The National Cancer Moonshot Initiative seeks to make ten years of progress on cancer research in half that time, with a goal to end cancer in our lifetime. The project—led by U.S. Vice President Joe Biden—recently called for ideas to help shape the cancer research priorities for the Moonshot. They received over 1,600 comments and suggestions.

We offered several actions that would speed up the probability of discovery for new cancer treatments and cures. Our recommendations urged the U.S. government to make immediate open access the default for publicly funded cancer research articles and data.

The Moonshot team noted that several other commenters highlighted the importance of improving access to scientific and medical research about cancer:

Share cancer research results broadly. Require that the entire cancer community provide open, free public access to all research findings, particularly research supported by public funds.

The community comments echoed Vice President Biden’s remarks in April to the American Association for Cancer Research, in which he committed to help break down the access barriers to cancer-related research. “Taxpayers fund $5 billion a year in cancer research every year,” said Biden. “But once it’s published, nearly all of that taxpayer-funded research sits behind walls. Tell me how this is moving the process along more rapidly.”

The implication is clear: if researchers do not have immediate, unrestricted access to the latest publications and data about cancer, they will be slowed in their progress in developing improved treatments and eventual cures.

The Moonshot team is now analyzing the responses to the call for comment, and they plan to release a final report this Fall. We believe that open access to government funded scientific research is absolutely critical to accelerating progress in the fight against cancer. With support from Biden and the Administration, the National Cancer Moonshot Initiative should make openness the default for cancer research.

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Photo: Cancer Immunotherapy by National Institutes of Health, CC BY 2.0

Under the direction of Vice President Joe Biden, the National Cancer Moonshot Initiative seeks to make ten years of progress on cancer research in half that time, with a goal to end cancer in our lifetime.

Today, Creative Commons will participate in Biden’s Cancer Moonshot Summit in Washington, D.C. I will join the Summit, which is aimed at creating action and fostering collaborations around the goals of the Cancer Moonshot. The event will bring together a wide spectrum of stakeholders, including researchers, oncologists, nurses and other care providers, data and technology experts, philanthropists, advocates, patients, and survivors.

Changing Policy to Improve Access to Cancer Research

We need a new approach that will give cancer researchers broad, unencumbered access to scientific literature and data. Even with significant investments in cancer research, the scientific publishing environment hampers innovation and discoveries. In 2016 alone, $5.21 billion of public money was allocated to the National Cancer Institute for cancer related research. Other major agencies such as the National Institutes of Health fund billions more. Despite this massive public investment, research articles remain hidden behind paywalls, delayed from release by long, unnecessary embargo periods. Research data remain unavailable, or are restricted from being machine-readable, an essential element needed to allow deep analysis by new technologies. If all publicly-funded cancer research was required to be shared, and researchers had unfettered access to the underlying data, it would allow everyone to cooperate and lead to new discoveries, analysis, cancer treatments, and ultimately a cure.

Recently, Creative Commons made recommendations on how the federal government can accelerate the speed and probability of discovery for new cancer treatments and cures:

1. Make open access the default for cancer research articles and data.
2. Take embargo periods on research articles and data to zero.
3. Build and reward a culture of sharing and collaboration.
4. Share cancer education and training materials as open educational resources.

We also asked our community to share their personal stories about the need for open access in cancer research. There stories are powerful and important, and they make a compelling case for immediate open access. Read some of their stories on Medium.

Our Commitments to the Cancer Moonshot Initiative

In response to the Vice President’s call for open access to cancer research publications, Creative Commons is committing to provide open educational resources and tools that will support researchers, funders, medical professionals, professors, and patients as they build open and collaborative communities for cancer research. These materials will include guides for adopting and implementing open licensing policies, training materials regarding working openly and using licensed materials, and technical tools for applying licenses to shared works.

As with all of Creative Commons’ programs, these materials and tools will be freely available and openly licensed for all who need them, and can also be remixed and repurposed by anyone to serve each community’s needs. Sharing resources ensures that the best materials are available to everyone to increase the effectiveness and impact of the cancer community as a whole.

In addition to providing educational resources and open licensing assistance to researchers, CC will engage, educate, and support federal departments and agencies, cancer research centers, universities, nonprofits, and foundations that fund cancer research to adopt and implement open policies that require knowledge to be openly licensed and freely-available without restrictions or embargoes.

We applaud the bold goals of the National Cancer Moonshot Initiative. Its success will depend both on breaking down barriers of access to research by promoting information sharing and scientific collaboration. One way to do this is to require full, immediate open access to government-funded cancer research, data, and educational resources. Creative Commons is committed to aiding federal agencies in the development and implementation of policies that meet these requirements. We are thrilled to participate in today’s Cancer Moonshot Summit. We look forward to providing leadership, training, and educational materials that will help open up research, enable collaboration, and put an end to cancer.

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A few weeks ago we wrote about how the European Union is pushing ahead its support for open access to EU-funded scientific research and data. Today at the meeting of the Competitiveness Council of the European Union, the Council reinforced the commitment to making all scientific articles and data openly accessible and reusable by 2020. In its communication, the Council offered several conclusions on the transition towards an open science system:

• ACKNOWLEDGES that open science has the potential to increase the quality, impact and benefits of science and to accelerate advancement of knowledge by making it more reliable, more efficient and accurate, better understandable by society and responsive to societal challenges, and has the potential to enable growth and innovation through reuse of scientific results by all stakeholders at all levels of society, and ultimately contribute to growth and competitiveness of Europe;

• INVITES the Commission and the Member States to explore legal possibilities for measures in this respect and promote the use of licensing models, such as Creative Commons, for scientific publications and research data sets;

• WELCOMES open access to scientific publications as the option by default for publishing the results of publicly funded research;

• AGREES to further promote the mainstreaming of open access to scientific publications by continuing to support a transition to immediate open access as the default by 2020;

• ENCOURAGES the Member States, the Commission and stakeholders to set optimal reuse of research data as the point of departure, whilst recognising the needs for different access regimes because of Intellectual Property Rights, personal data protection and confidentiality, security concerns, as well as global economic competitiveness and other legitimate interests.

You can read the rest of the conclusions. Crucially, the Council said that “open access to scientific publications” will be interpreted as being aligned to the definition laid out in the Budapest Open Access Initiative: free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.

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A few weeks ago we submitted comments to the Office of Management and Budget’s (OMB) draft federal source code policy. The purpose of the policy is to improve access to custom software code developed for the federal government, and would require that:

(1) New custom code whose development is paid for by the Federal Government be made available for re-use across Federal agencies; and

(2) a portion of that new custom code be released to the public as Open Source Software.

We provided feedback on a few different areas of the proposed policy.

First, we suggested that software developed by U.S. government employees should be clearly marked as being in the public domain not only in the United States, but worldwide, and as a matter of both copyright and patent rights. Under U.S. copyright law, works created by employees of the federal government are not subject to copyright protection in the United States. But what about foreign copyrights? Clearly, this custom code produced by government employees—thus in the public domain in the U.S.—could be equally as useful to developers outside of the U.S. There is no indication that the U.S. government has wishes to enforce its copyright abroad, but rather allows and even encourages the worldwide public to reuse its works freely, including software.

We said that software created by federal government employees should be released under the CC0 Public Domain Dedication, which waives any copyright that might apply, accompanied by a standard non-assertion pledge (“nonassert”) that indicates that the U.S. government will not to seek to enforce patent rights it may have against reusers of the software.

Second, we proposed that software funded by the federal government but developed by third party vendors should be released under free/open source software licenses that permit the greatest levels of freedom for reuse with the least number of restrictions. This will ensure that the public is granted rights to freely use, share, and build upon custom software code developed using public funds.

Third, we urged the federal government to consider setting a policy of “open by default” for custom software developed by third parties. Right now, the draft policy requires each covered agency to release at least 20% of its newly-developed custom code each year as open source software.

Finally, we urged the U.S. government to extending its open source licensing policy to the outputs of Federal grants and cooperative agreements. We discussed a precedent that support the adoption of a default open licensing policy for software—even for grants and cooperative agreements. In 2011, the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) adopted an open licensing policy for the outputs of its $2 billion Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training Grants Program. As a condition of the receipt of a grant under this program, grantees are required to license to the public all digital content created with the support of the grant under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY) license. In addition to content such as digital education and training resources, DOL requires that all computer software source code developed or created with grant funds must be released under an open license acceptable to either the Free Software Foundation and/or the Open Source Initiative. DOL adopted this open licensing policy “to ensure that the Federal investment of these funds has as broad an impact as possible and to encourage innovation in the development of new learning materials.” As of December 2015, the Department of Labor has adopted a department-wide open licensing policy, which covers all intellectual property developed under a competitive Federal award process.

The public comment period is now closed. The U.S. government will analyze the feedback and revise the policy as necessary. You can view all of the comments submitted here.

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Vice President Biden is leading the National Cancer Moonshot Initiative, which aims to accelerate cancer research and “make more therapies available to more patients, while also improving our ability to prevent cancer and detect it at an early stage.”

VP Joe Biden asks about CC’s Ryan Merkley’s op-ed in Wired from Matt Lee on Vimeo.

In his remarks to the American Association for Cancer Research, Biden discussed a broad global support for the Cancer Moonshot Initiative. He talked about the importance of collaboration among cancer researchers, academic institutions, patient groups, the private sector, and government.

He made a commitment to cancer researchers to help break down barriers that get in the way of their work. One of the barriers is not having broad open access to cancer research and data. The Vice President asked about the types of innovative insights and discoveries that could be made possible with next generation supercomputers and openly accessible, machine readable text and data.

Biden spoke about realigning the incentives around sharing cancer data so that research and development can lead to better treatments, faster. He said, “taxpayers fund $5 billion a year in cancer research every year, but once it’s published, nearly all of that taxpayer-funded research sits behind walls. Tell me how this is moving the process along more rapidly.” Biden quoted Creative Commons CEO Ryan Merkley, who this week published an op-ed in WIRED on the urgent imperative for open access to publicly funded cancer research:

 Imagine if instead we said we will no longer conceal cancer’s secrets in a paywall journal — pay-walled journals with restricted databases, and instead make all that we know open to everyone so that the world can join the global campaign to end cancer in our lifetimes? It’s a pretty good question. There may be reasons why it shouldn’t be answered like I think it should — and I’m going to hear from you, I hope, because I’ve not made these recommendations yet. But it seems to me this matters. This question matters.

In the op-ed, Merkley pushed for a fundamental change in the model for sharing and collaboration around scientific information, including cancer research: “An alternative system, where all publicly-funded research is required to be shared under a permissive license, would allow authors to unlock their content and data for re-use with a global audience, and co-operate in new discoveries and analysis.”

We’re grateful to see Vice President Biden’s continued support in the fight against cancer, and we’re committed to assisting in the efforts to ensure unrestricted access to cancer research for the public good.

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