Copyright-sharing group delves into science, in CNET News.com. From the CC website, a Proposal to Explore a Science Commons:

Creative Commons is a disinterested party with remarkable experience in the formation and deployment of well-written, accessible, machine- and human-readable licenses that guarantee wider availability of material while preserving some selected intellectual property rights. Along with scientists, patent and university IP lawyers and scholars, we believe that this particular conjunction of features might encourage an enormously valuable thaw against the freeze-in of scientific data. We anticipate that there will be a major role for well-written, standard form, machine- and human-readable agreements:

• Between funders and grant recipients, requiring greater access to data.

• Between universities and researchers, prohibiting collectively the most toxic types of restrictions on data, and guaranteeing a level and open playing field of access to data.
• Between government agencies who are purchasing data from or providing data to, private commercial concerns, so as to develop standard terms that benefited the public and research as a whole.
• In any or all of these areas, a Science Commons division of Creative Commons could play an important role.

[via BNA’s ILN]