Science Commons to Liberate Research

"The important and innovative ideas need to be shared. I believe it’s vital to revolutionizing science in the future," says filmmaker Jesse Dylan about the Science Commons project. His recent video promotes the new licenses from Science Commons that should achieve for scientific research what Creative Commons does for the creative realm.

Jesse Dylan is most recently known for his well regarded video for Barack Obama's presidential campaign, "Yes We Can," along with music videos for Tom Waits, Elvis Costello and others.

The three important initiatives of the Science Commons project are:

• Scientific research should be reusable

• Material should be "one-click" accessible

• Fragmented information sources should be integrated

The initiators of the project see the problem being that researchers have mainly done their work in isolation. Their results end up collecting dust in databases and are bound by restrictive contracts. As often occurs, work gets duplicated and complicated processes mean that opportunities are missed. "The time it takes to go from identifying a gene to developing a drug currently stands at 17 years — forever, for people suffering from disease."

The Science Commons project is currently working on the Neurocommons, a software platform that might become the model for licensing in the neurosciences, and the basis for subsequent scientific research projects.