciencecommons.org/literature
* Project: Licensing    http://sciencecommons.org/licensing
* Project: Data         http://sciencecommons.org/data