开源方法的社会应用
这是对BIOS，开放社会的生物学创新，项目的介绍。“CAMBIA BIOS 启动项目将融合知识产权分析、创新政策改革和合作性技术开发活动，藉以促进将生物学技术应用于可持续发展的民主化创新。”
该项目介绍的PDF中译本在：
http://www.bios.net/daisy/bios/2108/version/default/part/AttachmentData/...
注意译本有错误。下面是英文本中的背景介绍。原本在
http://www.bios.net/daisy/bios/2029/version/default/part/AttachmentData/...
Few of the serious problems experienced by the disadvantaged of either the
developing or developed world are being adequately addressed by modern
biological technologies.
These problems include the lack of sustainable food production, fragile rural
economies, insufficient nutrition, environmental degradation, loss of biological
diversity, poor public health practices, and insufficient attention to medical
conditions of poor people or marginalized communities.
While the potential of biological technology to impact these problems is
undeniable, its discouraging failure to do so not a failure of technology, but
rather a structural failing.
It is not the products of biotechnology that the poor need, per se, and given
the state of science, economics, business and society, provision of these
products in some subsidized or facilitated manner to the poor can never be
sustainable or realistic.
What is needed is the opportunity for the creative disenfranchised to engage in
collectively creating solutions to their own challenges, using tools that meet
their operating constraints, and which may be uniquely suited to these tasks
and constraints. Some of these tools are technology tools, and others are
adaptations of simple local solutions, or a mixture of the two.
Sustainable and equitable development can only happen through committed
and creative participation of those experiencing problems, in the generation of
robust local solutions.
If science is to be relevant as a component of such development, it must be
part of an integrated process of democratic innovation, sensitive to the
constraints of problem solvers, and building on their commitment and local
knowledge.
Much of modern science –particularly biological technologies and other “high
tech” – has evolved in a world of high-capital, high-margin applications
irrelevant to the poor or excluded communities that make up more than four
billion of the world’s population.
Mirrored in the evolution of intellectual property regimes to protect and
promote these high capital, high margin applications and business models to
capture, develop and deliver them, this driving direction in technology
reinforces the differential and furthers the disenfranchisement of the poor.
The explosion of patenting rather than delivery as a metric for investment in
biological sciences, while hinting at great opportunities in the accelerating pace
of discovery, has created a thicket of rights, self-reinforcing barriers, and
added cost impediments to innovation. These barriers not only continue the
marginalization of those most at need, but also effect constraints on the pace
and direction of innovation even in the highly capitalized industries of the
industrialized world.
This cycle of exclusion is neither irreversible nor inevitable.
The Information and Communications Technology (ICT) industries are evolving
new innovation models that suggest a productive way forward. Concepts of
collaborative invention of core technology and its provision in a protected
commons are now galvanising the software industry to new levels of creativity
and democratisation in business and society, without compromising
profitability.
The core elements of this Open Source revolution are not new. They are a
rebuilding of the original pillars of civilizations and economies -- all agriculture,
medicine and indeed society were made possible through the sharing and
incremental improvements of innovations by inventive farmers and citizens.
All progress in agriculture, until the advent of hybrids in the early/mid 1900s,
was conducted within norms that almost precisely presage open source.
Sustainability of innovation system paradigms
To be sustainable, any enablement effort should meet two critical challenges.
First, there must be mechanisms by which modest-scale local investment of
both financial and social capital can be fostered, encouraged, leveraged, risk-
mitigated and rewarded. Development assistance, whether through
government programs or private philanthropy, is necessarily linear in scope
and limited in magnitude and duration. The single greatest point of
intervention will be increasing confidence of investors and innovators.
Second, the ‘representational technocracy’ must be harnessed, not bypassed.
Representational mechanisms have been developed in political systems to
mitigate a tendency of pure referenda to marginalize smaller or less influential
constituencies, and to apportion governance responsibilities and options.
Similarly, the application of science and technology to problem solving often
benefits from local representation, if this can be done without imposing
obfuscatory layers of scientific and informational ‘clergy’. Patents nearly
require such a clergy for interpretation of the complex coverage and rights
they convey. Transparency is needed to support the harnessing of science and
technology information as opposed to increasing reliance on the clergy to
bypass it.
One of the key tenets of open innovation – captured in its very name – is the
transparency that allows technical contributions to be evaluated on their merits
of and responsiveness to their constituencies. This transparency must be
coupled with and responsive to a feedback system, to allow improvement of
response quality and delivery.
We propose that in the strategic design of new innovation systems, local-scale
agricultural and technical universities and state-funded public health and
extension activities must be coopted, empowered and strengthened in a
manner that furthers their relevance and transparency. Furthermore, the
encouragement of small-to-medium enterprise affords a critically important,
self-regulating system of ‘representation’ that should be galvanised and
strengthened.
The BiOS initiative is designed to forge a new commons in enabling technology
for biological innovations, and new paradigms and mechanisms to address
market failures and weak market signals with productive, transparent and
sustainable problem-solving.
BiOS will increase fairness in access to the tools of innovation as a
fundamental human right. Our desire is to invent, acquire, commission and
distribute inventions under new, public-good binding licenses and contracts to
ensure the insulation of the new body of technology from appropriation.
BiOS will:
explore, adapt, implement, promote and support new inclusive
•
mechanisms for sharing IP and Intellectual Capital (IC);
• create new tools, legal and normative instruments and methods for
generating and sharing biological innovations;
• make transparent, understandable and navigable the opaque world of
patent rights;
• integrate this new transparency of intellectual property systems with
opportunities for cooperative and collective action – technical, legal
and political – to remedy its excesses;
• articulate and promulgate public-good norms in development and use
of biological technologies;
• develop, commission, guide and promote new transformative
technologies;
• forge synergies between diverse sectors, including life sciences,
nanotechnology, and software engineering.
BiOS – What is it and what is it not?
The name, Biological Innovation for Open Society, was chosen carefully to
indicate what BiOS is not, as much as what it is.
BiOS is not simply a 'biotechnology' initiative, although biological innovation is
one of the first points of intervention because the opportunities are so great,
and the impediments to wise use are so pronounced.
All forms of 'Biological Innovation' ranging from plant and animal breeding,
crop husbandry and protection, agronomy, genetic and natural resource
conservation, management and use, medical and public health interventions
and environmental remedies are becoming similarly constrained in the
technology options available to disenfranchised user groups, and these
constraints can be addressed by similar measures.
'Open Society' is a goal that is reflected in the BiOS institutional philosophy
and in a desire for a self-correcting community of problem solvers, whether in
the public or private sector. Unlike the usage of “free” mandated by groups
such as the Free Software Foundation, ‘Open Society’ is less likely to be
misunderstood as prescriptive of the mode by which social advancement is
achieved, and lends itself to the diverse cultural, social, economic and
environmental imperatives under which innovation systems must act.
There seems to have been a growth industry in the last few years associated
with the general malaise around intellectual property use and abuse.
Unfortunately, in this explosion of interest an important point is often missed:
the dramatic increase in the use of intellectual property protection by both
public and private sector, the concomitant low standard but broad scope of
such IP grants, and the trend towards exclusive licensing and exclusionary use
of IP portfolios are symptoms, not causes.
In focusing on the symptoms rather than the causes, many “IP initiatives” may
fail to provide truly useful tools or alternatives, merely ‘patches’ to a defective
and inadequate system.
It is helpful to distinguish between the tools of innovation, and the products of
innovation The implications for the impacts of exclusionary IP regimes in tools
and their use (analogous to operating systems, programming languages,
middleware and standards of interoperability) or in their applications
(analogous to product lines or service relationships in software companies) are
very different.
Enabling technologies, the “source code” for adding value to biological
information in order to make products, may be considered pre-competitive for
high-margin applications, but are crucially lacking for low-margin applications.
Broad access to such tools is critical for their continued evolution to be able to
address the challenges of low margins and the market failures associated with
the needs of poor people. Enabling technology tools are the new battleground
for public good and democratic involvement in problem solving in the life
sciences, whether by public agencies or by private enterprise.
However, this battleground is largely unsurveyed. Many of the proposed
“solutions” to intellectual property use and abuse are about “freeing” or
creating cheaper or wider availability for particular products rather than
liberating and providing tools.
This distinction is not only useful to define the best rules of engagement, but
also to forge common purpose with the proprietary thinking that drives, often,
both the academic and business sectors involved in biological technology. The
same distinction is at the heart of the acceptance and promotion of Linux and
other Open Source software by many powerful and influential corporations in
IT.
New Development Vector: The ‘Free Software’ Lesson
The fundamental tenet driving the BiOS Initiative has resonance with the Free
Software movement, which has morphed into the Open Source movement.
This ethos is a recognition that ‘Freedom to Innovate’ is a core human right,
and that infringements on the capacity of persons to improve their condition
through innovation must be viewed very cautiously.
The statement widely credited to Richard Stallman, the iconoclastic founder of
the Free Software movement, and further expanded on the GNU.org web site,
serves as a helpful framework for the elaboration of the BIOS initiative:
“‘Free software’ is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the
concept, you should think of “free” as in “free speech”, not as in
“free beer”.
Free software is a matter of the users' freedom to run, copy,
distribute, study, change and improve the software. More precisely,
it refers to four kinds of freedom, for the users of the software:
The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom
•
0).
• The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it
to your needs (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a
precondition for this.
• The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your
neighbor (freedom 2).
• The freedom to improve the program, and release your
improvements to the public, so that the whole community
benefits (freedom 3). Access to the source code is a
precondition for this. “
(www.gnu.org , May 2005)
Similar to the ethos of the Free Software movement, the BIOS Initiative is not
about cheap or free stuff, either pharmaceuticals or food. It’s about creating
the freedom to innovate based on what has come before, and the freedom to
deliver the fruits of such innovation with few constraints. “Free Stuff’ is one of
the upsides of this ‘freedom’, but is a consequence rather than a cause of the
liberty and capacity to innovate and share.
The Open Source movement is a more recent, distinct and pragmatic evolution
of the Free Software movement. In Open Source, products can be created
and delivered for a profit, but the source code must remain available for use
and improvement.
Without pushing the metaphor too far, it can be said that the degree of
accommodation of private enterprise and capital recruitment mechanisms by
Open Source has more resonance with the challenges of innovation in the life
sciences, where time frames and capital thresholds are of much larger
magnitude than in software engineering.
Granularity of Technology:
One spoke broken will stop the wheel from turning
Increasingly, biological technologies are not self-contained, but are rather
interdependent technologies that require multiple key methods and
components to function. By analogy, the most powerful technologies can be
considered as ‘wheels’, requiring a number of ‘spokes’ to function. For
instance, the ability to transfer a gene to a crop plant may require dozens of
individually protected, discrete technologies. Denial of access to any one of
these “spokes” can and does deny the use of the entire technology by potential
users. Worse, it prevents the iterative and cooperative shaping and
improvement of the technology to meet diverse users’ needs.
Unfortunately, even placing one or more key methods or components into the
public domain allows no leverage to bring other components into a collective
whole with broad access. Virtually all practices of academic scientists promote
the belief that 'good science' can, almost by magic, transform itself into public
or private goods. It can’t.
In fact, in the failure to deliver such goods with broad access, the public sector
science community is complicit by neglect, because the true stranglehold is
where much less public sector effort is expended: the conversion process.
Reaching the delivery stage using most biological technologies requires the use
of many key components. When access to a highly fragmented set of critical
technologies is necessary to create a potentially viable product, when access to
even one of the components is denied and no substitute exists, the project
cannot move forward. This uncertainty destroys investment incentive and
confidence by public or private sector.
The multinational private sector has addressed this problem by acquiring large
IP portfolios and negotiating cross-licensing arrangements among themselves
to obtain full platforms of enabling technologies, though these companies still
usually find themselves still limited in freedom to operate. The public-good
sector, and small-to-medium enterprise, in contrast, having only fractured
portfolios often comprising publicly-developed technology and modest non-fixed
capital pools that it believes can be expanded by eagerness to license out, is at
a grave disadvantage.
Laudable work by high profile individuals and dedicated agencies to ensure
genome sequences, genetic resources or indeed scientific results are placed in
the public domain is insufficient, and worse, can be a diversion, because the
ease and affordability of sharing data via the internet have rendered
information, per se, no longer the critical point of control. These data, the
genetic materials and the published science are routinely hijacked - enclosed -
by entities, usually large multinational corporations, which have access to the
means of converting that information into economic value. For an example of
how this happens, see the Policy Forum in October 2005 Science, on the
extensive patenting activity related to the Human Genome project. Similar
examples have occurred with plant genomes such as rice, despite or perhaps
even assisted by the public funding that has gone into making the sequences
available.
The enclosure, the hijacking of the information outside the public domain
rarely ensures a sustainable competitive advantage. More often it is an
inadvertent and very unfortunate side effect of a strategy for industry survival.
If the expense, and the perceived requirement for competitiveness and
investment, of sequestering added value outside the public domain in iterative
patents could be rendered unnecessary, many economically rational companies
would not undertake it. Even the most ardent advocates of free market capital
forces are finding that, with new business models, money can be made without
controlling or restricting access to the tools of innovation.
Where is the proof? Recently, the social and technological achievements of
the community of programmers who created a public-spirited and public-good-
binding world of open source software have also fomented a great change in
the IT business world.
IBM Corporation made a bold and unprecedented move to create the first
universally accessible ‘protected commons’ of patents in a pool available for
any open source development. While IBM, as the largest patent holder in the
world (USPTO and WIPO data) could be viewed as a ‘rights maximalist’, over
500 of its key software patents have been made available to all – including
competitors – who choose to use these patented technologies under open
source rules. Within days, Sun Microsystems followed suit with another 1600
patents, and a myriad of other companies such as HP and Nokia are doing the
same. The snowball effect continues.
By providing templates for new licensing and sharing regimes, approaches to
greatly decrease transaction costs, new tools for technology forecasting and
management and enhancing the pro-active analytical capabilities of offices of
technology transfer, BiOS will similarly play a catalytic role in making parallel
public-good oriented activities and IP focused initiatives in the life sciences
more likely, and more successful.
Initially, it is anticipated that streamlined commissioning and management of
core technology improvements will best be done in a format such as BiOS that
is technologically and legally sophisticated, with a commitment to advanced
informatics and communications. However, the intent is to develop fully
‘portable’ paradigms and procedures by which the concept can be promulgated
in diverse institutional and cultural settings.
The BIOS Initiative - Open Source Biotechnology Is Born
In a publication today in the prestigious scientific journal, Nature, a team at CAMBIA in Canberra unveils the 'kernel' of the world's first 'explicit open source' biotechnology toolkit. These tools, and the precedent they establish, will allow the public-sector, small to medium enterprises and even large firms worldwide to explore new business models and begin a new era of transparent and cost-effective innovation in life sciences.
The technologies include TransBacter, a new method for transferring genes to plants, and GUSPlus, a new way of visualizing where these genes are and how they function. "These tools are seeding a growing movement -- the BIOS Initiative -- that will enable researchers, even in the poorest countries in the world, to be partners in the choice and development of the crop improvement technologies best suited to their own priorities", says Richard Jefferson, founder and CEO of CAMBIA and Adjunct Professor at Charles Sturt University (CSU).
"Most importantly, these new tools are provided under a new licensing paradigm that ensures that they are improved, shared and retained as a public resource."
Today also sees the launch of BioForge (http://www.bioforge.net), an online collaborative research platform for biological innovation, developed in partnership with CollabNet Inc (http://www.collab.net). In the tradition of open source software, BioForge makes it possible for scientists to work together to craft new, deliverable technologies within a "protected commons".
"BioForge is a hands-on, evolving tool kit to make things happen. BioForge is about sharing capabilities and building communities of innovation to tackle the challenges of global health, poverty and hunger. These problems are best solved by empowering untapped resources - the countless creative people who are currently marginalized", says Jefferson, an influential scientist who in 2003 was named as one of Scientific American's 50 Top Technology Innovators and is a Fellow of the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship.
Members of the BioForge community will be able to use certified BIOS licenses (www.bios.net) to distribute their work. The BIOS Initiative provides a new licensing mechanism that encourages sharing of the core tools of innovation with all, while still allowing patenting of products, where necessary.
Not content with inventing new technology and new software communities, CAMBIA is also releasing new functionalities in its highly successful Patent Lens, which includes the world's fastest free, full-text searchable patent database, with over 1.6 million patents in the life sciences. CAMBIA has flagged its intent to expand its scope beyond the life sciences to include all patents in many countries, to create comprehensive search capabilities and to assist with opportunities for patent system reform. CAMBIA has also just added the INPADOC patent status database to its free online service, now allowing any searchers to know the dynamic status of patent applications and patents in over 40 countries. "This expansion is part of our ongoing effort to restore transparency and trust in patent systems that are often perceived as misaligned with public interest", says Greg Quinn, Senior Informatics Specialist at CAMBIA.
"BIOS is a model for a new innovation system for old challenges. It combines astute use of intellectual property, informatics, new biological sciences, and the unique human element that Internet communication now provides" says Jefferson.
###
CAMBIA is a private, independent, non-profit institute partially self-financed, with assistance from the Rockefeller Foundation, R&D grants, and other philanthropic agencies. CAMBIA is an Affiliated Research Centre of Charles Sturt University (CSU). TransBacter, GUSPlus, Patent Lens, BIOS and BioForge are all trademarks of CAMBIATM. For a press kit with answers to FAQs and downloadable images visit http://www.bios.net.
"Science Commons" is a subsidiary project from the well known "Creative Commons", aiming to overcome barriers in disseminating scientific information. Here are two pieces of articles that give a good overview of this project.
A brief history on why Creative Commons launched the Science Commons project
The sciences depend on access to and use of factual data. Powered by developments in electronic storage and computational capability, scientific inquiry is becoming more data-intensive in almost every discipline. Whether the field is meteorology, genomics, medicine, or high-energy physics, research depends on the availability of multiple databases, from multiple public and private sources, and their openness to easy recombination, search and processing.
Traditions in Intellectual Property
In the United States, this process has traditionally been supported by a series of policies, laws, and practices that were largely invisible even to those who worked in the sciences themselves.
First, 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, not the data on the behavior of mice, or the tensile strength of steel. A scientific article could be copyrighted. 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 use.
Second, US law mandated that even those federal government works that could be copyrighted, 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 system, this provision of a public good would yield incalculable economic benefits.
Third, in 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 (as opposed to inventions derived from data) and required as a condition of publication the availability of the datasets on which the work was based.
Innovation in Technology and Legal Friction
Each of these three central tenets evolved from concepts that existed even before the Industrial Revolution--at the innately slow rate of change of the legal system. Similarly, scientific publication has a long-standing tradition. Modern technologies, especially the evolving use of the World Wide Web as a library, have forever changed the mechanisms for delivery and replication of documents. In many fields, results are published nearly as quickly as they are found. But copyright law has evolved at a different rate. Progress in modern technology combined with a legal system designed for a different technology-based environment is now leading to some unintended consequences. One of these is a kind of legal "friction" that hinders reuse of scientific discoveries and could lead to discouraging innovation.
To counterbalance, a large and vibrant community has joined together in support of the concept of Open Access for scientific literature - "digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions". The U.S. National Institutes of Health have proposed mandated Open Access to all NIH-funded research starting six months after the print date, and there is support for the initiative in the U.S. Congress. Most major journals have granted authors the right to self-publish versions of their peer-reviewed papers. But the legal questions - how can an author make her work available to the public, while taking comfort that she retains some rights to it - have yet to be answered.
The different rates of change between modern technology and the law create friction in other places as well. For example, in the genetic realm, patent law has moved perilously close to being an intellectual property right over raw facts - the C's, G's A's and T's of a particular gene sequence. 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. Legislatively, the US is considering and the EU has adopted a "database right" which actually does accord intellectual property protection to facts - changing one of the most fundamental premises of intellectual property: that one could never own facts, or ideas, only the inventions or expressions yielded by their intersection.
The Federal government's role is also changing. Under the important and in many ways admirable Bayh-Dole statute, federally funded researchers are encouraged to look for potential commercial use of their research. Universities have become partners in developing and reaping the fruits of research. This process has yielded amazing results in many cases by converting raw, basic science into useful products in many industries. But as a consequence, the quest to commercialize has moved upstream in some cases, to the fundamental levels of research and data, and that has created complex legal requirements. While the details can get complex when the intellectual property at hand is a novel "method" for assaying biological activity, there are even more questions about patents covering the genes, proteins and their inferred functions.
The sheer cost in terms of time and money of such complex, multi-party legal work can take intellectual property "out of play" - it is simply more expensive to do the lawyer work than the product might reap on the open markets after the legal work is done. This hinders scientific innovation, as the value of scientific information increases exponentially in connection with other scientific information, and is of the least possible value when segregated by law.
The Search for a Solution
These facts have not gone unnoticed. Numerous scientists have pointed out the irony that, at the historical moment when we have the technologies to permit worldwide availability and distributed processing of scientific data, legal restrictions on transfer make it harder to connect the dots. Learned societies including the National Academies of Sciences, federal granting agencies such as the National Science Foundation, and other groups have all expressed concern about the trends that are developing. Any solution will 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.
Enter Science Commons
Science Commons is an exploratory project to apply the philosophies and activities of Creative Commons in the realm of science. Science Commons works in three project areas: Publishing, Licensing, and Data.
http://sciencecommons.org/about/towards.html
A Description by John Wilbanks, executive director of the Science Commons
Science Commons (SC) was launched in early 2005. SC is a part of
Creative Commons - think of us as a wholly owned subsidiary - drawing
on the amazing success of CC licenses, especially the CC community
and iCommons. But we’re also a little different. Whereas CC focuses
on the individual creators and their copyrights, SC by necessity has
a broader focus. That necessity is caused by, for example, the fact
that most scientists sign employee agreements that assign
intellectual property rights to a host institution. Another example
is that scientific journals regularly request that scientific authors
sign over their copyrights, and scientists eagerly do so in return
for citations in what are called “high impact” journals. There’s a
very real collective action problem here: no one individual or
institution has strong incentives to change the system.
But the system is causing problems in the scientific and academic
communities. Scientific articles are locked behind firewalls, long
after their publishers have realized economic returns. This means
that the hot new article about AIDS research can’t be redistributed
much less translated into other languages (where it might inspire a
local researcher to solve a local problem). The difficulties faced
in relation to the “open access” of publications are easy compared
to those presented when we consider access to tools and data.
Published research indicates that nearly half of all geneticists have
been unable to validate research from colleagues due to problems with
secrecy and legal friction.
So Science Commons works on these problems: inaccessible journal
articles, tools locked up behind complex contracts, socially
irresponsible patent licensing, and data obscured by technology or
end-user licensing agreements. We translate this into projects, with
work in three distinctly different project spaces: publishing
(covered by copyright), licensing (covered by patent and contract)
and data (in the US, covered only by contract). We work on agreements
between funders and grant recipients, between universities and
researchers and between funders and universities—all in the service
of opening up scientific knowledge, tools and data for reuse. We
also promote the use of CC licensing in scientific publishing, on the
belief that scientific papers need to be available to everyone in the
world, not simply available to those with enough resources to afford
subscription fees.
The Publishing Project
Scholarly communication in the sciences generally involves three
components: data generated by experimental research, a peer-reviewed
article explaining and interpreting the data, and metadata that
describes or interprets the underlying data or the article.
Traditionally, journal publishers were predominantly responsible for
gathering, distributing and archiving this information.
The Internet and associated digital networks create a range of
opportunities and challenges for changing the nature of what
information gets stored and communicated, how and when it gets
communicated, and how it is marked with metadata to aid in its use
and reuse. Science Commons is devoted to using its legal and
technical expertise to help scientific researchers make the best use
possible of these new communication technologies. For example, some
science publishers experimenting with a new business model for
scholarly communication require authors of peer-reviewed articles to
grant a Creative Commons license in their articles. These publishers
include the Public Library of Science, BioMed Central, and Springer
OpenChoice.
Science Commons also has convened a working group to discuss other
means for better associating research articles with research data and
for standardizing metadata associated with both of these components.
The Licensing Project
In licensing, we work in a focused manner on the funding of disease
research. Such work involves a lot of basic science carried out by
many individuals at a diverse range of institutions, both public and
private, and each with different policies about intellectual property
rights, different licensing agreements, and, to some extent, even
different funders. When the research begins to yield the kinds of
leads that might attract drug company attention, it will be desirable
(both in remuneration, and also in encouragement to pharmaceutical
companies interest and participation) to offer drug companies an
efficient package of rights that covers the basic permissions they
need to turn research into viable drugs and treatment regimens. The
current practice will certainly not allow the benefits of such “one
stop shopping.”
Using Huntington’s Disease research as a case study, Science Commons
is exploring a “technology trust,” which will combine an intellectual
property rights conservancy, patent pool and other related rights-
bundling methods. We are assessing the types of problems of rights-
fragmentation, a range of possible legal solutions to this problem
(including compulsory terms in funder agreements), the institutional
design of the trust or conservancy, and the question of what
institution would be best suited to administer such a trust or
conservancy. While the project aims to produce a method to ameliorate
the problem for Huntington’s, we would hope to provide guidelines for
solving such problems more generally.
The Data Project
In the United States, there is no intellectual property right on data
(there is such a right in the European Union, albeit with mounting
evidence that it was not needed). But current expansions in
intellectual property law could generate an entirely new set of
obstacles to sharing data among scientists or with the public.
Extending intellectual property rights to databases are likely to
result in basic data being locked up, made more expensive, or more
easily subjected to restrictive licensing agreements.
Additionally, there is a wasteful data economy evolving in which raw
data is not made accessible; scientists are either leery of the risks
of losing control over their data or subject to institutional
requirements that mandate a closed approach. Implicit in data sets
are answers to questions the researcher perhaps did not specify –
answers that are a consequence of the throughput of the experiment.
This data could be reused many times over if properly annotated and
preserved. This, however, requires a cultural shift among scientists,
not a technical shift driven by lawyers.
The Science Commons Data project has two aspects. First, we assert
that data should not be covered by intellectual property law. As part
of this project we provide a resource for database providers
struggling with licensing. Second, we are looking to improve on the
data economy by aiding in the construction of an integrated web of
data, papers, tools, and policy with the explicit goal of
facilitating research into brain disease - the NeuroCommons.
http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/5695
这个标题来自于[Geoff Mulgan, Tom Steinberg & Omar Salem]发在2005的《Demo》上的同名文章。第一作者是英国政坛的重要智囊人物。这篇文章讨论了开源方法在社会领域中的应用潜力。
下面节选了其引言的片段。文章全文可以在http://www.demos.co.uk/publications/wideopen获取。
For centuries the pursuit of knowledge has been undertaken in
ways that involve widely dispersed groups commenting on each
others’ work. The evolution of the Talmud in Judaism is one example,
and the tradition of interpretation in Islam is another. Modern
science has developed through critical peer review in an open, expert
and increasingly global community. Each shares the principle of
making thought open, and using structured commentary to advance
knowledge. Each operates more like a gift economy than a market
economy.
Open source methods take these principles in a radically new
direction. The advent of the internet has made it possible for new
knowledge to be developed, shared and refined in ways that
emphasise its character as a common good, rather than as something
to be owned and enclosed. Open source methods are just the latest in
a series of major innovations founded in the fertile pasture which is
the internet.
Our primary interest in this pamphlet is with the wider
applications and potential of the open source idea. In recent years
‘open source’ has been applied to many areas that have nothing to do
with software. There are now important new organisations involved
in biosciences and pharmaceuticals that describe themselves, or are
being described by others, as open source. There are also open source
news organisations, political campaigns, betting organisations,
markets and employee campaigns.
The application of open source methods to wider areas of social
and economic life is understandably attractive to many. The promise
for the casual observer is of huge returns from relatively little
investment, as well as a sense that non-professionals outside big
corporations now have an unprecedented chance to beat the ‘big
beasts’ at their own games.
The actual picture is much more complex. This paper looks at
these complexities, and concludes with a series of recommendations
for the wide application of open methods to areas including law,
media, academia and social enterprise among others.
Some of the most important innovations will be in and around the
state. Government has started to open up its data sources and more
open methods of policy formulation should make it possible to draw
on much more of society’s intelligence when decisions are being
made. Politics is likely to remain dominated by mass communication
– but open methods are already beginning to transform the ways in
which citizens organise, and even mainstream parties and media
organisations are having to learn how to use them. More broadly, as
has happened with the web – those cities, organisations and nations
that move fastest to embrace open methods in appropriate fields are
likely to benefit in all sorts of ways, both economic and social.
However, in all of this we try to strike a balance. Achieving the full
potential of wider applications depends on clarity about what ‘open
source’ really means, awareness of its limits as a detailed working
model and rigour in thinking through which aspects of it are
applicable in new areas.
今天看了一下Linus Torvalds 五月份在Google讲Git 的 TechTalk。Git 是两年前Linus Torvalds 决定暂时从Linux内核开发中腾出手来、专门写的一个版本控制系统。鉴于版本控制系统是程序开发的一个基本工具，Torvalds老大如此重视也是正常的。
Git 的一个设计思路是分布式系统，区别于常见CVS、SVN等的集中服务器模式。这对应了工作流中的权力体系：集中服务器模式带来集中的权力体系，因为要把程序代码加入到一个集中的管理库里必然要用到某个人的管理权力。即使这种管理权力没有被滥用、管理者尽心尽职，在开发者众多且活跃的时候，这个管理机制会形成一个瓶颈。当然我们知道，有人的地方就有权力的分布问题，这比技术性问题的负面作用更大。
我们一直在说，开源是web 2.0的精神启迪。Torvalds在开源软件开发中碰到的问题在web 2.0的内容开发中其实也很普遍。许多理论上的“守门人”（gatekeepers）在实践中有意或无意的偏移了操作底线。因为这种权力体系的问题，许多人有价值的贡献可能就被浪费了；有限的积极性被压制了。那么分布式版本控制系统的思路可不可以使用到互联网内容建设上来呢？
有谁先用开源汉化的项目做个试验？
～～~～～～～～～～～～～～～～～~
[http://rl.rockiestech.com]
洛基开放文化实验室，使用开源方法来推动社会文化进步
全球性的开放教育资源（OER, Open Educational Resources）正在迅速涌现。联合国教科文组织支持的一个wiki站点[1]提供了很好的资源导向和相关讨论。像OER Commons这种门户站点已经收入了上万的开放教育资源链接[2]。
其中比较著名的有麻省理工的开放课件（MIT Open Courseware）和Rice University发起的Connexions project。其他广义上的开放教育资源可以包括Wikipedia系列项目和Gutenburg等的开放图书。在线开放的优秀音频视频资源也日趋丰富，例如Librivox的音频图书和Google Video里的一些技术讲座。
有效的中文开放教育资源似乎还很有限。这个开放教育资源离我们有多远的问题首先成了本地化（或翻译）的问题。MIT Open Courseware有中文翻译项目：朱学恒带领的志愿者们作出了巨大的努力，大陆官方也有个相应的项目。除此之外，值得一提的恐怕只有一些IT图书资料（有时侵权了）的志愿翻译。
在这个长路迢迢的本地化之上，是如何有效使用这些开放教育资源的问题。
像传统资源一样，开放教育资源仍然需要相当的、附加的努力来进入学习者的知识结构。尽管优秀的资料可以更有效的传递知识、拙劣的资料也可以应付考试，资料无法代替结构化的和方向性的指导、无法代替师生、同学之间的交流讨论。
这要求我们重新思考教育的本质。教育者不是知识的占有者，而是知识的传播者。教育的核心不是知识，而是知识的传递。在开放资源把知识垄断打破之后，教育就应该（健康地）专注到知识的传递上来。
使用英语的程序开发人员已经熟悉了开放教育资源下的学习模式。开源软件的一个巨大社会效益就是帮助软件人才的培养。然而优秀的程序员们是一个有着非常的探索热情的特殊人群，这个开源学习模式要转移到普通教育上需要巨大的额外努力——也就彰显了教育者的重要性。
教育资源严重短缺是中国的一个严重问题，是中国现代化的真正障碍。然而教育在事实上的国有垄断进一步恶化了这个问题。一方面，应试教育阉割了学生的创造力和自学能力；另一方面，劣质教育泛滥，成了政治权力结构下的敛财工具。
开放教育资源的涌现对所有的发展中国家都是巨大的机会。中国面对这个机会比面对开源软件的时候更茫然——更清楚地反映出了深层的社会问题。让我们呼吁中国政府在义务教育上负起基本的责任，在职业教育和高等教育上消除政治性垄断。同时鼓励社会各界来积极探索开放教育资源的使用，阻止中国在巨大的数码鸿沟后面落后更远。
[1] http://oerwiki.iiep-unesco.org 。资源指南页面见：
http://oerwiki.iiep-unesco.org/index.php?title=OER_useful_resources 。
[2] http://www.oercommons.org 。
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[http://rl.rockiestech.com]
洛基开放文化实验室，使用开源方法来推动社会文化进步
开源的核心是自由，使用和修改软件工具的自由。这在本质上是对个人价值的尊重。关于意识形态的争议，多数是人们的臆想或商业宣传的误导。开源和共产主义在价值观和经济模式上都是冲突的。
共产主义的平等是一种无法实现的终极虚幻。依靠政治强权只能制造奴隶式的平等而不可能达到真实的平等。共产主义抹杀个人自由和个人价值；开源软件维护个人自由和个人价值。
开源软件彻底的反对垄断行为，是自由市场的捍卫者；开源本身也面对自由市场的选择。开源软件鼓励创新和再开发，其商业意义是促进多样化，优化产业生态环境。这里和共产主义的区别不须赘言。
把开源、开放性内容与共产主义混淆到一起有两个常见来源：
（1）国人的共产主义情结。这其实也是国内政治经济教育的贫瘠。除了被扭曲得面目全非的马主义，大多数人没有了解其它理论的机会；结果有人见了四条腿的就以为是骡子。
（2）商业宣传的误导。开源、开放性内容的发展影响许多人的既得利益。在西方的政治话语里，“共产主义”是一个打击对手的方便标签。“开源是共产主义”的论调，对有的人是算计好的舆论，对有的人是不明就里的跟风。
开放性内容是 web 2.0 的灵魂，很大程度上来自于开源软件的启迪。开源对web 2.0 的后互联网格局的出现有两个主要贡献：
（1）大量的开放源码提供了技术基础，大大降低了网络经济的开发成本和运行成本。
（2）为用户参与内容生产过程的模式和网络上协作共创的模式作出了示范。
共享精神是上面第（2）点的动力。维基百科（wikipedia），web 2.0 的模范之一，的运作模式非常类似于Linux的开发。而且维基百科的内容就是以GNU/FDL（自由文本协议）发布。
“web 2.0 是高级的民-主”是指网络社区的运作模式。
当然就传统意义的政治民-主说起，网络突破了诸多形式上的限制，加强了大众话语权。例如，YOUTUBE已经对美国政治生活产生了重大的影响。然而这更多是互联网本身带来的，不是web 2.0 特有的。web 2.0 特有的是，社区需要遵循民-主模式来运行，而且是有史以来最彻底的民-主。用户的参与可以受到限制，但是没有人可以限制他们用脚投票的权利。
“高级的民-主”中的“高级”，检验在政府缺省下的民间的社会组织能力。即使大陆没有封锁维基百科，中文的维基百科站点能否成功呢？大陆学术传统的迷失和合作精神的残缺使得这个答案很不光明。“高级的民-主”，体现在推动文明进步和文化积累的社会力量上。民-主模式的组织能力需要在这一类的社会活动中培养起来。
同样，web 2.0 的商业运作必须充分尊重用户的自由，体现民-主的组织能力。这在很大程度上要求摆脱历史上的文化泥沼，用人情常识代替专制恶习，用理性来树立权威。
这里的第一步是明确版权，网站与用户间达成基本共识。开放性协议对于使用用户内容的网站往往是必要的基础。创作共享（Creative Commons）的系列协议提供了很方便的框架。某些网站傲慢的侵吞用户版权的做法其实是奸商霸市。
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[http://rl.rockiestech.com]
洛基开放文化实验室，使用开源方法来推动社会文化进步