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Science Commons

Science Commons was launched to expand the Creative Commons mission into the scientific realm. James Boyle will be talking about two Science Commons projects: The Neurocommons and the Materials Transfer Project. The Materials Transfer Project uses standard machine readable licenses so that one day sharing biological materials between labs might be as easy as buying books from Amazon. If these words weren't forbidden at Google, he'd describe the Neurocommons as a first draft of an open "semantic web" for neurology. The overall goal is to take some of the ingenuity we devote to allowing teenagers to flirt with each other online, or people to share and find mashups, and use it to reduce the transaction costs of science and make it selfishly beneficial for scientists to share more, and more easily.