Open Access News

John Wilbanks, Complexity and the Commons, John Wilbanks' blog, January 9, 2008.  (Thanks to Glyn Moody.)  Excerpt:

...[I've been] preoccupied with the reasons for why it takes so long and costs so much to get a drug to market....

I am very skeptical that the law is the key, single solution here. Mainly because I believe the law is only a symptom of the big problem. I do believe that the commons itself is the solution, but not because of intellectual property.

It’s the solution because it’s an incredibly efficient way to generate knowledge rapidly, at low costs. And knowledge is what we need. A commons is the infrastructure for distributed collaboration and innovation in the life sciences, and we should be thinking about the law in terms of how to expose and integrate as much knowledge as possible at the lowest possible transaction cost.

The primary reason drugs are so expensive to discover and develop is that we just don’t know very much about the human body. The problem isn’t the law. To paraphrase Bill Gates, the problem is complexity (read the whole thing, it’s worth it)....

Complexity is the core problem. Human bodies are so mindbogglingly complex that we can’t accurately predict…well, very much of anything about them. There is a knowledge gap a mile wide and ten miles deep between where we are today and a world in which it costs less in terms of time and money to get a drug to market....

As a result, the best way we have to test drugs is to give them to people and see what happens....

The solution to the knowledge gap has, to date, been to simply take more shots on goal. We throw eight million potential drug compounds at a target and check to see what sticks, then we cull the field, again and again, tweaking here and there.

It’s like playing roulette and winning by betting on every square, then patenting the one that wins and extracting high rents from it. Patents are much less the problem in such a scenario than the fact that we are playing roulette. Changing the odds is the better answer – it lowers the pressure to rely on patents! ...

One of the reasons I believe so deeply in the commons approach (by which i mean: contractually constructed regimes that tilt the field towards sharing and reuse, technological enablements that make public knowledge easy to find and use, and default policy rules that create incentives to share and reuse) is that I think it is one of the only non-miraculous ways to defeat complexity. If we can get more people working on individual issues – which are each alone not so complex – and the outputs of research snap together, and smart people can work on the compiled output as well – then it stands to reason that the odds of meaningful discoveries increase in spite of overall systemic complexity.

This is not easy as far as solutions go. It requires open access to content, journals and databases both. It requires that database creators think about their products as existing in a network, and provide hooks for the network, not just query access. It requires that funders pay for biobanks to store research tools. It requires that pharmaceutical companies take a hard look at their private assets and build some trust in entities that make sharing possible. It requires that scientists share their stuff (this is the elephant in the lab, frankly). It requires that universities track sharing as a metric of scientific and societal impact.

It is not easy. But it is, in a way, a very simple change. It just requires the flipping of a switch, from a default rule of “sharing doesn’t matter” to one of “sharing matters enormously”. It is as easy, and as hard, as the NIH mandate on open access. It’s a matter of willpower....

Complexity is the enemy. Distributed innovation, built on a commons, is a strong tonic against that enemy.