[okfn-advisory] fund-raising idea for OKF

Sat Dec 5 18:32:07 UTC 2009

Thanks, John.  What's the org dedicated to serving the data?

Do you think a critical mass of pharma companies would pay to see their open
data (whatever volume they voluntarily opened up, and whatever its licensing
status) inch toward interoperability?  Behind this I'm wondering whether
they might cover the expenses of the project, even if large, with some left
over to support OKF general operations.

In any case, here's a Plan B.  If the interoperability project is too
ambitious, OKF could launch a smaller project simply to *track* open
industrial data, starting with the pharma industry.  The project could
annotate the data sets to indicate where they were hosted, how they were
licensed, marked-up, preserved, and so on.  Because many companies realize
that they have an interest in freeing up some kinds of data, they might fund
a project to track and annotate it all.  At any time that seemed propitious
--if ever--, the project could become more ambitious.

     Peter S.

On Sat, Dec 5, 2009 at 1:05 PM, John Wilbanks
<wilbanks at creativecommons.org>wrote:

> It's hard work, I can tell you from experience :-)
>
> The main thing is to work on getting data into existing registries at EBI,
> EMBL, NIH, and so forth. Otherwise you're stuck in a world where you're
> having to store, serve, and support data. Creative Commons has spent an
> enormous amount of time on this topic and we're starting to have real
> success. Merck's donation of data to Sage and some more forthcoming work
> from other top-ten global pharma will both fall into these lines - there's
> an org dedicated to serving the data, our job is just making sure the data
> falls into the public domain so that it can be reused, redistributed, and
> re-integrated.
>
> jtw
>
> Peter Suber wrote:
>
>>  Just one quick follow-up to Peter MR:
>>
>> On Sat, Dec 5, 2009 at 4:35 AM, Peter Murray-Rust <pm286 at cam.ac.uk<mailto:
>> pm286 at cam.ac.uk>> wrote:
>>
>>    [...]
>>    On Fri, Dec 4, 2009 at 7:04 PM, Peter Suber <peter.suber at gmail.com
>>    <mailto:peter.suber at gmail.com>> wrote:
>>
>>
>>        First, OKF could launch a project on the "pre-competitive
>>        sharing" of pharma data.  It could collect info on the company
>>        initiatives already under way, develop guidelines for other
>>        companies, and so on. This much seems very compatible with the
>>        current OKF mission.  Call it Phase 1.
>>
>>         I agree with this - it's obviously considerable work and I am
>>    wondering whether there is synergy with other bodies. I suecpt that
>>    we would need some funding for this.
>>
>>
>> Much of the info on existing initiatives I've already collected in my
>> blog.  It would have to be rounded out and brought up to date.  But that
>> phase of the project wouldn't have to start from scratch.
>>
>>     Peter (Suber)
>>
>>
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>
> --
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------
> John Wilbanks
>
> VP for Science, Creative Commons
> http://creativecommons.org
> http://sciencecommons.org
> http://neurocommons.org
>
> "We make sharing easy, legal, and scalable."
> ----------------------------------------------------------------
>
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