Science Commons
Science Commons is a Creative Commons project to try to free up sharing constraints in science while working within existing copyright and patent law.
From Technology Review:
Sunstein points out that until recently peer-reviewed scientific journals were the main way in which news of scientific developments were propagated. He says that there has always been an informal underground network of communication among “old boy” scientists who would share pre-prints and drafts of publications; a network that has generally been confined to select groups and depended on trust, word of mouth, and paper media.
But that old boy network was hacked by the rapid acceleration of research, aided by computers, the Internet, and the World Wide Web. The result is that peer-reviewed scientific journals or other paper media are no longer the first and main source of news of scientific development.
“Many scientists now see paper publications as an impediment, since the Web is a faster and cheaper form of dissemination of information, one that might well foster a greater and better community of scientific endeavor,” says Sunstein. “This technological communications environment requires a new set of rules to assure the fair exchange of scientific ideas and a reasonable way of monetizing this exchange.”