IBM's healthcare and education practices today announced a major initiative to improve interoperability and information-access through the development of open software standards. Under this initiative, IBM is pledging royalty-free access to its patent portfolio for the development and implementation of selected open healthcare and education software standards built around web services, electronic forms and open document formats. Industry growth and service delivery in healthcare and education currently are hampered by the proliferation of incompatible document formats and proprietary technology, making it difficult to find, retrieve and share data such as standardized medical records and educational resources. IBM believes its new initiative can help address the complex ecosystem across which information must be accurately, securely and efficiently shared and assist our clients in these two vital industries as they work to improve the quality and lower the costs of services they deliver to patients, physicians, students and teachers around the world. Standards can foster interoperability and dramatically improve the ability to communicate data and information among and between companies and throughout communities....IBM's work with the healthcare and education industries follows IBM's pledge of 500 software patents to the open source community earlier this year. Since then, other companies and organizations have made similar pledges helping to create an open source "patent commons."
Also see IBM's official statement of the new policy. Excerpt:
Each year, IBM generates more than a $1 billion of intellectual property income, and leads the world in U.S. patents issued. This income and pipeline are vitally important to our ability to continue to innovate. At the same time, opening access to our patents allows us to treat IP as intellectual capital that IBM invests in specific industries for them to improve services and reduce costs while helping them innovate and grow.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 10/25/2005 01:21:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
