Any research project should adopt a “mission-driven approach.” The question to be asked is, “What do we want to achieve?” The goal may be commercial gain, may simply be the advancement of research for the public good, or both. Open access to research data and publications should always be considered, especially in the case of publicly funded research.21 The level of access to and reuse of research data and publications that is to be allowed should ideally be determined at the outset of a research project.
From the commencement of a research project, it is imperative to have appropriate policies and frameworks in place. Policies must cover copyright management and data management. Copyright management policies should deal with copyright ownership rights and how copyright protected material is to be shared. Researchers should consider the various open content licensing models that can be applied to their copyright material. Data management plans should deal with how data is to be generated, managed and stored; data ownership rights and legal controls that may apply to data (including patents); and how access will be provided to the data and how the data will be disseminated.
Interestingly, some argue that, while open access in terms of copyright material will allow us to read that material and potentially to reproduce and electronically communicate it to colleagues, it most likely will not provide permission to use or exploit related patented material. One of the challenges for the near future will be to consider to what extent open access to publicly funded knowledge (e.g., that makes up tools or platform technologies in biotechnology) requires an accompanying commitment to allow a certain level of use of patented material. In this regard, the CAMBIA project provides an interesting approach that deserves close attention in coming years.
As lawyers, we hope that the law can adapt to facilitate the very great potential cyberinfrastructure promises us. To this end, we need to think of legal tools as being part of the infrastructure and work towards providing innovative models for the future.
2Lambert Working Group on Intellectual Property - www.innovation.gov.uk/lambertagreements/index.asp?lvl1=1&lvl2=0&lvl3=0...
3University Industry Demonstration Partnership - uidp.org/
4Seventh Research Framework Programme (FP7) - cordis.europa.eu/fp7/home_en.html See further, European Commission, “Intellectual Property and Technology Transfer” ec.europa.eu/invest-in-research/policy/ipr_en.htm
5Fitzgerald, B., Fitzgerald, A., Perry, M., Kiel-Chisholm, S., Driscoll, E., Thampapillai, D., Coates, J. “OAK Law Project Report No. 1: Creating a Legal Framework for Copyright Management of Open Access Within the Australian Academic and Research Sector,”(2006), at 1.22, eprints.qut.edu.au/archive/00007306/01/Printed_Oak_Law_Project_Report_...
6Creative Commons - creativecommons.org/
7Public Library of Science (PLoS) - www.plos.org
8PLoS One - www.plosone.org
9Nature Precedings - precedings.nature.com/
10Nature Precedings – Copyright - precedings.nature.com/about
11For more information, see Kylie Pappalardo and Dr Anne Fitzgerald, ‘A Guide to Developing Open Access Through Your Digital Repository’ (2007), available at www.oaklaw.qut.edu.au/node/32
12Science Commons - sciencecommons.org/
13See sciencecommons.org/resources/faq/databases
14UniProtKB - www.uniprot.org/terms
15Driscoll, C. T. “NIH data and resource sharing, data release and intellectual property policies for genomics community resource projects,” Expert Opin. Ther. Patents (2005), Vol. 15, no.1, pp. 4.
16Eisenberg, R., Rai, A. “Harnessing and Sharing the Benefits of State-Sponsored Research: IP Rights and Data Sharing in California’s Stem Cell Initiative,” (2006), 21 Berkley Law Journal 1187 at 1202.
17HapMap, Project Public Access Licence, previously at www.hapmap.org/cgi-perl/registration. Users are no longer required to enter into this licence to use the HapMap database. See also [16].
18CAMBIA - www.cambia.org/daisy/cambia/home.html
19Jefferson, R. “Science as Social Enterprise: The CAMBIA BiOS Initiative,” (2006) Innovations, Vol. 13 at 22 available at www.bios.net/daisy/bios/3067/version/default/part/AttachmentData/data/...
20CAMBIA, Biological Innovation for Open Science, About BiOS (Biological Open Source) Licences, www.bios.net/daisy/bios/398
21OECD, Declaration on Access to Research Data from Public Funding www.oecd.org/document/0,2340,en_2649_34487_25998799_1_1_1_1,00.html
