Concerned about the potential effect of recent policy on the conduct of science, the Creative Commons initiative is looking to explore a Science Commons:
The sciences depend on access to and use of factual data. Powered by developments in electronic storage and computational capability, scientific inquiry is becoming more data-intensive in almost every discipline. Whether the field is meteorology, genomics, medicine, or high-energy physics, research depends on the availability of multiple databases, from multiple public and private sources, and their openness to easy recombination, search and processing. In the United States, this process has traditionally been supported by a series of policies, laws, and practices that were largely invisible even to those who worked in the sciences themselves. [Science Commons | Creative Commons]
