December 20, 2004

Science Commons makes sharing easier

Science Commons is a new project exploring legal and technical mechanisms to remove the barriers that inhibit the sharing of scientific information. John Wilbanks has just been appointed as the Executive Director of Science Commons. He talked to Open Access Now about his new job and his aspirations for Science Commons.

John Wilbanks' decision to take on a new job is motivated by his concern that "barriers to sharing are hindering innovation in the sciences." This is the problem that Science Commons hopes to address in the months ahead. Wilbanks is quick to point out that the Science Commons, to be officially launched in January 2005, is still very much an exploratory project. But this is not the first time that Wilbanks has taken on an ambitious project of this type and he has spent a lot of time over the last decade thinking about how technology can be used to foster creative interactions between scientists.

Wilbanks' previous jobs have equipped him for acting at the interface between law, science and technology. He has worked on the staff of a Congressman in Washington DC, led projects in e-learning and software development at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, and founded a semantic database company focused on the pharmaceutical industry. Before joining Science Commons, Wilbanks was a Fellow at the World Wide Web Consortium developing the Semantic Web for Life Sciences.

Science Commons is the latest project developed by the non-profit organization Creative Commons. Inspired by the work of cyberlaw expert Lawrence Lessig of Stanford University, Creative Commons has developed an alternative copyright system to make literature, music, films, and scholarship freely available online. Science Commons plans to expand Creative Commons' work in the sciences by developing alternative mechanisms to allow scientists, universities, and industry to share data, knowledge and scientific intellectual property.

Wilbanks emphasizes that these can be naturally adapted to the scientific literature and the sharing of database information, pointing out that the Creative Commons licenses are already adopted by Open Access publishers such as Public Library of Science and BioMed Central. "This is the traditional Creative Commons role as a neutral third-party public interest group. We can help create some alternatives that are both efficient and useable, that protect the rights of creators and owners of intellectual property who want to share." Wilbanks notes that although the existing licenses can be used, there are additional issues that are particular to the peer-reviewed publication domain, such as pre- and post-print licenses, licenses from one journal to another, and licenses for electronic archives. "These areas are different from the creative culture world," says Wilbanks. "Our hope is to support Open Access by creating choices in licensing that are free and modular and open source." "Our hope is to support the sharing of scientific knowledge by creating choices in licensing that are free and modular and open source."

Wilbanks cites the example of "GoldenRice" vitamin-A-enhanced rice, that has been well documented by the Public Intellectual Property Resource for Agriculture (PIPRA) consortium. GoldenRice technology promised enormous health benefits to millions of poor children in developing countries, where vitamin A deficiency causes 500,000 cases of blindness each year and contributes to over 2 million premature deaths annually. When researchers began to prepare this new rice for delivery to the countries and people for whom it was intended, they discovered a complicated network of legal protection that restricted distribution. In fact, there were 70 patents involved, 40 issued by the United States, and six Material Transfer Agreements (MTAs). "It took a lot of lawyering to resolve all of these issues so that they could actually do what everyone wanted to do which was to bring the rice to the people who needed it," notes Wilbanks. "The 'friction' in this case came from the unintended conflict of multiple licensors with different interests at heart, even though all of them wanted to share."

Science Commons will explore how to reduce this friction. "For example, is there a role for Science Commons to develop Open Source modular, voluntary mechanisms that allow institutions to make some of their licenses and patents available in such a way that the legal status does not hinder innovation?" asks Wilbanks. He hopes to bring together the various stakeholders, including the universities, the technology licensing managers, the consumers of technology licenses, lawyers and technologists, to try to see how Science Commons could create legal and technical 'products' for them to use. "The goal is to bring the community together to help charter some work in this area. We want it to be community-driven."

Wilbanks envisages licensing agreements that allow institutions to waive certain rights. They might, for example, want to allow exceptions for developing countries, or for diseases of the global poor, or for non-profit use. "We will explore this area to find out if there are mechanisms that can release some of the pressure of having to get lawyers involved," says Wilbanks. He argues that the fact that intellectual property licenses are not interoperable or machine-readable means that people have to get involved at every step. This is costly and time-consuming and can create unintentional barriers to sharing knowledge. "The idea behind this part of Science Commons is that maybe there are some legal innovations and technical mechanisms that could be put together, as we did for Creative Commons licenses in the culture world, to allow creators and owners of intellectual property to tag their scientific knowledge and data with details of the conditions for sharing the material. We would like to do that in such a way that neither the creator nor the user of the information has any unnecessary, involuntary blocks against sharing their property."

Wilbanks has already had positive feedback from the research community and from several pharmaceutical companies. He will be based in Boston, where he hopes to interact with the large life science community, as well as other scientific groups. "There is an opportunity to broaden our reach, so as to work with meteorologists, geologists, anthropologists, and many others. In fact, any place where you have scientific data and peer-review and you have the potential for unintentional intellectual property conflict we believe that there might be a role for Science Commons," notes Wilbanks. "What we are trying to do is to create opportunities for innovation. One of the key elements of science is putting things together in a unique way to create a new perspective. I think we can just make that easier by simply taking away unnecessary barriers to sharing knowledge."

http://science.creativecommons.org/