In 2006, after a year long period of research, Science Commons targeted three areas for focused work: scholarly publishing, licensing policies, and the realization of the “semantic web” for science. This segmentation comes from analyzing the overall research cycle of science, which includes the:
- survey of the existing canon of knowledge
- development of hypotheses for testing
- acquisition of research tools
- experimentation
- analysis of data
- recontribution to the canon of knowledge through peer review publication
Science Commons has launched three corresponding “proof of concept” projects with early-stage efforts in:
- Scholar’s copyrights,
- Biological materials transfer, and
- The intersection of semantic web with Open Access content in neuroscience (the Neurocommons).
These projects are designed to intersect to provide evidence of the benefits of the overarching Science Commons vision of an accelerated research cycle, and to stand as worthwhile efforts in their own right.
