A research or resource commons requires agreement among providers or participants about its legal structure, the technical requirements for common 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 licenses. There are three major objectives for the workshop to be held at American University. First, the attendees will 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. Next, the members will 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. Third, they will 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. The report of the workshop and all case studies developed will be made publicly available and published on the Internet.
The products of this project delineated the landscape for others studying the interaction of law and science. The whitepapers prepared for the meeting and that will be published online. They included, among others: - A review of federal data sharing and open data policies - An examination of the technical friction points in open science Workshop participants reviewed and discussed current policies and activities across a range of U.S. federal agencies, international agencies and specific countries. This gave them a shared sense of current positions on providing access to digital research data in the U.S. and elsewhere, and the types of activities that are influencing both policy and behavior across a range of stakeholders in the research enterprise. Providing a complete picture of current policies, attitudes and activities across such a complex domain is not possible in workshop format so the goal was instead to provide a "snapshot" of a moment in time. As digital data becomes the central product of research, better policy for managing that data and for ensuring the greatest benefit to the public and to future researchers becomes a centrally important point of science policy. This project addressed the lack of centralized data sharing and open data policy at the federal level, and attempted to survey what the current state of data sharing and open data policy was, and to make recommendations for future steps to increase access to data. Robust open data polices allow quick uptake of new data for improvements in commercial technology, public health, and education. A better understanding of the current landscape and the key steps to increasing access to data will benefit the public, both in their conception of the opportunities posed by data access, as well as in their awareness of current open data resources. Going forward, this project found: - High-level government policies are key, and good examples exist to develop best practices - Policy for funder-mandated data management plans should require direction on open availability of results (publications and data) to the extent possible, clear terms of access and use, and timing of availability. - In addition to government and funder policy, focusing on a middle ground or bottom up support is also critical and can be supported through education and outreach, especially to researchers and students - Improving incentives for data sharing, demonstrating its value and removing barriers are also very important - Data sharing policy should address multiple levels of data that are useful for a variety of audiences, including scientists but also students and the general public - Usefully shared data requires specific information about methodology, semantics, and other appropriate metadata, in standardized terms. - Data management infrastructure will likely be characterized by a mix of centralized holding and distributed centers at universities - Creating exemplars on specific scientific research topics that use a commons approach will demonstrate value.
