Open-Source Initiative Aims to Save Biotech

From bio-itworld:

"This month, an international movement was quietly born — one that aims to loosen the grip of the world’s biggest life science corporations on key enabling technologies and patents for biotechnology R&D.

The Biological Innovation for an Open Society (BIOS) initiative is the creation of U.S.-born molecular geneticist Dr. Richard Jefferson, founder and CEO of the CAMBIA (Centre for the Application of Molecular Biology to International Agriculture) in Canberra.

BIOS is an attempt to establish an open-source technology movement in the biotechnology industry, similar to the computing industry’s open-source software movement. An editorial in the flagship journal Nature earlier this month said the BIOS intellectual property database and associated informatics “promise to bring more transparency to the opaque patent web and to provide tools to guide decision-making when choosing technologies”.

In practice, BIOS provides biotechnology with its own free ‘operating system’: a public-domain toolkit and associated patents, aimed at freeing researchers worldwide to innovate without restriction, and without being forced into partnerships or unfavorable royalty agreements with the big corporations that currently dominate the pharmaceutical and agbiotech industries."