What problem does Science Commons intend to solve?
Science has always depended on the free flow of information. Over the last three decades, a combination of legal change and evolving social norms in science has created a tangled web of intellectual property and professional secrecy that sometimes restricts that flow of information. Some of these changes occurred for good reasons. Intellectual property rights may be needed to encourage investment in research or in bringing innovations to market. Yet not all of the changes are good, and they come with many unintended consequences – thickets of rights that must laboriously be worked through, non-standard licenses that make each transaction slow and expensive, cumbersome materials transfer agreements that slow down the process of experimentation. The long term impact of such complex webs of intellectual property is severe. Research into rare diseases, or diseases of the global poor, can become too expensive – simply to get the lawyering done, not the science. University tech transfer offi
