Open Access News

Science Commons (SC) was launched in early 2005. SC is a part of Creative Commons - think of us as a wholly owned subsidiary - drawing on the amazing success of CC licenses, especially the CC community and iCommons. But we're also a little different. Whereas CC focuses on the individual creators and their copyrights, SC by necessity has a broader focus. That necessity is caused by, for example, the fact that most scientists sign employee agreements that assign intellectual property rights to a host institution. Another example is that scientific journals regularly request that scientific authors sign over their copyrights, and scientists eagerly do so in return for citations in what are called "high impact" journals. There's a very real collective action problem here: no one individual or institution has strong incentives to change the system. But the system is causing problems in the scientific and academic communities. Scientific articles are locked behind firewalls, long after their publishers have realized economic returns. This means that the hot new article about AIDS research can't be redistributed much less translated into other languages (where it might inspire a local researcher to solve a local problem). The difficulties faced in relation to the "open access" of publications are easy compared to those presented when we consider access to tools and data....So Science Commons works on these problems: inaccessible journal articles, tools locked up behind complex contracts, socially irresponsible patent licensing, and data obscured by technology or end-user licensing agreements. We translate this into projects, with work in three distinctly different project spaces: publishing (covered by copyright), licensing (covered by patent and contract) and data (in the US, covered only by contract). We work on agreements between funders and grant recipients, between universities and researchers and between funders and universities --all in the service of opening up scientific knowledge, tools and data for reuse. We also promote the use of CC licensing in scientific publishing, on the belief that scientific papers need to be available to everyone in the world, not simply available to those with enough resources to afford subscription fees....Science Commons is devoted to using its legal and technical expertise to help scientific researchers make the best use possible of these new communication technologies. For example, some science publishers experimenting with a new business model for scholarly communication require authors of peer-reviewed articles to grant a Creative Commons license in their articles. These publishers include the Public Library of Science, BioMed Central, and Springer OpenChoice.... Using Huntington's Disease research as a case study, Science Commons is exploring a "technology trust," which will combine an intellectual property rights conservancy, patent pool and other related rights- bundling methods. We are assessing the types of problems of rights-fragmentation, a range of possible legal solutions to this problem (including compulsory terms in funder agreements), the institutional design of the trust or conservancy, and the question of what institution would be best suited to administer such a trust or conservancy....The Science Commons Data project has two aspects. First, we assert that data should not be covered by intellectual property law. As part of this project we provide a resource for database providers struggling with licensing. Second, we are looking to improve on the data economy by aiding in the construction of an integrated web of data, papers, tools, and policy with the explicit goal of facilitating research into brain disease - the NeuroCommons.

(PS: Disclosure: I serve on SC's Publishing Working Group.)