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Open Source Biology Initiative
Nick dos Remedios writes "The Biological Innovation for Open Society (BIOS) initiative aims to make biological technology more readily available to biologists everywhere. The latest genetics and biology tools should be freely available to researchers over the internet, but instead access is typically restricted by commercial patents and prohibitive licensing fees. BIOS and its associated BioForge aims to overcome these restrictions to innovation by encouraging companies and public sector research organizations to contribute their research tools and technologies to the BioForge repository. In return, users of the technology are bound by an open source license to share all improvements with the original inventors and other license holders."
Typically for academic institutions, you publish all of your techniques including changes that you made to the protocol to get your results. This, and the willingness to share and explain your approach, is called good science.
The problem comes when you try to open up approaches done by commercial companies. Many of these companies spent years putting together the kits that they sell. Only the restrictive licensing and patents allow them to fully recoup their losses.
Take Amaxa for example. They supply an electroporation kit that works wonders for expressing constructs in cells. Unfortunately each kit costs $300 for 25 transfections. My lab typically goes through 3 of these every 2.5 weeks. Now if Amaxa would just tell us what the composition of the buffers are, that is all that I need to put together my own electroporation system and save my lab at least 15k a year! As a downside, Amaxa would cease to exist. What would be the point of having a biotech company that develops new techniques? Selling support? Please.