Open Source Disease Modeling in Biology

Open Source software is known for fostering large, unorganized, and distributed communities. It’s the nature of these communities and contributors that makes the software development model effective. The “openness” of the approach attracts people and although they’re usually spread out, it enables diverse sets of people to come together and leverage contributions of one another. Compared to proprietary software development, open source iterates and innovates much quicker. But, can open source models accomplish similar goals in other markets and applications?

Sage Bionetworks is aiming to apply the model to biology by providing an open repository for disease modeling called the Sage Commons. Researchers, scientist, and the like will be able to submit and utilize the contributions and research of others to make quicker progress in their particular field. One of the reasons their doing this is because “disease biology is characterized by many intelligent academic and commercial researchers in fragmented public and proprietary efforts.” These segmented communities and research need to be linked in a more comprehensive way, similar to how the sequenced Genome was made available for scientist to access. It would be incredibly hard and silly for scientist to have to sequence the genome on their own in order to use the information. There are similar milestones and challenges in biology disease modeling. For instance, there are “no common languages, no accessible communal repositories and no government, corporate or foundation investment in generating an inclusive resource.”

As you can imagine, this slows innovation.

Much like open source uses a general public license where you give up a right to sell the software in exchange to use its source code. Sage Bionetworks will be taking a similar approach by waiver of database rights. Their website explains that “this is the natural legal status of data in the United States and many other jurisdictions. This approach echoes the legal status of the human genome, SNP maps and other “big science” project.”

The initiative has 2 primary goals:

1. Ensure that disease models are accessible for widespread use and innovation.

2. Create a common standard to replace complex business models and a segmented research model.

What do you think? Can an open source model be applied to biology? I presume they have a good chance if they can rally support and empower people to collaborate on the standard.