ScienceCommons1

[|Towards a Science Commons (Commons of Science Conference)]
Started November 3, 2006

Ended:

Notes:

" The sciences depend on access to and use of factual data. "

"American intellectual property law (and, until recently, the law of most developed countries) did not allow for intellectual property protection of "raw facts." One could patent the mousetrap, but not data on the behavior of mice, or on the tensile strength of steel. The article could be copyrighted but the data on which it rested could not be. Commercial proprietary ownership was to be limited to a stage close to the point where a finished product entered the marketplace. The data upstream remained for all the world to work upon."

"US law mandated that even works that normally could be copyrighted, if produced by the federal government, fell immediately into the public domain - a provision of great importance given massive governmental involvement in scientific research. More broadly, the practice in federally funded scientific research was to encourage the widespread dissemination of data at or below cost in the belief that, like the interstate highway system, this provision of a public good would yield incalculable economic benefits for society as a whole."

"n the sciences themselves, and particularly in the universities, a strong sociological tradition - sometimes called the Mertonian tradition of open science - discouraged the proprietary exploitation of data itself - as opposed to inventions derived from data, and required as a condition of publication and replication, availability fro examination of the datasets on which the work was based."

" Each of these three central tenets is now either under attack, or subject to serious reservations."

" In other areas, complex contracts of adhesion create de facto intellectual property rights over databases, complete with "reach through agreements" and multiple limitations on use. More disturbingly, the US is considering, and the EU has already adopted, a "database right." This “database right” actually does accord intellectual property protection to facts - upsetting one of the most fundamental premises of intellectual property – that one could never own facts or ideas, but could exert ownership only over the inventions or expressions yielded by their intersection."

" The Federal government's role is also changing. Under the pressure of the important and, in many ways, admirable Bayh-Dole statute, federally funded research in universities is now pushed towards early proprietary exploitation. Universities then become partners in privatizing and exploiting the fruits of research. While this is a good idea when it encourages the conversion of science into useful products brought to market, it is much more questionable when the proprietary pressures occur "upstream" at the most fundamental level of data and research. At the same time, universities depend more and more on their intellectual property portfolios."

"Science is not open when scientists are bound up in confidentiality agreements, and when proprietary concerns limit or prohibit the transfer of the full datasets on which they work. In this atmosphere, institutions, often unconsciously, begin to encourage secretive practices they formerly frowned on."

"Around the world, government departments may begin to look at datasets as a source of revenue to be exploited, rather than a public good to be provided."

"Numerous scientists have pointed out the tragic irony that at the historical moment when we have the technologies to permit worldwide availability and distributed processing of scientific data, and the concomitant promise for broadening collaboration and accelerating the pace and depth of discovery, we are busy locking up data and slapping legal restrictions on its transfer."

" The learned societies, the National Academies of Sciences, the National Science Foundation, and other groups have all expressed concern about the trends that are developing right now. Much attention has been focused on proposals for legislative change which, while important, will be both extremely hard to push through, and be incomplete as a solution. Any solution will be need to be as complex as the problem it seeks to solve, which is to say it will be interdisciplinary, multinational, and involve both public and private initiatives."

" Science Commons, a project of the non-profit Creative Commons, is the sponsor and organizer of the Commons of Science Conference. Our goal is to promote innovation in science by lowering the legal and technical costs of the sharing and reuse of scientific work. We remove unnecessary obstacles to scientific collaboration by creating voluntary legal regimes for research and development."

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