whether it be the ability to place a copy of the final PDF version of their work on the Internet upon publication, or whether the work is subject to a six-month delay or otherwise dictated embargo period (“Delayed Access” addendum).
Our most recent work in Scholar’s Copyright revolves around the question of licensing data and databases. An extensive amount of research, exploratory conversations and a number of private workshops were convened and conducted to gain a better grasp of the complexity of this issue. On 15 December 2007, Science Commons released the outcome of these conversations—the Protocol for Open Access Data, which, along with the CC Zero Project, do the same things for data as CC licenses do for literature. The idea is to allow databases to be freely integrated with one another, reconstructing the public domain for data through contract, and creating zones of certainty. The protocol incorporated a number of recommendations based on established scientific norms, such as attribution and citation. The CC Zero tool identifies what rights need to be waived (for example, copyright in databases, sui generis rights under the European Union database directive, etc) in order to put data back into the public domain.
- 3. Open Access to physical materials
The Biological Materials Transfer (MTA) Project addresses the accessibility issues surrounding most research materials in biology—the physical research tools upon which the research Web is built. DNA, cell lines, lab mice, and more physical tools are more often than not subject to deliberate withholding, legal slowdowns, difficulties in fulfilling orders and many other kinds of delays that add to the drag on scientific discovery and the research cycle. Our MTA work is built on the idea of building an application that incorporates the principles of an “e-commerce” transaction system but applied to biological materials; we are working towards “one-click” access to these materials wherever possible.
To achieve this, our legal experts worked to create a suite of contracts, known as Materials Transfer Agreements (MTA). There are pre-existing standard MTAs, two of which are included in the suite: the National Institute of Health’s Uniform Biological Materials Transfer Agreement (UBMTA) and the Simple Letter Agreement (SLA). These two agreements cover a significant amount of materials already. Each MTA follows the
