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Science Commons

Science Commons (SC) was a Creative Commons project for designing strategies and tools for faster, more efficient web-enabled scientific research. The organization's goals were to identify unnecessary barriers to research, craft policy guidelines and legal agreements to lower those barriers, and develop technology to make research data and materials easier to find and use. Its overarching goal was to speed the translation of data into discovery and thereby the value of research.

Not to be confused with ScientificCommons.

Founded

2005

2009

Building infrastructure for open science

  • Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States

Projects[edit]

Biological Materials Transfer Project[edit]

The Biological Materials Transfer Project, a Material transfer agreement (MTA), developed and deployed standard, modular contracts to lower the costs of transferring biological materials such as DNA, cell lines, model animals and more. The MTA project covered transfer between non-profit institutions, as well as offering transaction solutions to transfers between non-profit entities and for-profit institutions. It integrated existing standard agreements and new Science Commons contracts into a Web-deployed suite, with the goal of developing a transaction system along the lines of Amazon or eBay by using the licensing as a discovery mechanism for materials.


This metadata driven approach is based on the success of the Creative Commons licensing integration into search engines, further allowing for and facilitating the integration of materials licensing into the research literature itself and databases. The hope being that scientists would eventually be only one click away from accessing and/or ordering the materials referenced in the scholarly literature as they perform their research. Unfortunately, the MTA project's tools were not adopted by more than a very small percentage of the scientific community while Science Commons was active and, for all practical purposes, died out when the Science Commons project folded.

Neurocommons[edit]

Science Commons’ Neurocommons project set out to create an Open Source knowledge management platform for biological research. The platform combined open access materials (making up the knowledgebase) and open source software (in the form of an analytic platform). The software was still under development when the project ended.

Scholar's Copyright Project[edit]

The Scholar’s Copyright was developed with Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition designed to lower the barriers to Open Access (OA) by reducing transaction costs and eliminating contract proliferation by offering tools and resources catering to both methods of achieving Open Access. The Scholar's Copyright Addendum is still in use by SPARC

Creative Commons

. Archived from the original on January 2, 2011. (Former official site)

"Sciencecommons.org"

MIT Libraries Podcast with Creative Commons VP for Science John Wilbanks

Popular Science interview with Creative Commons VP for Science John Wilbanks