PAULA GOULD Alternative licensing scheme for scientists set to launch.
[LONDON] A
not-for-profit organization is preparing to launch a form of science
licensing that it says will give researchers more flexibility when they
publish and share data. The project, called Science Commons, has grown out of the Creative
Commons movement, a scheme devised by Lawrence Lessig of Stanford Law
School, California, to promote the online publishing of audio, visual
and textual materials with "some rights reserved". Science Commons aims to provide a form of legal protection that
could serve as an alternative to both copyright and patents. If
successful, the system should allow the creators of a pesticide, for
example, to restrict its free use to the developing world through one
simple licence, rather than a web of international patents. Most would
declare this a worthy goal, but sceptics say it will be a hard slog for
Science Commons, as those involved have little experience of patent law. Creative Commons licences are free to use and
legally binding. To date
they have garnered most support from musicians and web loggers who wish
to promote their work over the Internet, but who do not want to lose
all control over its use. The movement's activities are funded
primarily by three US-based private foundations, and are run from
premises at Stanford Law School. Since its inception, the movement's founders have wanted to expand
into the world of science. Additional funding to do so has now been
obtained from an unnamed source. John Wilbanks, a fellow at the World
Wide Web Consortium, an organization that aims to promote the
development of the web, has been appointed director of Science Commons.
He plans to consult with scientists, companies and funding agencies to
work out a mechanism by which the commons will work. "We are not coming
in with a pre-written agenda. We only want to solve areas of legal
friction that the scientific community tells us are a problem,"
Wilbanks says. The "some rights reserved" philosophy has already made inroads into
the world of science. A Creative Commons licence covers the content of
the Public Library of Science publications PLoS Biology and PLoS
Medicine.
And the Biological Innovation for Open Science (BIOS) initiative, run
by Richard Jefferson, aims to make methods and techniques developed by
scientists freely available, in return for the results gained through
such techniques also being freely released (see Nature 431, 494; 2004). Science
Commons says it hopes to cover all this ground. Wilbanks is in discussions with BIOS to explore possible link-ups.
But Jefferson is sceptical of the impact that Science Commons will have
outside the publishing arena. "The world of patents and science has
almost nothing to do with the world of copyright. The economics, the
culture and the pragmatics have almost no parallels," he says. Science Commons will initially focus on biomedical sciences when it
launches in January 2005. But Wilbanks would ultimately like to see the
concept used in a wide range of scientific fields, including
astrophysics and high-energy physics, where large amounts of data are
collected. "The goal is to be an international Science Commons, not a
US-centric life-sciences commons," he says. |
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