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/...

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[This section cites "BiOS Initiative Documentation" from bios.net]
Background to the Initiative

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.

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[ZT from ScienceDaily, http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/02/050213134445.htm]

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.

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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.