Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

cc-info - [cc-info] ccNewsletter #7 - Science Commons

cc-info AT lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: The Creative Commons monthly newsletter.

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: "Melissa Reeder" <melissa AT creativecommons.org>
  • To: cc-info AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [cc-info] ccNewsletter #7 - Science Commons
  • Date: Mon, 9 Jun 2008 10:11:15 -0700

Dear All,

Creative Commons, as an organization, has undergone a significant transition since the last ccNewsletter -- on April 1st, 2008, Lawrence Lessig stepped down as CEO and Joi Ito, previously the Chairman of the Board, took his place. It is an exciting time here at CC and this transition marks the growth of CC from just an idea (which we were 5 1/2 years ago) to becoming a fixture in the digital landscape -- and we can honestly attribute this growth to the acceptance and evangelism of our active community of which you all are a part. Thank you for sharing and supporting CC and helping us build this global creative commons, which is so vital to the future of participatory culture. Even though CC as an organization has changed, CC as a philosophy and as a mission remains the same, and we hope that you will continue to support CC as we work hard to continue providing you all with the tools necessary to actualize this common goal.

This month's newsletter spotlights Science Commons, a project of Creative Commons dedicated to bringing the sharing and reuse principles CC brought to the world of culture, to scientific research. Their work focuses on identifying unnecessary barriers to research, and developing strategies and tools for faster, more efficient scientific research. The goal - to speed the translation of data into discovery.
If you would prefer a hard copy, download the pdf (designed by CC Philippines Project Leads and CC's Senior Designer Alex Roberts) here: http://mirrors.creativecommons.org/newsletter/ccnewsletter7.pdf

No one can explain Science Commons better than the VP, John Wilbanks, so without further adieu...

Best,

Melissa Reeder


===Inside Scoop - Science Commons==

A word from the VP of Science:  John Wilbanks

I'm going to take full advantage of the opportunity to address the broader Creative Commons audience on the topic of Science Commons. Many of the CC community don't know a lot about us – who we are, what we do, and why we think science is such a remarkable place for the commons. Hopefully we can address some of that knowledge gap with this issue of the CC newsletter.

There are clear parallels between the advance of the control philosophy in culture and science. As in culture, an interlocking set of science-related judicial, legislative, and social was eroding ancient traditions of information distribution and reuse. Costs were rising, not dropping, with the advent of more efficient network technologies for publishing. The Web we built for culture and commerce was not robust enough to handle the demands of high-throughput research. And in general, the kinds of innovation explosions we associate with user-driven culture and commerce were nowhere to be found in the scientific web.

Something has to give. We need cures for diseases, understanding of global problems like climate change, and better government science policy. But the question was how we got there – and how a commons fit into the picture.

That's where we come in at Science Commons.

We're a project of Creative Commons – that is, we work for CC just like the culture folks, and we have our email addresses @creativecommons.org. We have five full-time employees and four part-time employees, and we're hosted at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in Cambridge, MA, USA. We raise our own dedicated project funds, and we work on taking the ideas at the heart of Creative Commons – standard licenses that create sharing regimes, implemented in good technology, and commons-based policy – into the sciences. Specifically, we work on making the "research cycle" go as fast as it can go.

By the research cycle, we mean the constant generation, distribution, and reuse of knowledge that forms the heart of the scientific method. In a network world, the research cycle depends on digital technologies at every step, from the scholarly literature (search and access stages) to the petabytes of data (again, search and access stages) to the digital descriptions of non-digital research tools like cell lines and recombinant DNA. At each of these stages we can apply theories of the commons to remove barriers to research and accelerate the pace of science.

I've written previously about the commons as a key weapon against complexity, which I think is the key problem of our time in the sciences.

It's the abject complexity of the human system and the reality of the knowledge gap about the system. Human bodies make microprocessors look like children's toys in terms of complexity. And those bodies exist in a constantly changing set of environmental factors.

One of the reasons I believe so deeply in the commons approach (by which i mean:  contractually constructed regimes that tilt the field towards sharing and reuse, technological enablements that make public knowledge easy to find and use, and default policy rules that create incentives to share and reuse) is that I think it is one of the only non-miraculous ways to defeat complexity. If we can get more people working on individual issues – which are each alone not so complex – and the outputs of research snap together, and smart people can work on the compiled output as well – then it stands to reason that the odds of meaningful discoveries increase in spite of overall systemic complexity.

This is not easy as far as solutions go. It requires open access to content, journals and databases both. It requires that database creators think about their products as existing in a network, and provide hooks for the network, not just query access. It requires that funders pay for biobanks to store research tools. It requires that pharmaceutical companies take a hard look at their private assets and build some trust in entities that make sharing possible. It requires that scientists share their stuff (this is the elephant in the lab, frankly). It requires that universities track sharing as a metric of scientific and societal impact.

If we're going to attack the cost of drug creation and marketing, we have to attack the failures at the source – the knowledge gap created by complexity. Creating a robust public domain and knowledge commons – with the attendant increase in scientists who have the freedom and tools to practice collaborative science, all over the world -is one of the only clear methods we have at our disposal.

And if we can actually get the price point down to $100M, or $50M, the game is changed forever. Venture capitalists can fund a drug, as can foundations, at that price point. Prize models suddenly become very, very workable. And big pharma finally would see meaningful competition.

Complexity is the enemy. Distributed innovation, built on a commons, is a strong tonic against that enemy.


Upcoming Events
========

ESOF 2008:  Collaborating for the Future of Open Science
by Donna Wentworth

We're reaching an inflection point in the global movement to implement "open" approaches to scientific research -- approaches with tremendous potential for accelerating the translation of basic research to useful discoveries like new drugs and therapies. These approaches are often referred to collectively as "open science," yet both the term and its underlying principles have yet to be defined. This hamstrings efforts to connect the important initiatives that are working to further the development of open science in nations across the globe.

We now have the tools to bring together open research and data from around the world, embedded with the freedoms necessary to make use of it. What we need are shared principles for developing systems that can work together, so we can harness network effects and increase the value of each contribution to the open knowledge commons.

This July, Science Commons is convening a free and open workshop in Barcelona, Spain, to discuss and define the basic principles of open science, including identifying the key tenets for a system to be recognized as an open science system. Our aim is to conclude the workshop with a set of principles for open science that can effectively guide the development of a global, collaborative infrastructure for knowledge sharing that speeds discovery and saves lives.

The event, "Policy and Technology for e-Science," is one of three satellite events preceding the Euroscience Open Forum (ESOF), which is among the largest and most well-known conferences in Europe on science and technology. The workshop will take place July 16 -17, 2008, at the Institut d'Estudis Catalans. Our co-sponsors are the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), the Center for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke University (CSPD) and the Institut d'Estudis Catalans (IEC).

In preparation for the workshop, we have been working with a distinguished steering committee that includes representatives from the European Commission, CERN, the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and Creative Commons International (CCi), as well as leading open access advocates, text-mining experts and academics engaged in these discussions in Europe.

We hope to bring together thought leaders, policymakers and representatives from the major research foundations for a discussion that will significantly further shared goals. If you would like to attend, please visit the registration page <http://sciencecommons.org/events/esof-satellite-event/registration/>. The event is open to the public and free, but seating is limited. For more information, visit <http://sciencecommons.org/events/esof-satellite-event>.


Science Commons News
========

The following is an excerpt from the whitepaper -"Health Commons:  Therapy Development in a Networked World - an Introduction and Overview" co-authored by John Wilbanks and Marty Tenenbaum. To read the paper in its entirety, visit <http://sciencecommons.org/resources/readingroom/>

Introducing the Health Commons
a project of Science Commons, Collabrx, Public Library of Science, and CommerceNet

The Health Commons: Solving the Health Research Puzzle

The pharmaceutical industry is at a crossroads. Despite revolutionary advances in molecular biology that have made genetic decoding routine, the time from gene to cure still stands at 17 years. High-throughput screening methods allow us to test the efficacy of millions of compounds against a molecular target in a single week; but the odds of one of those compounds making it through the development pipeline and becoming a drug are less than 1/1,000,000. A well-funded group starting today, using the traditional model of drug development, has a very slim chance at getting a drug to market by 2025.

The time has come to change the way we cure disease. We are no longer asking whether a gene or a molecule is critical to a particular biological process; rather, we are discovering whole networks of molecular and cellular interactions that contribute to disease. And soon, we will have such information about individuals, rather than the population as a whole. Biomedical knowledge is exploding, and yet the system to capture that knowledge and translate it into saving human lives still relies on an antiquated and risky strategy of focusing the vast resources of a few pharmaceutical companies on just a handful of disease targets.

The Health Commons Vision

Imagine a virtual marketplace or ecosystem where participants share data, knowledge, materials and services to accelerate research. The components might include databases on the results of chemical assays, toxicity screens, and clinical trials; libraries of drugs and chemical compounds; repositories of biological materials (tissue samples, cell lines, molecules), computational models predicting drug efficacies or side effects, and contract services for high-throughput genomics and proteomics, combinatorial drug screening, animal testing, biostatistics, and more. The resources offered through the Commons might not necessarily be free, though many could be. However, all would be available under standard pre-negotiated terms and conditions and with standardized data formats that eliminate the debilitating delays, legal wrangling and technical incompatibilities that frustrate scientific collaboration today.

We envision a Commons where a researcher will be able to order everything needed to replicate a published experiment as easily as ordering DVDs from Amazon. A Commons where one can create a workflow to exploit replicated results on an industrial scale – searching the world's biological repositories for relevant materials; routing them to the best labs for molecular profiling; forwarding the data to a team of bioinfomaticians for collaborative analysis of potential drug targets; and finally hiring top service providers to run drug screens against those targets; with everything – knowledge, data, and materials – moving smoothly from one provider to the next, monitored and tracked with Fed-Ex precision; where the workflow scripts themselves can become part of the Commons, for others to reuse and improve. Health Commons' marketplace will slash the time, cost, and risk of developing treatments for diseases. Individual researchers, institutions, and companies will be able to publish information about their expertise and resources so that others in the community can readily discover and use them. Core competencies, from clinical trial design to molecular profiling, will be packaged as turnkey services and made available over the Net. The Commons will serve as the public-domain, non-profit hub, with third-parties providing value added services that facilitate information access, communication, and collaboration.

What is Health Commons?

Health Commons is a coalition of parties interested in changing the way basic science is translated into the understanding and improvement of human health. Coalition members agree to share data, knowledge, and services under standardized terms and conditions by committing to a set of common technologies, digital information standards, research materials, contracts, workflows, and software. These commitments ensure that knowledge, data, materials and tools can move seamlessly from partner to partner across the entire drug discovery chain. They enable participants to offer standardized services, ranging from simple molecular assays to complex drug synthesis solutions, that others can discover in directories and integrate into their own processes to expedite development — or assemble like LEGO blocks to create new services.

The Health Commons is too complex for any one organization or company to create. It requires a coalition of partners across the spectrum. It is also too complex for public, private, or non-profit organizations alone - reinventing therapy development for the networked world requires, from the beginning, a commitment to public-private partnership. Only through a public-private partnership can the key infrastructure of the Commons be created: the investments in the public domain of information and materials will only be realized if that public domain is served by a private set of systems integrators and materials, tools and service providers motivated by profit. And in turn, the long-term success of the private sector depends on a growing, robust, and self-replenishing public domain of data, research tools, and open source software.

* Towards Research in a Box - by Donna Wentworth
<http://sciencecommons.org/weblog/archives/2008/05/13/towards-research-in-a-box/>

* How to Free Your Facts - by Donna Wentworth
<http://sciencecommons.org/weblog/archives/2008/05/12/how-to-free-your-facts/>

* Science Commons & SPARC Release Guide for Creating Open Access Policies at Institutions - by Donna Wentworth
<http://sciencecommons.org/weblog/archives/2008/04/28/science-commons-and-sparc-release-guide-for-creating/>

* Nguyen on Keeping Data Open & Free - by Donna Wentworth
<http://sciencecommons.org/weblog/archives/2008/04/23/nguyen-on-keeping-data-open-and-free/>

===And now for other Creative Commons News===

CC News
* Creative Common Statement of Intent for Attribution-ShareAlike Licenses
http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/8213
* CC0 beta/discussion draft 2
http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/8211
* search.creativecommons.org screencast and i18n
http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/829
*ccMixter RFP
http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/8323

CCi News
* CC Licensing Guidebook for Government Agencies and NGOs
http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/8200
* Transition at Creative Commons Switzerland
http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/8209
* 2nd Blender Peach Open Source Movie Premiere and Economies of the Commons in Amsterdam
http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/8203
* Ecuador encourages learning, research, and creativity with localized CC licenses
http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/8216
* Mayer and Bettle: the Animation Sequel about CC
http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/8231
* Scripta: CC Latin America
http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/8246
* CC Guatemala enters public discussion
http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/8254
* Building an Australasian Commons
http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/8280
* Grant Competition to Support CC Licensing Adoption in the South Caucasus
http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/8294
* Malaysian Artistes for Unity
http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/8297

CC Points of Interest
* Flickr Video
http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/8205
* Magnatune does good via the Amarok media player
http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/8256
* Custom CC Search
http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/8258
* Another Nine Inch Nails album out under a Creative Commons license
http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/8267
* The (potential) U.S. copyright czar and you
http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/8282
* VIA added
http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/8320
* Steal this Footage added
http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/8318

ccLearn
* ccLearn Monthly Update - April 15th
http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/8234
* "Attribution Only" as Default Policy—Otago Polytechnic on the How and Why of CC BY
http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/8235
* LearnHub Integrates CC Licensing
http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/8236
eIFL.net on Open Access, Open Education, and Creative Commons
http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/8247
* ccLearn Monthly Update 21 May 2008
http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/8303


=============
We rely on our supporters to continue our work enabling stories like those listed above. Check it out --

Donate:
   http://support.creativecommons.org/donate

CC Store:
   http://support.creativecommons.org/store

Subscribe to the CC Weblog:
http://bloglines.com/sub/http://creativecommons.org/weblog/rss
http://google.com/reader/view/feed/http://creativecommons.org/weblog/rss
http://add.my.yahoo.com/rss?url="http://creativecommons.org/weblog/rss

This newsletter is licensed under
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ -- please share
and remix!

Creative Commons was built with and is sustained by the generous support of organizations including the Center for the
Public Domain, the Omidyar Network, The Rockefeller Foundation, The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and The
William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, as well as members of the public.


_______________________________________________
cc-info mailing list

To unsubscribe visit
http://creativecommons.org/about/newsletter#unsubscribe

Or send email with "unsubscribe" as subject to
cc-info-request AT lists.ibiblio.org

Creative Commons newsletters are also posted to the CC Weblog.  For back
issues please visit http://creativecommons.org/weblog/



  • [cc-info] ccNewsletter #7 - Science Commons, Melissa Reeder, 06/09/2008

Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page