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hubie [soylentnews.org] writes:

Armchair neuroscientists rejoice! McGill University's Montreal Neurological Institute (MNI) and Hospital [mcgill.ca] in Canada will begin the transition this year [sciencemag.org] to conform to the "open science" [cos.io] movement: all results and data will be made freely available at the time of publication and the institute will not pursue patents on any of its discoveries. They will include freely providing all results, data, software, and algorithms and requiring collaborators from other institutions to also follow the open principles.

“It's an experiment; no one has ever done this before,” he says. The intent is that neuroscience research will become more efficient if duplication is reduced and data are shared more widely and earlier. Opening access to the tissue samples in MNI's biobank and to its extensive databank of brain scans and other data will have a major impact, Rouleau hopes. “We think that it is a way to accelerate discovery and the application of neuroscience.”

This was an institutional decision supported by the 70 principal investigators and 600 other scientific faculty and staff. Over the next six months the individual research groups will determine how they will implement the policy.

“While the scale of ‘open’ that can be pursued right now may vary across research areas and will certainly depend on the resources that can be brought to bear, the practical challenges seem worth contending with,” she says. Participation is voluntary, and researchers can pursue patents on their own, but MNI will not pay the fees or help with the paperwork.

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