Open Sharing and Communication

Open Sharing of Materials

OpenPlant has organised, sponsored and contributed to international workshops on intellectual property (IP), material transfer and responsible innovation. An important part of OpenPlant’s vision is centered around open exchange of tools and techniques.

Current IP practices and restrictive licensing threaten to restrict innovation as the scale of DNA systems increases. We believe that the field needs to explore new “two-tier” intellectual property models that will protect investment in applications, while promote sharing of DNA components and freedom-to-operate for small companies in commercial applications of Synthetic Biology.

We are collaborating with the Biobricks Foundation on an Open Materials Transfer Agreement (OpenMTA). This is a simple, standardized legal tool that enables individuals and organizations to share their materials and associated data on an open basis. 

The primary purpose of the OMTA is to eliminate or reduce transaction costs associated with access, use, modification, and redistribution of materials and associated data. This in turn will help minimize waste and redundancy in the scientific research process and promote access to materials and associated data for researchers in less privileged institutions and world regions.

Moreover, OpenPlant actively builds open resources such as DNA parts collections and shared protocols and follows open data sharing principles.

OPEN SHARING OF PROTOCOLS

As part of follow-on funding from the BBSRC (BB/W014173/1), researchers from the University of Cambridge and the Earlham Institute have been creating and curating a set of online resources on the OpenPlant GitHub site to share with the wider community.

This consists of a library of easily-accessible tutorials, protocols, and automation scripts for use on the Opentrons OT-2 platform.
The aim of which is to make it easier for researchers to adapt their general molecular biology workflows for automation, enabling an efficient and high-throughput manner for streamlining their experimental processes.

OpenPlant Forum

Each year, in the last week of July, we organise the OpenPlant Forum. The OpenPlant Forum brings together OpenPlant and international speakers to explore the potential applications of reprogrammed biological systems, and a framework for exploring the wider implications of these potentially disruptive new technologies. Each year, an overarching theme is chosen, and we aim to cover the strategic, technical, and social implications of this topic. Topics include Reprogramming Agriculture and Frugal and Fast Biotech.