Science Commons
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| Science Commons | |
| Founder(s) | Lawrence Lessig |
|---|---|
| Type | Non-profit organization |
| Founded | 2005 |
| Focus | Building infrastructure for open science |
| Website | http://sciencecommons.org/ |
Science Commons (SC), a project of Creative Commons (CC), designs strategies and tools for faster, more efficient web-enabled scientific research. The organization identifies unnecessary barriers to research, crafts policy guidelines and legal agreements to lower those barriers, and develops technology to make research data and materials easier to find and use.
Science Commons' goal is to speed the translation of data into discovery — unlocking the value of research so more people can benefit from the work scientists are doing. Science Commons is located at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in the Ray and Maria Stata Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States.
The project was launched in early 2005 and is representative of Creative Commons' efforts in the sciences. It comprises three interlocking initiatives designed to accelerate the research cycle — the continuous production and reuse of knowledge that is at the heart of the scientific method. Together, they represent the building blocks of a new collaborative infrastructure to make scientific discovery easier by design.
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[edit] History of SC and CC
"But there are also huge amounts of data that do not need to be kept behind walls. And few organizations seem to be aware that by making their data available under a Creative Commons license ... they can stipulate both rights and credits for the reuse of data, while allowing its uninterrupted access by machines."
- Nature, vol. 438, December 2005
A brief history on why Creative Commons launched the Science Commons project
Science Commons is a project of Creative Commons, a non-profit organization that offers an array of less restrictive copyright licenses allowing individuals to build upon their creative works and share.
Creative Commons’ charge initially was entirely in the cultural and copyright realms – in the world of music, texts, blogs, pictures, films and so on. Nevertheless, in the early days of the organization, the founding board members expressed an interest in exploring developing the Creative Commons model in the sciences. Recognizing that developing open pathways for scientific research would be complex and contentious, the Creative Commons board did not feel armed at that point with the expertise or the technical capability to enter into that territory.
Creative Commons turned its eyes back to science in early 2005 with the launch of Science Commons. Millions of creative works were already on the Web under Creative Commons licenses and those involved had gained significant experience in open licensing approaches, complex negotiations, and community building. They had the ambition of achieving for the world of science and data what Creative Commons had begun to achieve for the world of culture, art and educational material: to ease unnecessary legal and technical barriers to sharing, to promote innovation, and to provide easy, high quality tools that let individuals and organizations specify the terms under which they wished to share their material.
Visit Science Commons’ About page for more information regarding those involved with this initiative.
[edit] Projects
[edit] Biological Materials Transfer Project
[edit] Description
The Biological Materials Transfer Project (MTA) develops and deploys standard, modular contracts to lower the costs of transferring biological materials such as DNA, cell lines, model animals and more. The MTA project covers transfer between non-profit institutions, as well as offering transaction solutions to transfers between non-profit entities and for-profit institutions. It integrates existing standard agreements and new Science Commons contracts into a Web-deployed suite, allowing for the emergence of a transaction system along the lines of Amazon or eBay by using the licensing as a discovery mechanism for materials.
This metadata driven approach is based on the success of the Creative Commons licensing integration into search engines, further allowing for and facilitating the integration of materials licensing into the research literature itself and databases. The hope being that scientists would eventually be only one click away from accessing and/or ordering the materials referenced in the scholarly literature as they perform their research.
[edit] Why focus on MTAs?
While patents are popularly identified as impediments to scientific progress, our interview-based research yielded remarkable consensus that the impact of slow – or non-existent – materials transfer among entities was a far more significant slowdown of the basic research cycle.
Materials represent tacit knowledge – generating a bacterial vector or an antibody can take months or years, and replicating the work is rarely feasible. Gaining access to those materials is subject to secrecy, competition, lack of resources to manufacture materials, lack of time, legal transaction costs and delays, and more.
(Science Commons has compiled empirical data and other findings about materials transfer problems. To access that information, visit this Web site.)
[edit] Evidence - for and against
There is significant evidence that the transfer of biological materials is subject to significant slowdowns. Campbell and Cohen have each demonstrated that materials are frequently denied. Legal barriers are part of the problem – more so than patents – but the greater problem is frequently the competition, secrecy and incentive systems involved. The secrecy and competition do not maximize the likelihood of meaningful discovery coming from limited funding, and thus funders (especially of rare or orphan diseases) have a particular incentive to maximize the easy movement of biological materials to maximize follow-up research.
There is little evidence to suggest that materials transfer is working effectively. Most of the “counter evidence” would be not that materials move as they should. There is a significant body of research arguing that patents are the problem in research, which has been a driving force behind out MTA research as the new elements of data emerged.
[edit] The Neurocommons
[edit] Description
Science Commons’ Neurocommons project sets out to create an Open Source knowledge management platform for biological research. The platform combines open access materials (making up the knowledgebase) and open source software (in the form of an analytic platform). The software is still under development, but builds off our existing progress in creating a knowledgebase of relationships by applying text mining and natural language processing to open biomedical abstracts. These two elements together represent a viable open source platform based on open content and open Web standards.
Science Commons is launching this effort in neuroscience, indicative by the name of the project, in order to create network effects within a single therapeutic area and to leverage the connections developed with neurodegenerative disease funders through their MTA work. The long-term elements of the Neurocommons revolve around the mixture of commons-based peer editing and annotation of the pilot knowledge project, as well as in the creation of an open source software community around the analytics platform.
[edit] Process by which choice was made
The Neurocommons project comes out of Creative Commons’ history with the Semantic Web. John Wilbanks (Vice President of Science Commons at Creative Commons) founded the Semantic Web for Life Sciences project at the World Wide Web Consortium and led a semantics-driven bioinformatics startup company to acquisition in 2003. Science Commons Principal Scientists Jonathan Rees and Alan Ruttenberg play key roles in the Semantic Web development efforts for science.
The scope of knowledge in the public and private domains has led many experts in the field of pharmaceutical knowledge management to embrace commons-based production methods and pre-competitive knowledge sharing. No one company, even one such as Pfizer, can capture, represent, and leverage all the available knowledge on the Web.
Science Commons’ research meshed with emergent efforts and interest from the pharmaceutical industry in technology to harvest common terms and relationships from unstructured text and databases to provide a “map” of the implicit semantics shared in and across domains. Pfizer and Biogen both contributed significant input to early discussions, and the system is modeled in part on a service already in use at Novartis, though proprietary.
[edit] Evidence - for and against
Pharmaceutical companies such as Pfizer, Novartis, Biogen, Astra Zeneca and more are embracing the Semantic Web efforts as part of a general knowledge management strategy. The head of Systems Biology at Pfizer and the head of libraries at Biogen have each publicly backed the Science Commons project in the trade press. An op-ed argues the importance of a drug safety commons using semantic web. And a roundup of industry projections for 2007 features two mentions of Science Commons, with a prediction that the Semantic Web will reach its tipping point in life sciences in 2007.
Most of this discussion has been in the press, as the uptake is coming from the business side.
There is also significant criticism of the Semantic Web. Wikipedia cites these criticisms against the Semantic Web generally.
However, much of the criticism comes from outside the life sciences. The complexity of the genome and the pressure to find both new drugs and new models for pharmaceutical discovery creates an environment where the admittedly high costs of conversion to the Semantic Web remain much lower than the potential benefits. Thus there is strong movement in the direction of Semantic Web for science – just as the initial Web was developed in science by the high-energy physics community.
[edit] Scholar's Copyright Project
[edit] Description
The Scholar’s Copyright Project lowers the barriers to Open Access (OA) by reducing transaction costs and eliminating contract proliferation. Through the Scholar’s Copyright project, Science Commons offers a spectrum of tools and resources catering to both methods of achieving Open Access. Here is a glimpse of our efforts and successes to date.
[edit] Open Access Data Protocol
The Science Commons Open Access Data Protocol is a method for ensuring that scientific databases can be legally integrated with one another. The protocol is not a license or legal tool, but instead a methodology and best practices document for creating such legal tools in the future, and marking data in the public domain for machine-assisted discovery.
For more information about the Protocol and our stance on Databases, visit our FAQ page, where you can read our new FAQ on the Database Protocol. Also, click here to read the official announcement of the Protocol, issued in concordance with the 5th anniversary of Creative Commons’ licenses.
[edit] OA publishing and CC licensing
One road to Open Access is to publish in an OA journal. More than 250 peer-reviewed scholarly journals implement their OA philosophy using Creative Commons licensing. Key adopters include the Public Library of Science (PLoS), Hindawi, and BioMed Central.
Each uses the Creative Commons Attribution License, which is a legal implementation of the Open Access vision as laid out by the Budapest Open Access Initiative. The result - more information is made freely available for public consumption, and without unintended consequences of applying at least 70 years’ worth of control to scientific knowledge.
For more information about Creative Commons licenses, visit FAQ or Creative Commons’ licenses page.
[edit] Scholar's Copyright Addendum Engine (SCAE)
(For more background information on SCAE, visit the project page.)
Another road to OA is to put an archive copy of the peer-reviewed article on the Web (”self-archiving”) after publication in a peer-reviewed journal. This approach is gaining significant traction as well, with the European Union, US National Institutes of Health, and the Wellcome Trust adopting policy initiatives based on archives.
Although most journals support some form of self-archiving, the number of variables in their policies create real confusion among authors. The Science Commons Author Addenda help scholars negotiate the rights they need to use and distribute their work via self-archiving, eliminating confusion and doubt as to when, where, and how authors can make their work available to the world.
The Scholar’s Copyright Addendum Engine (SCAE) is a simple interface for generating a signature-ready Addendum. The SCAE generates the one page document, amending the copyright transfer agreements issued by publishers. This ensures that the author can make their work freely available on the public Internet whether upon publication, pre-publication (in the form of the author’s final manuscript), or after a certain period of time. This FAQ walks you through step-by-step how to do this.
[edit] Open Access Law Program
Over 35 law journals have committed to the Open Access Law program since launch.
The Open Access Law (OAL) Program provides a comprehensive set of resources promoting open access in legal scholarship. The program relies on self-assessment and self-reporting, arming the editorial boards of law journals with the means to go OA.
The OAL program consists of a set of principles of OA, committing both author and journal to basic tenets of OA, and a free model agreement between authors and journals that implements the principles in contract.
Visit this site to see what journals are already on board.
[edit] Reason behind this focus
Science Commons was launched around the initial relationship with the Public Library of Science, which uses the Creative Commons Attribution license to achieve the OA definition of literature that is free, digital, free of charge, and free of most copyright restrictions. After both convening meetings and engaging in other conversations with various parties invested in scholarly publishing, this focus was chosen.
The Creative Commons licenses were selected to use for Open Access rather than creating new copyright licenses in an effort to avoid license proliferation. Science Commons’ work in publishing also responds to the needs of journals in the legal field who did not have the resources to design their own OA agreements (OAL program). Science Commons also saw the emergence of multiple contracts aimed at empowering authors with the ability to retain rights to make archival copies of their scholarly works on the Web. The organization in turn built relationships with the designers of the most-utilized author addenda (SPARC, MIT) to unify the regime and lower confusion among potential users (SCAE).
[edit] Evidence - for and against
Most discussions of OA focus on the two approaches commonly used to achieve the goals of access: publishing in an open access journal or making an archive copy of a paper available in a repository. the vast bulk of the evidence in OA is focused on what approach of OA to choose, not on how to achieve the legal status associated with OA. Rather than choosing to support one approach or another, the Scholar’s Copyright Project chooses to provide tools to all comers in OA. Science Commons provides copyright licenses to OA journals and rights retention tools to individual authors. All of the tools are voluntary and private, in keeping with Creative Commons methodologies.
An examination of the addenda can be found here. You can also read more about retaining author rights in OA at this site. Both analyze SPARC addenda and address copyright issues. A discussion of addendum proliferation is online here.
[edit] Using data and CC licenses
Science Commons launched on 16 December 2007 the Protocol for Implementing Open Access Data in conjunction with the Public Domain Dedication License and the Open Knowledge Foundation.
The Protocol is of note because, rather than relying on copyright licenses such as the Creative Commons licenses and the GNU GPL, it provides a rationale and methodology for reconstructing the public domain of data.
[edit] External links
