iBRIDGE CONVERSATION

Congratulations to our friends over at Science Commons who have been written up in Popular Science magazine this week! I love hearing John Wilbanks talk about why it should be easier to share and find scientific information even if you aren’t immersed in that particular field. If you have never heard or read anything from him, I would suggest for you to read the article.

As you may know, the iBridge Network is working with Science Commons on their Material Transfer Agreement project which provides a wide array of standardized licenses including the Uniform Biological Materials Transfer Agreement (UBMTA) and the Simple Letter Agreement (SLA) in addition to several standard ones developed by Science Commons. Standardized licensing of research materials happens today, though it may not be as common as one would think. We are expecting with the additional of several other standardized licenses, and the ease of specifying them (through Science Commons tools), and ease of attaching these licenses to research descriptions in the iBridge Network will help fuel use of standardized agreements for more situations.

We are expecting to have standardized licensing up on our site by the end of the summer and already have a couple of our university members who are planning to participate as early adopters! We’ll keep you posted!