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.

Rights issue: Science Commons would provide legal protection for work published on the web. Credit: HTTP://CREATIVECOMMONS.ORG

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; 200410.1038/431494a). 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.

→ http://creativecommons.org/projects/science/proposal