Pawel. I don't feel as pessimistic as you do - I don't feel convinced that Open Source approaches are incompatible with drug discovery. But I do think that Open Science is incompatible with intellectual property preservation (unless used as an offensive ploy to invalidate a competitor's patent application). Innocentive is a good example of crowdsourcing but not of Open Innovation - if it were truly open we would see all the solutions provided by the crowd in real time - and we would be able to see the full details of the problems without agreeing to an NDA. - Jean-Claude Bradley

Jean-Claude, probably it's not really an incompatibility, but a competitive (or even legal) disadvantage of certain "open" approaches. After all, pharmaceutical companies have a legal obligation to increase shareholders value, not to solve world's health problems. Hence the need of three domains (Science, Politics and Business) for OS to become mandatory. And I'm not really pessimistic - I just look for arguments and implementation ways (plus marketing messages) for Open Science :) I agree, Innocentive is a crowdsourcing company - the post has been updated. - Pawel Szczesny

Pawel - because of their business model I can't see that the typical pharmaceutical company can do much Open Science. Anything they wish to protect by US patent would have to be submitted by the provisional patent mechanism on a daily basis which is impractical and certainly an unnecessary cost. But I do see that some small non IP critical data could be shared to everyone's benefit - for example solubility data on starting materials that all chemists could use. - Jean-Claude Bradley

Jean-Claude, even Heller (of "The Gridlock Economy") argues that getting rid of IP preservation is going to be extremely difficult for various (reasonably sounding) reasons, so I can't see pharma adopting OS as well. But not all research actually has a commercial value, so I hope that mandatory OS (in academia?) will not do that much harm. On the other hand, grant agencies (at least here) would like to see most of the science as having a commercial value and being patentable. :/ I insist on OS becoming mandatory, because I don't believe that changing business model to "open" is going to work, if we, researchers, still cannot agree on mechanism (and a value of) attribution/citation. But I will be happy to be proved wrong on that. - Pawel Szczesny

There is clearly a close coupling between the (short to medium) term success of business models and the environment they operate in, but I wonder whether in the long term only business models that actually add value can win, and that they will actually drive environmental change. There must be analogous arguments in evolution/ecology about coupling between environment and species success presumably? - Cameron Neylon

p.s. great post - Cameron Neylon

I think this is a step in the right direction. White House proposes 7-year protection for brand-name biotech drugs White House officials sent a letter to Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., recommending that brand-name biotech drugs be given seven years of intellectual property protection before generic versions can be launched, saying it "strikes the appropriate balance between innovation and competition." BIO President Jim Greenwood expressed concern that the seven-year exclusivity would be a "risky shortcut" that will "undermine the incentives necessary for continued biotech research into breakthrough medicines." - Jim Hardy

Funding bodies and publishers have the ability to make some form of OS mandatory but I don't see that happening in the short term. My bet is that change will happen by scientists doing so voluntarily - mainly for selfish reasons. With more people doing OS the general pressure in the scientific community to not hoard data will increase. Still I don't think it is likely or even desirable to get the majority of scientists working in this way. That isn't necessary for OS to have a large impact. Nobody can predict the future but that's what I think right now. - Jean-Claude Bradley