Who we are

copyright law and the Web

Copyright law allows for "all rights reserved" the minute a document is created - whether a song, a Web page, a picture - until the end of the author's life plus 70 years. On the Web that is a very long time. Seventy years ago,Life magazine was launched. In science it's even more dramatic; 70 years ago, we didn't know that DNA stored genetic informantion.

Science Commons is overseen by members of the Creative Commons board, including MIT computer science professor Hal Abelson; intellectual property experts James Boyle, Michael Carroll and Lawrence Lessig; and lawyer and documentary filmmaker Eric Saltzman. Bioinformatics entrepeneur and metadata expert John Wilbanks is Vice President.

We are guided in our work by a remarkable Scientific Advisory Board, including 2002 Nobel Laureate Sir John Sulston; the late Joshua Lederberg (1958 Nobel Laureate); renowned genomics and bioinformatics scientist Michael Eisen; prominent economist Paul David; and the distinguished patent law and biotech scholar, Arti Rai.

Science Commons is housed at and receives generous support from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where we share space, staff and inspiration with the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

Scientific Advisory Board

Advisory Board

Staff and Fellows

Operations Analyst

In Memoriam