Biological Innovation for Open Society

Last updated
Biological Innovation for Open Society
FormationFebruary 10, 2005
Founder Cambia
Purposebiological innovation
Key people
 Richard Anthony Jefferson

BiOS (Biological Open Source/Biological Innovation for Open Society) is an international initiative to foster innovation and freedom to operate in the biological sciences. BiOS was officially launched on 10 February 2005 by Cambia, an independent, international non-profit organization dedicated to democratizing innovation. Its intention is to initiate new norms and practices for creating tools for biological innovation, using binding covenants to protect and preserve their usefulness, while allowing diverse business models for the application of these tools. [1]

Contents

As described by Richard Anthony Jefferson, CEO of Cambia, the Deputy CEO of Cambia, Dr Marie Connett worked extensively with small companies, university offices of technology transfer, attorneys, and multinational corporations to create a platform to share productive and sustainable technology. [1] The parties developed the BiOS Material Transfer Agreement (MTA) and the BiOS license [2] as legal instruments to facilitate these goals.

Biological Open Source

Traditionally, the term 'open source' describes a paradigm for software development associated with a set of collaborative innovation practices, which ensure access to the end product's source materials - typically, source code. [3] The BiOS Initiative has sought to extend this concept to the biological sciences, and agricultural biotechnology in particular. BiOS is founded on the concept of sharing scientific tools and platforms so that innovation can occur at the 'application layer.' Jefferson observes that, 'Freeing up the tools that make new discoveries possible will spur a new wave of innovation that has real value.' [4] He notes further that, 'Open source is an enormously powerful tool for driving efficiency.' [5]

Through BiOS instruments, licensees cannot appropriate the fundamental kernel of a technology and improvements exclusively for themselves. The base technology remains the property of whichever entity developed it, but improvements can be shared with others that support the development of a protected commons around the technology. [6]

To maintain legal access to the technology, in other words, licensees must agree not to prevent others who have agreed to the same terms from using the technology and any improvements in the development of different products

BiOS License

By making the BiOS license cost-free, Cambia has sought to create 'freedom to innovate' in the scientific community. In lieu of royalties and other restrictions often imposed by legal agreements, the BiOS licenses impose on the licensee conditions to encourage cooperation and development of the technology. To be granted full, unfettered commercial rights to listed technologies, licensees are required to comply with three conditions:

As with other legal instruments, definitions used in the BiOS licenses are important. The scope and core capabilities of the enabling technologies and platforms should be carefully defined to provide confidence in the development of viable business models surrounding the use of the BiOS license.

The adoption of the BiOS licenses has now extended to over 300 licensees worldwide.

Material Transfer Agreements (MTAs)

BiOS has also issued a series of Material Transfer Agreements (MTAs), a common form of bailment used to provide materials for life sciences research, such as bacterial strains, plant lines, cell cultures, or DNA. MTAs able to be adapted for biological materials are available on the BiOS site. [7]

Open Source Biological Technologies

CambiaLabs [8] engineered two ‘open source’ biological technologies, TransBacter and GUSPlus, [9] which they released under the BiOS Initiative. The first, TransBacter, was designed to work around the intense patenting associated with the making of transgenic plants. Cambia identified that the majority of patents claiming methods for plant transgenics make explicit reference to the bacterium Agrobacterium tumefaciens; therefore, the use of a bacterium outside the genus Agrobacterium would not be subject to existing patent claims. Cambia published its work on TransBacter, which uses bacteria from the genera Rhizobium, Sinorhizobium and Mesorhizobium in 2005 in Nature. [10] TransBacter is available to all non-profit researchers and institutes upon signing a BiOS MTA. For-profit companies are asked to sign a BiOS license and to make a contribution to Cambia which is calculated on the company’s financial means.

An inventory of BiOS-licensed patents is available at the Cambia site. [11]

See also

Related Research Articles

Patent Law conferring a monopoly on a new invention

A patent is a title that gives its owner the legal right to exclude others from making, using, or selling an invention for a limited period of years in exchange for publishing an enabling public disclosure of the invention. In most countries, patent rights fall under private law and the patent holder must sue someone infringing the patent in order to enforce his or her rights. In some industries patents are an essential form of competitive advantage; in others they are irrelevant.

A royalty is a payment made by one party to another that owns a particular asset, for the right to ongoing use of that asset. Royalties are typically agreed upon as a percentage of gross or net revenues derived from the use of an asset or a fixed price per unit sold of an item of such, but there are also other modes and metrics of compensation. A royalty interest is the right to collect a stream of future royalty payments.

Cambia (non-profit organization)

Cambia is an Australian-based global non-profit social enterprise focusing on open science, biology, innovation system reform and intellectual property. Its projects include the The Lens, formerly known as Patent Lens, and the Biological Innovation for Open Society Initiative.

Science Commons

Science Commons (SC) was a Creative Commons project for designing strategies and tools for faster, more efficient web-enabled scientific research. The organization's goals were to identify unnecessary barriers to research, craft policy guidelines and legal agreements to lower those barriers, and develop technology to make research data and materials easier to find and use. Its overarching goal was to speed the translation of data into discovery and thereby the value of research.

Know-how is a term for practical knowledge on how to accomplish something, as opposed to "know-what" (facts), "know-why" (science), or "know-who" (communication). It is also often referred to as street smarts, and a person employing their street smarts as street wise. Know-how is often tacit knowledge, which means that it can be difficult to transfer to another person by means of writing it down or verbalising it. The opposite of tacit knowledge is explicit knowledge.

Richard Anthony Jefferson

Richard Anthony Jefferson is an American-born molecular biologist and social entrepreneur who developed the widely used reporter gene system GUS, conducted the world's first biotech crop release, proposed the Hologenome theory of evolution, pioneered Biological Open Source and founded The Lens. He is founder of the social enterprise Cambia and a Professor of Biological Innovation at the Queensland University of Technology. In 2003 he was named by Scientific American as one of the world's 50 most influential technologists, and is renowned for his work on making science-enabled innovation more widely accessible. He was profiled in 'Open & Shut: The Basement Interviews', and other major media, including in an Economist Feature 'Grassroots Innovator' in 2001.

Humanitarian use licenses are provisions in a license whereby inventors and technology suppliers protect in advance the possibility of sharing their technology with people in need. Thus, humanitarian use licenses set the conditions for the provision of access to innovations for people in need at a royalty free basis or at lower costs. Humanitarian use licenses assure that products of research and development stay publicly available and that at the same time the incentive function of exclusive intellectual property rights are maintained.

Opposition to software patents is widespread in the free software community. In response, various mechanisms have been tried to defuse the perceived problem.

A Material transfer agreement (MTA) is a contract that governs the transfer of tangible research materials between two organizations when the recipient intends to use it for his or her own research purposes. The MTA defines the rights of the provider and the rights and obligations of the recipient with respect to the materials and any progeny, derivatives, or modifications. Biological materials, such as reagents, cell lines, plasmids, and vectors, are the most frequently transferred materials, but MTAs may also be used for other types of materials, such as chemical compounds, mouse models, and even some types of software.

Patentleft is the practice of licensing patents for royalty-free use, on the condition that adopters license related improvements they develop under the same terms. Copyleft-style licensors seek "continuous growth of a universally accessible technology commons" from which they, and others, will benefit.

The Lens

The Lens, formerly called Patent Lens, is an online patent search facility and knowledge resource, provided by Cambia, an Australia-based non-profit organization.

Proprietary software, also known as non-free software, is computer software for which the software's publisher or another person reserves some rights from licensees to use, modify, share modifications, or share the software. It sometimes includes patent rights.

The open-source model is a decentralized software development model that encourages open collaboration. A main principle of open-source software development is peer production, with products such as source code, blueprints, and documentation freely available to the public. The open-source movement in software began as a response to the limitations of proprietary code. The model is used for projects such as in open-source appropriate technology, and open-source drug discovery.

Oxford University Innovation

Oxford University Innovation Limited (OUI) is a British technology transfer and consultancy company created to manage the research and development (R&D) of University spin-offs. OUI is a wholly owned subsidiary of the University of Oxford, and is located on Botley Road, Oxford, England. OUI was previously known as Isis Innovation (1988–2016) and Oxford University Research and Development Ltd (1987–1988).

Open-source appropriate technology (OSAT) is appropriate technology developed through the principles of the open-design movement. Appropriate technology is technology designed with special consideration to the environmental, ethical, cultural, social, political, and economic aspects of the community it is intended for. Open design is one that is public and licensed in such a way as to allow it to be used, modified and distributed freely.

NIH Office of Technology Transfer manages all intramural inventions from the United States National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as mandated by the Federal Technology Transfer Act and related legislation.

The Technology Advancement Office (TAO) is an office within the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK), of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which is an agency of the United States Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). TAO facilitates research collaborations and the exchange of research materials by use of a Material Transfer Agreement or other types of technology transfer agreements between NIDDK and the global scientific community by developing research partnerships. Unlike most technology transfer and development offices, TAO also helps NIDDK inventors advance their technologies through preclinical development.

Licensed production is the production under license of technology developed elsewhere. It is an especially prominent commercial practice in developing nations, which often approach licensed production as a starting point for indigenous industrial development.

A biological patent is a patent on an invention in the field of biology that by law allows the patent holder to exclude others from making, using, selling, or importing the protected invention for a limited period of time. The scope and reach of biological patents vary among jurisdictions, and may include biological technology and products, genetically modified organisms and genetic material. The applicability of patents to substances and processes wholly or partially natural in origin is a subject of debate.

Microsoft, a technology company known for its opposition to the open source software paradigm, turned to embrace the approach in the 2010s. From the 1970s through 2000s under CEOs Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, Microsoft viewed the community creation and sharing of communal code, later to be known as free and open source software, as a threat to its business, and both executives spoke negatively against it. In the 2010s, as the industry turned towards cloud, embedded, and mobile computing—technologies powered by open source advances—CEO Satya Nadella led Microsoft towards open source adoption although Microsoft's traditional Windows business continued to grow throughout this period generating revenues of 26.8 billion in the third quarter of 2018, while Microsoft's Azure cloud revenues nearly doubled its revenue.

References

  1. 1 2 Jefferson, Richard (Fall 2006). "Science as Social Enterprise: The CAMBIA BiOS Initiative" (PDF). Innovations. 1 (4): 13–44. doi: 10.1162/itgg.2006.1.4.13 . Archived from the original (PDF) on 2011-01-24. Retrieved 2010-01-06.
  2. ↑ "BiOS (Biological Open Source) Licenses and MTAs". Archived from the original on 2009-12-03. Retrieved 2010-01-11.
  3. ↑ DiBona, Chris; Sam Ockman (1999). Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution. O'Reilly.
  4. ↑ Schenker, Jennifer (2006-04-17). "Open Source BioTech" (PDF). Red Herring. 3 (14): 30–36. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2011-07-18. Retrieved 2010-01-06.
  5. ↑ Gedda, Rodney (2009-10-06). "Researchers to unlock codes for open source green energy". TechWorld. Retrieved 2010-01-07.
  6. ↑ Cukier, Kenneth Neil (2006). "Navigating the future(s) of biotech intellectual property". Nature Biotechnology. 24 (3): 249–251. doi:10.1038/nbt0306-249. PMID   16525371.
  7. ↑ "BiOS-compatible Materials Transfer Agreements (MTA) Listing". Archived from the original on 2010-05-02. Retrieved 2010-01-11.
  8. ↑ "CambiaLabs". Archived from the original on 2010-01-11. Retrieved 2010-01-11.
  9. ↑ "Materials and Methods Available from CambiaLabs". Archived from the original on 2010-04-07. Retrieved 2010-01-11.
  10. ↑ Broothaerts, Wim; Heidi J. Mitchell; Brian Weir; Sarah Kaines; Leon M.A. Smith; Wei Jang; Jorge E. Mayer; Carolina Roa-Rodriguez; Richard A. Jefferson (2005-02-10). "Gene transfer to plants by diverse species of bacteria". Nature. 433 (7026): 629–633. doi:10.1038/nature03309. PMID   15703747.
  11. ↑ "BiOS-licensed patent inventory". Archived from the original on 2010-01-09. Retrieved 2010-01-11.
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