[Community_studios] [cc-lessigletter] What is Science Commons? By John Wilbanks, Science Commons Executive Director

Lawrence Lessig lessig at pobox.com
Wed Nov 9 21:50:24 EST 2005


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Last week, I said this week's email would describe the Science  
Commons. Let me introduce John Wilbanks, executive director of the  
Science Commons. Here's his description:


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.   
Published research indicates that nearly half of all geneticists have  
been unable to validate research from colleagues due to problems with  
secrecy and legal friction.

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.

The Publishing Project
Scholarly communication in the sciences generally involves three  
components: data generated by experimental research, a peer-reviewed  
article explaining and interpreting the data, and metadata that  
describes or interprets the underlying data or the article.  
Traditionally, journal publishers were predominantly responsible for  
gathering, distributing and archiving this information.

The Internet and associated digital networks create a range of  
opportunities and challenges for changing the nature of what  
information gets stored and communicated, how and when it gets  
communicated, and how it is marked with metadata to aid in its use  
and reuse.  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.

Science Commons also has convened a working group to discuss other  
means for better associating research articles with research data and  
for standardizing metadata associated with both of these components.

The Licensing Project
In licensing, we work in a focused manner on the funding of disease  
research.  Such work involves a lot of basic science carried out by  
many individuals at a diverse range of institutions, both public and  
private, and each with different policies about intellectual property  
rights, different licensing agreements, and, to some extent, even  
different funders. When the research begins to yield the kinds of  
leads that might attract drug company attention, it will be desirable  
(both in remuneration, and also in encouragement to pharmaceutical  
companies interest and participation) to offer drug companies an  
efficient package of rights that covers the basic permissions they  
need to turn research into viable drugs and treatment regimens. The  
current practice will certainly not allow the benefits of such "one  
stop shopping."

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. While the project aims to produce a method to ameliorate  
the problem for Huntington's, we would hope to provide guidelines for  
solving such problems more generally.

The Data Project
In the United States, there is no intellectual property right on data  
(there is such a right in the European Union, albeit with mounting  
evidence that it was not needed). But current expansions in  
intellectual property law could generate an entirely new set of  
obstacles to sharing data among scientists or with the public.  
Extending intellectual property rights to databases are likely to  
result in basic data being locked up, made more expensive, or more  
easily subjected to restrictive licensing agreements.

Additionally, there is a wasteful data economy evolving in which raw  
data is not made accessible; scientists are either leery of the risks  
of losing control over their data or subject to institutional  
requirements that mandate a closed approach. Implicit in data sets  
are answers to questions the researcher perhaps did not specify –  
answers that are a consequence of the throughput of the experiment.  
This data could be reused many times over if properly annotated and  
preserved. This, however, requires a cultural shift among scientists,  
not a technical shift driven by lawyers.

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.


John Wilbanks
http://science.creativecommons.org

-------

To link to or comment on this message, go to:
http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/5695

Week 5 - CC in Review: Lawrence Lessig on Continuing the Movement
http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/5689

Week 5 - CC in Review: Lawrence Lessig on Continuing the Movement -  
Spanish Version
http://mirrors.creativecommons.org/translations/lessig-letter-5-es.pdf

Thanks to Maria Cristinia Alvite for translation.

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