Why develop BioForge?

Scientists are often concerned about placing information and data in the public domain because it can be analyzed and improved by those with more resources, and those improvements can be patented, excluding others from using them during the term of the patent. To foster innovation that can be improved and used, the BioForge aims to build a protected commons in which you may share your ideas and data so that you and others can continue to build on them and improve them, but no user appropriates them and prevents other members of the BioForge community from building on them. The BioForge community is instead creating intellectual property within a protected commons, in which information may still be patentable and can certainly be used for making profitable products, but should be available to other creative members of the community to improve. Thus, users may patent improvements that they invent, but must agree not to enforce those patents against other members of the BioForge community.

BioForge will be most successful in catalysing a large community of innovators to produce high quality and relevant biological technologies for the empowerment of diverse problem-solvers in the developed and developing world.  The software platform we are developing and the pro bono contributions of IP practitioners are helping to ensure that we can secure these technologies in a new, protected, universally-accessible commons.

As sourceforge.net has done for the open source software community, we hope that BioForge will become a cyberspace meeting place for scientists and those who can apply science. It is a place to combine vigorous but positive debate, peer co-development concepts, curated and stewarded contributions, and public-good binding norms to forge unique collaborations and distributive problem-solving relevant to those unserved by current innovation practice. This will be a dynamic exercise, changing and morphing as it gains experience.