Health Commons from Science Commons

Ismael Peña, a colleague at Open University of Catalonia and a friend of mine, has been working on issues relative with Open Access, Open Science, Open Educational Resources, Open Source Software, etc. His post titled Introduction to the open paradigm sum up the main features of Open movement. Talking about “paradigm” is a tricky question so I have suggested him to title his introduction as Openness at the informationalism paradigm. Anyway, a few days ago he sent me a link to The Health Commons

Health Commons is a coalition of parties interested in changing the way basic science is translated into the understanding and improvement of human health. Coalition members agree to share data, knowledge, and services under standardized terms and conditions by committing to a set of common technologies, digital information standards, research materials, contracts, workflows, and software. These commitments ensure that knowledge, data, materials and tools can move seamlessly from partner to partner across the entire drug discovery chain. They enable participants to offer standardized services, ranging from simple molecular assays to complex drug synthesis solutions, that others can discover in directories and integrate into their own processes to expedite development — or assemble like LEGO blocks to create new services.

This is the new project from Science Commons that has “the ambition of achieving for the world of science and data, what Creative Commons had begun to achieve for the world of culture, art and educational material: to ease unnecessary legal and technical barriers to sharing, to promote innovation, to provide easy, high quality tools that let individuals and organizations specify the terms under which they wished to share their material” (see An Introduction to Science Commons).

John Wilbanks and Marty Tenenbaum have written Health Commons: Therapy Development in a Networked World – an introduction and overview and have produced a video titled An Introduction to Health Commons

I’m very interested in these kind of initiatives or project. Please contact me flupianez[at]ictconsequences.net if you have or know any initiative related to Health and Openness at the informationalism paradigm as Health Commons or the examples I’m collecting at my wiki under the category Openness at Health.