“What if there were something like Creative Commons, but for scientific data?”
Being the nerd that I am, this is what I was contemplating over a warm cup of coffee this morning. So I googled it and was pleased to find that Creative Commons has actually spawned, just like I hoped, Science Commons.
Creative Commons is a non-profit organization that issues licenses for intellectual property that allow the IP-holder to designate in what ways their work can be remixed and reused. It’s a means for rights holders to protect their rights in exactly the fashion that they see fit. Science Commons attempts the same thing but with specifically scientific data. Their three goals, as listed on their website, are:
Making scientific research “re-useful” — We help people and organizations open and mark their research and data for reuse. We are also exploring new models for licensing patents and know how.
Enabling “one-click” access to research materials — We help streamline the materials-transfer process so researchers can easily replicate, verify and extend research.
Integrating fragmented information sources — We help researchers find, analyze and use data from disparate sources by marking and integrating the information with a common, computer-readable language.
The FAQ describes the challenges of applying traditional licenses to data sets. Essentially, since the pieces of data are useful in multiple levels of granularity—alone, as a unit, and then as a curated unit in a database—applying copyright law becomes very, very tricky even for experienced lawyers. Scientists are extracting certain parts and mixing it with parts from other data sets and then manipulating those data in complex ways. They would have to know at each step of the process what data they have a right to use, if they have a right to integrate it with other data, and in what ways it can be used. Creative Commons saw that blanket licenses couldn’t work for these situations and so instead started developing a set of protocols. As they describe it,
“The Science Commons Protocol for Implementing Open Access Data is a method for ensuring that your database can be legally integrated with other databases, regardless of the country of origin. The protocol is not a license or legal tool, but instead a methodology and best practices document for creating such legal tools, and marking data in the public domain for machine-assisted discovery. “
Science Commons also proposes principles to make patent licenses more reasonable. By making patent licenses public and transparent, patent holders and others who might have new uses for the patent idea can connect. The patent holders could potentially make more money by discovering uses for their patent that never occurred to them.
Overall, Science Commons has a very comprehensive approach to the issue of scientific data. Beyond what I’ve listed here, there’s also test projects, such as Neurocommons, the goal of which is to create open source data analysis software like that used by large pharmaceutical researchers so that smaller researchers can do similar work. There’s information on their website for authors on how copyright law applies to self-archiving as well as information about how the publishing industry can utilize the protocols. Science Commons is making a strong attempt to reform the broken publishing industry and intellectual property laws that make sharing scientific data difficult.