Goal:
To promote free access to biological literature, protocols and data.

Philosophy:
To make scientific information more freely available, to help promote scientific discovery and innovation..

Limited access to scientific information is not a new thing.  Scientific literature itself represents the most common form of non-free scientific information.

Copyrights:
To access scientific literature usually requires paid subscriptions to journals.  The publishers retain copyright to all papers.

We believe that authors should use the copyleft or retain copyright to their own papers.

Given that biological literature is reviewed and edited on a voluntary basis by scientisists themselves,
it should be possible to cheaply implement open repositories for data, papers and protocols, as well as e-journals.

See our Bioliterature Project for one attempt at a solution.

Patents:
Patents essentially give a time-limited monopoly on the practical application of new ideas.  They were developed to promote technology by making information about technological techniques available to the public. Essentially, they were designed as alternative to trade secrets, to maintain open exchange of technology.  

However, they can be used to stifle innovation as well-- for example internet patents.

By publishing obvious or patentable ideas with the expressed intent of forgoing patents is one way to fight  patent abuse.  This implies that the inventors give up the potentially large sums of money associated with some patents to place ideas in the public domain. We are developing a website, obviousideas.org to help facilitate this idea. 


Trade Secrets
Companies keep data secret to benefit their own interests.  By inhibiting the free flow of information, scientific and technological progress are impeded.  Trade secrets are protected by US law.  Companies have long maintained private databases of scienitfic info for their own use, eg., drug databases.  
 
We believe that legal protection for trade secrets should be weakened.  Also, we encourage the creation of a GPL like "license" for publicly available data.  If such data is used by a company to create a new technology, then any data with which it is associated must also be made available under a similar license.

Debate on our BBS

Contribute your time /ideas

Projects
Bioliterature Project
Open Biology Initiative
Responsible Biology Foundation

Sponsored by
Regenerative Sciences Institute