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POLICY FORUM The Public of Science (www.plos.org), based on the e-Biomed proposal (11), offers a model of - Commons-Based Strategies based, peer-reviewed scientific publica- tion. It has a professional staff funded by philanthropic giving and author page and the Problems of charges. Papers published are freely avail- able under a Attri- Yochai Benkler bution . Creative Commons is an or- ganization that created a menu of he role of in sci- ment process added an organizational in- that provide authors several ways to license ence has dramatically increased in novation: It modularized the work and their work openly (12). Tthe past 25 years. U.S. has en- thereby harnessed thousands of volunteer The ArXiv.org e-Print Archive offers a couraged universities to their dis- developers and testers (9). The measurable more radical alternative (13). Authors post coveries and license them commercially, quality of free software and its wide adop- physics papers on a server with no prepub- judicial reforms have increased patent pro- tion have proved its value. lication peer review. Postpublication criti- tection, and the trend has expanded inter- Beyond software, the abounds cism, a facility for version updating, and a nationally through . The ex- with commons-based peer production. tight-knit academic community where rep- pansion occurred even though economic Wikipedia (http://wikipedia.org) is a multi- utation effects are substantial provide ac- theory is ambivalent about the effects of lingual encyclopedia produced by 20,000 creditation and quality control. patents on welfare and (1). volunteers. A major Web index, the Open Harnessing nonscientists. National Empirical suggests that patents Directory Project (http://dmoz.org), is pro- Aeronautics and Space Administration are important in few industries, mostly duced by 60,000 volunteers. SETI@Home (NASA) clickworkers was an experiment pharmaceutical (2, 3), and that aggregate processes radio astronomy data (http:// (http://clickworkers.arc.nasa.gov/top) to effects of strong protection are small and setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu), combining see if volunteers, working in small incre- on October 14, 2008 often negative (4, 5). Excessive patent pro- the excess computer cycles of 4.5 million ments, could do analysis normally done by tection has been criticized as impeding sci- PCs to create a supercomputer. a scientist or graduate student. Users were entific research through “anticommons” Why do people do it? How do they or- provided an interface that enabled them to effects (6) and as imposing cost barriers on ganize without property and ? Peer mark craters on Mars images. In 6 months, . Proposed solutions production modularizes work so that indi- over 85,000 users visited the site, many usually take the form of legal change, but viduals can contribute at different levels of contributing to the effort. Their automati- the emerging model of commons-based effort consistent with their motivation; cally computed consensus was equivalent production can be implemented by the sci- contributions are then integrated into a us- in quality to the markings of a trained sci- entific community without waiting for law able whole. Instead of direct payment, entist (14). www.sciencemag.org reform. commons-based production relies on indi- Folding@home may be the best- rect rewards: both extrinsic, enhancing rep- documented distributed computing project. Commons-Based Production utation and developing human and It harnesses contributions of over 572,000 Property, contract, and managerial com- social networks; and intrinsic, satisfying CPUs from 272,000 users. The processing mands are the basic tools of managing psychological needs, pleasure, and a sense power is used to simulate protein folding mainstream production. By contrast, pro- of social belonging. Instead of exclusive without a dedicated supercomputer and has

duction is “commons-based” when no one property and contract, peer production us- resulted in multiple scientific publications Downloaded from uses exclusive to organize effort or es legal devices like the GPL, social (15). capture its value, and when cooperation is norms, and technological constraints on achieved through social mechanisms other “antisocial” behavior. Proposal 1: Publicly Minded Licensing than price signals or managerial directions. Nonproprietary frameworks for scien- Patent royalty and licensing revenue pro- Large-scale instances of such cooperation tists. Science has long been the quintes- vides an insignificant portion of total uni- are “peer production” (7). sence of nonproprietary production (10). versity revenues (see the table, p. 1111). Free software is the paradigm of com- Academic freedom to choose one’s goals Revenue from government-sponsored re- mons-based production, as is the Linux and open distribution of the inputs and out- search outweighs patent revenues by an or- kernel for peer production. Free software is puts of the scientific process are its organi- der of magnitude. These facts make it fis- based on a legal innovation, the GNU zational norms. Some academic projects cally feasible and likely advantageous for General Public License (GPL), which has already offer working models for using the universities to use their intellectual proper- been adopted with variations by 85% of culture of science to solve the problems of ty rights to alleviate impediments of the projects (8). It permits anyone patents. patent system when applied to research to use the software and to develop it, but no The open bioinformatics movement has tools and distribution in poor nations. one can appropriate outputs exclusively. It focused on developing an open source Universities could cooperate to seek wide requires improvers to share access to their model, providing to tools and adoption of open licensing provisions. One improvements. The Linux kernel develop- research outputs. Visible successes include model is PIPRA (Public Intellectual the Ensembl Genome Browser (www. Property for Agriculture), a collaboration ensembl.org) and resources offered by the among agricultural research universities to Yale , Yale University, 127 Wall Street, New Haven, CT 06520, USA. E-mail: yochai. National Center for Biotechnology share their intellectual property and retain [email protected] (www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov). rights to use their for subsis-

1110 20 AUGUST 2004 VOL 305 SCIENCE www.sciencemag.org Published by AAAS P OLICY FORUM tence and specialty crop devel- discrete increments using opment (16). Collectively, uni- SELECTED REVENUES FROM U.S. UNIVERSITIES* simpler equipment to achieve versities would have substantial acceptable throughput (if Revenues (millions $) negotiating power with the sample and reagents avail- biotechnology and pharmaceu- Institution Total Licensing Government grants ability and cost were solved). ticals industries. and royalties and As distributed computing has Universities could adopt two All universities 227,000 1,270 31,430 shown, seemingly insur- varieties of license: an open re- Univ. California 14,166 81 2,372 mountable equipment costs search license (ORL) and a de- Harvard 2,473 48 416 may sometimes be resolvable veloping country license (DCL). by reorganizing a process. Stanford 3,475 43 860 An ORL would include two Ultimately the problem of core elements: Univ. Minn. 1,237 39 324 high-cost bottlenecks may Reservation for research. Florida State 2,646 36 238 limit the extent to which The university would reserve a Cal Tech 531 27† 268 some processes can be made right to use and nonexclusively amenable to peer production. *Sources for this information are as described (19). †Almost half of this amount is in income sublicense its for re- from a single initial public offering; without that offering, the revenue would be $15.7 million. If small enough, however, search and education. This is residual costs may be covered more permissive than, but con- by philanthropic and govern- sistent with, emerging practice since puting. This is where current proposals for ment funding. Madey clarified that the research exemp- peer production of biomedical research for Scientists can learn from peer produc- tion in patent law was illusory (17). tropical diseases primarily focus (18). tion how to organize their research proj- Reciprocal nonexclusive license to re- Adapting peer production to the laboratory ects to modularize research tasks and to search. The licensee and any sublicensee is harder, but specifying its components integrate contributions from many low-in- would grant back a nonexclusive license to can mark feasible paths. First, graduate stu- tensity collaborators. This will increase the university to use and sublicense all dents, post-docs, and scientists are parallel their ability to pursue science that affects technology that the licensee develops in life-cycle and motivational profile to millions of lives, but cannot pay its way based on university technology, again, for free software developers. Scientists may be under the present system. research and education only. busier, but anyone who can find days to on October 14, 2008 A DCL would add development, man- work on unexpected grant applications can References and Notes ufacture, and distribution of end-product find a few minutes or hours to contribute to 1. K. Arrow, in The Rate and Direction of Inventive drugs if distribution is limited to develop- other goals they value. Second, experi- Activity: Economic and Social Factors [National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), Cambridge, ing nations. It would permit generics to ments that can be done with widely avail- MA, 1962], p. 609. manufacture for developing nations, us- able equipment can be designed to fit peer 2. R. Levin et al., Brookings Pap. Econ. Activ. 1987, 783 ing the same licensing technique as the production. Some equipment is ubiquitous (1987). GPL. and offers redundant capacity. Scientists 3. W. M. Cohen et al., NBER Work. Pap. Ser. 2000 (w7552) (2000). This approach would alleviate anticom- interested in starting a project must speci-

4. A. Jaffe, Res. Policy 29, 531 (2000). www.sciencemag.org mons effects and patent-based limits on fy the research program in fine-grained 5. J. Lerner, Am. Econ. Rev. 92 (2), 221 (2002). global distribution without significantly modules, preferably executable on wide- 6. M. A. Heller, R. S. Eisenberg, Science 280, 698 (1998). impacting pharmaceutical revenues. Uni- spread equipment—like discrete poly- 7. Y. Benkler, Yale Law J. 112, 369 (2002). 8. J. Lerner, J. Tirole, J. Law Econ. Org. 21, in press; NBER versities and scientists would lose almost merase chain reaction (PCR) analyses. Work. Pap. Ser. 2002 (w9363) (2002). no revenue from end products, but would These could be placed on a Web site to al- 9. E. Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar (O’Reilly, lose the remote likelihood of appropriating low contributors to perform analyses when Cambridge, MA, 2001). a basic enabling technology. Their gains their equipment is free and to upload re- 10. R. Merton, The Sociology of Science (Univ. of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1973). would be reduced research impediments sults to the project site. Others could re- 11. H. Varmus, E-Biomed: A Proposal for Electronic Downloaded from and improved public perception of univer- view and analyze results. In principle, this Publication in the Biomedical Sciences (NIH, sities as public interest organizations, not process could be used for abundant mate- Bethesda, MD, 1999); available at www.nih.gov/ private . This gain is far from rials, perhaps including some laboratory about/director/pubmedcentral/ebiomedarch.htm. 12. L. Lessig, (Penguin, New York, 2004). symbolic. Minor increases in public fund- organisms and animals. The person who 13. M. Sincell, Science 293, 419 (2001). ing of university science would make up builds the platform will require greater in- 14. B. Kanefsky et al., 32nd Lunar and Planetary Science for loss of the small probability of striking vestment of effort, but will reap greater re- Conf. Abstr., Houston, TX, 12 to 16 March 2001, 1272 gold in research tools patents. wards. Repeat contributors may become (2001); available at www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/ lpsc2001/pdf/1272.pdf. coauthors on papers based on the results. 15. C. D. Snow et al., Nature 420, 102 (2002). Proposal 2: Peer Production Many contributors could add smaller con- 16. R. C. Atkinson et al., Science 301, 174 (2003). Scientists can complement university li- tributions—spending 2 hours using an oth- 17. Madey v. Duke University, 307 F.3d 1351 (Fed. Cir. censing practices by adopting peer-produc- erwise idle —for the benefit of 2002). 18. S. M. Maurer, A. Rai, A. Soli, in Biotechnology: Essays tion strategies. Although many think that finding a new treatment, gaining experi- from Its Heartland (BASIC & QB3, San Francisco and science is too expensive to be done this way, ence, or mention as a contributor. Santa Cruz, CA, 2004), p. 33; available at people once thought the same of supercom- Experiments that require expensive www.qb3.org/pdfs/biotech1.pdf. puting. It would require identification of equipment that has no downtime, or rare 19. Sources: Aggregate revenues: National Center for Education Statistics, U.S. Dept. of Education, the components of scientific production materials, may resist modularization. Enrollment in Postsecondary Institutions, Fall 2001, and modularization of tasks to minimize the Some perceived bottlenecks may, howev- and Financial Statistics, Fiscal Year 2001 (2003),Table burden on any single contributor. er, merely be convenience-oriented and F; Association of University Technology Management, Initially, anything that can be computer time-saving. A high-throughput process, Annual Survey Summary FY 2002 (AUTM 2003),Table S-12. Individual institutions: publicly available annual modeled has the same economic character- such as automated sequencing, might be reports of each university and/or its technology istics as free software and distributed com- replaced by many scientists working in transfer office for FY 2003.

www.sciencemag.org SCIENCE VOL 305 20 AUGUST 2004 1111 Published by AAAS