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

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  • From: Lawrence Lessig <lessig AT pobox.com>
  • To: cc-lessigletter AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [cc-lessigletter] What is Science Commons? By John Wilbanks, Science Commons Executive Director
  • Date: Wed, 9 Nov 2005 18:50:24 -0800

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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

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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.

Archive of Lessig Letters
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  • [cc-lessigletter] What is Science Commons? By John Wilbanks, Science Commons Executive Director, Lawrence Lessig, 11/09/2005

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