Science Commons

Science Commons (SC) is a Creative Commons project for designing strategies and tools for faster, more efficient web-enabled scientific research. The organization identifies unnecessary barriers to research, crafts policy guidelines and legal agreements to lower those barriers, and develops technology to make research data and materials easier to find and use. Its goal is to speed the translation of data into discovery and thereby the value of research.

Science Commons is located at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in the Ray and Maria Stata Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

History

When Creative Commons began, the founding board members expressed an interest in expanding the Creative Commons model to the sciences. Recognizing that developing open pathways for scientific research would be complex and contentious, the Creative Commons board did not feel armed at that point with the expertise or the technical capability to enter into that territory.



Creative Commons launched Science Commons in early 2005. The organization sought to achieve for science what Creative Commons had begun to achieve for the world of culture, art and educational material: to ease unnecessary legal and technical barriers to sharing, to promote innovation, and to provide easy, high quality tools that let individuals and organizations specify the terms under which they wished to share their material.

Projects

Biological......

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