Was ist Science Commons?

Während die Creative Commons Lizenzen für kulturelle Güter entwickelt wurden, gibt es mittlerweile auch das Science Commons Projekt. Hier geht es eher darum, einerseits Lizenzen für Open Access und andererseits auch beispielsweise Lizenzen für Forschungsdaten zu entwickeln. Im Creative Commons Weblog gibt es nun einen einführenden Text in den Sinn und Zweck des Science Commons Projektes:

Science Commons (SC) was launched in early 2005. SC is a part of Creative Commons – think of us as a wholly owned subsidiary – drawing on the amazing success of CC licenses, especially the CC community and iCommons. But we’re also a little different. Whereas CC focuses on the individual creators and their copyrights, SC by necessity has a broader focus. That necessity is caused by, for example, the fact that most scientists sign employee agreements that assign intellectual property rights to a host institution. Another example is that scientific journals regularly request that scientific authors sign over their copyrights, and scientists eagerly do so in return for citations in what are called „high impact“ journals. There’s a very real collective action problem here: no one individual or institution has strong incentives to change the system.