"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