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Workshop on Research and Resource Commons in Scientific Research: Final Report

• American University, Washington College of Law
• November 17-18, 2011
• Michael Carroll, Professor of Law and Director, Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property, Washington College of Law at American University, Washington, D.C.

Summary

In November of 2011, the Washington College of Law at American University convened and hosted a two-day workshop in collaboration with the Creative Commons to develop a strategy for promoting a commons or scientific research and related resources. The workshop brought together interested stakeholders from across the scientific research enterprise: scientists, administrators, librarians, publishers, societies, technologists, lawyers, policy makers, students, funders, and Open Science advocates, including both U.S. and international representatives. This diverse group discussed the current state of policy and technology as it relates to a scientific research commons, and identified key opportunities and challenges, as well as next steps, for the scientific community in general and Creative Commons in particular. These opportunities will inform the next phase of the Science program at Creative Commons and include legal and policy issues, education and technology efforts, and partnerships that will better leverage our efforts going forward.

Introduction

Rapid advances in information technology, and their uses in the inputs and outputs of scientific research, are far ahead of the legal and policy framework that supports science. A range of initiatives have emerged in the past decade to catch up, including changes in the grants policy at the National Institutes of Health to require public access through PubMed Central to peer-reviewed journal articles arising from NIH-supported research, university-based initiatives to improve open access to the scientific literature and to use institutional repositories as sites for data sharing, and the recent National Science Foundation requirements concerning grantees' data management plans. The time is ripe to review these and other initiatives to assess what lessons can be generalized. In particular, the rapid growth of digital scientific data, the complex status of these data under intellectual property law, and requirements that these data be managed responsibly, suggest that an open, commons-based approach could be particularly useful for addressing these phenomena.

A research or resource commons requires agreement among providers and participants about its legal structure, the technical requirements for its resources, and a shared understanding about how to sustain the commons. Legal issues, usually involving intellectual property or contract law, often arise as researchers, or research funders, seek to build commons or commons-based tools, such as Creative Commons^[1] licenses. The objectives for the workshop were:

• To review lessons learned from those who have worked to build or to promote the use of commons structures to support scientific research from within the federal government and from the private sector, including the non-profit sector. This would include review of case studies from existing initiatives to provide open access to the scientific and scholarly literature, attempts to streamline and standardize the sharing of biological materials, and successful data- sharing projects, such as Sage Bionetworks and existing and proposed methods for sharing earth observation data.
• To identify the legal, technical, and cultural requirements for a successful commons, with a particular focus on scientific data. The key themes will be the respective roles of standardization and interoperability at the legal and technical levels necessary for resources to be shared in a commons, whether those resources are literature, data, physical inputs, or others.
• To discuss how the federal government, the university and non-profit sector, and industry can best work together to support existing successful resource commons in science and to create new commons or commons-based tools to improve the speed and efficiency of publicly funded scientific research. Attention will be given to how existing commons standards, such as legal and technical tools supplied by Creative Commons, are currently being used in the sciences and how these might be made more useful with respect to emergent forms of scientific communication.

A commons, in this context, is a standard set of rules by which people access the shared resources, including the infrastructure (standards, protocols, security methods, etc.) as well as the policies and terms of its use (e.g. methods of covering its costs). For the progress of science, we also promote commons that allows for maximal reusability and re-purposability of resources –i.e., the ability to combine large amounts of texts or data for new research purposes often unforeseen by the resource producers but having great potential benefit to science and the public.

The scientific research resources under consideration are primarily the research articles (analysis and conclusions drawn from research) and primary research data produced during the conduct of a research project. Also in scope for consideration are emerging forms of scholarly communication: websites, wikis, blogs, pre-prints, technical reports and white papers, databases, data visualizations, etc. All of these resources may be used in their entirety or in parts, e.g., the reference section of a research article, or a subset of a dataset, so different policies and infrastructure may pertain. Rearch outputs are normally the product of one or more researchers working for a grantee (university, research institution, government agency, etc.) often across international boundaries, so we are interested in a wide range of research materials, research stakeholders, and of international scope.

Historically, formal research publications are copyrighted to the publisher (society, non-profit or commercial), the author and their institution retain no rights, and funders don’t enforce what rights they could retain. This is changing in two ways. First, Open Access publications use different funding models and allow for free public access to articles, but often the publisher retains further rights (e.g. to “mine” the texts or build added-value commercial services from them). Second, a lot of scientific communication now occurs outside the formal research publications, on websites, wikis, blogs, and via informal publications. Many of these are unlicensed and the copyright owner is unclear, others are published under open licenses like CC-BY^[2].

As background for the workshop, a survey of participants conducted before the event helped identify consensus around key questions:

1. Taking account of the ways in which scientific data vary in type and scale, what policies and practices would you say would constitute successful data sharing in science?