Frequently Asked Questions

Open science refers to a set of research practices that leverage the skills and knowledge of innovators by sharing research outputs — such as papers, data, software, reagents, and protocols — in ways that make it easy for others to access and use. These practices are essential for facilitating collaboration and maximizing the impact of research. 

At Conscience, we believe that open science is the key to advancement towards accessible treatments because it reduces barriers, fosters collaboration and efficiency, and avoids duplication of effort, helping promising discoveries move from the lab to the clinic.

Open Access refers to publishing research articles in a way that allows others to read them for free (i.e., without a journal subscription). This is just one of many practices that fall under the broader category of open science. Other examples include open data, open software, open sharing of reagents and materials, open hardware, and open protocols or methods.

In general, yes. Researchers routinely publish results that have been previously shared, for example via a preprint on a public repository. Increasingly, government research agencies require that some form of research data and results be openly accessible. 

However, some journals state that they will not publish information that they consider to have been published elsewhere, which may include publicly sharing a preprint or underlying data. If a journal you are considering has such a policy and your project has been funded by Conscience, please contact us and we will work with you to develop a disclosure timeline that will enable you to publish.

Collaborative research is an important way to advance shared scientific goals by pooling knowledge, resources, and expertise. Open science takes this a step further by making research outputs (such as data, methods, software, and materials) freely available for others to access and use.

By integrating open science practices into collaborations, whether basic research or innovation, you can broaden the impact of your work and enable others to build on your discoveries more quickly. This might involve publishing datasets in open repositories, sharing detailed protocols, or using open licenses for software and materials. Doing so makes it easier to quickly share with existing collaborators and find partners who can help translate foundational discoveries into real-world applications.

The types of outputs shared and the timing of their release, depend on the context of the project. For projects funded by Conscience, we ask recipients to openly share all patents, materials, and data (e.g. data supporting claims of therapeutic potential) that is created or developed  through a Conscience-funded project. For example, in small molecule drug discovery, this includes making the chemical structure and associated efficacy data publicly available, without patents. Both the product and the data should be openly shared according to a mutually agreed-upon timeline. Some projects go further by also sharing protocols, reagents, and software developed during the course of the project.

No one “owns” a discovery itself. The person who makes a discovery and publishes it will be acknowledged and credited as the maker of that discovery and the author of its disclosure. 

In the context of intellectual property (IP), someone can hold certain rights associated with an invention (such as patent rights) that prevent other from turning a discovery into a new product or method. Under an open science approach, creators and authors continue to receive credit and an individual or company can still hold regulatory exclusivity rights and trademarks granted by relevant agencies.

For more information on this topic, please refer to the additional questions on open science and IP below. Conscience Network members are also eligible for a free Open Science Guidance meeting with our consultation services team.

Like any multi-site or distributed project, an open science project team needs to coordinate its work carefully. The main additional consideration for open science is managing the sharing of project information with the wider world. This can be addressed through early planning and by choosing the appropriate information-sharing repository. Conscience can help you find the right solution for your team.

There are many tools available to support open science workflows. These include:

• General repositories (e.g. Zenodo), 
• Domain or data-type specific repositories (e.g. AIRCHECK), 
• Preprint servers (e.g. ChemRxiv, BioRxiv) 
• Protocol sharing platforms (e.g. protocols.io)
• General purpose open science platforms (e.g. Open Science Framework). 

Conscience can help you select the platforms that are best suited for your project.

In academia, the main mechanisms for reward and recognition are hiring, promotion and tenure, and degree granting — most of which rely on your publication record.  Open science does not prevent you from publishing in high impact journals. In fact, an increasing number of journals, institutions, and funders are requiring and rewarding open science practices. Moreover, there is a growing movement to recognize shared research outputs as independent contributions to the scientific community and to reward them as such.

Organizations that adopt open science can gain multiple benefits that improve efficiency, reduce costs, and accelerate discovery:

• Cost and time saving due to simplified agreements and the greater availability of standard form agreements. This could reduce startup times by months or longer.
• Sharing molecules, data, protocols, and other outputs allows those outside of an organization or collaboration to contribute solutions and ideas, ultimately accelerating development and reducing duplication and costs
• Working openly and transparently can attract collaborators from across academia, industry, and patient communities, bringing diverse expertise to your project
• Publishing early (e.g. via a preprint) ensures that you and your team get credit for your discoveries
• Sharing your work openly maximizes its impact by ensuring it benefits the widest possible audience
• Engaging in transparent, collaborative projects allows you to access alternative funding sources
• Transparent and public sharing helps build trust in your discovery and product, enhances reproducibility and validation, and strengthens science as a whole

Conscience provides frameworks, guidance, and funding to help organizations implement open science practices and realize these benefits.

Patient groups and advocacy organizations play a crucial role in advancing drug discovery and development research. Open science practices give patients direct access to the latest research (something that is often restricted by paywalls) allowing them to stay informed and engaged in developments that directly affect their health. Patients also contribute valuable data and samples, and open sharing ensures their contributions have the maximum impact.

Some common ways patient groups and advocacy organizations support open science include:

• Providing funding with open science requirements, which helps ensure research outputs are shared, maximizing impact (e.g., the Michael J. Fox Foundation)
• Participating in open science projects and contributing funding, data, or samples to open science repositories (e.g., C-BIG)
• Advocating for openness in science by encouraging institutions, researchers, and policymakers to increase transparency and sharing

Conscience’s open science policy encourages grantees to make use of regulatory exclusivities — a powerful form of protection that does not require patents.. These exclusivities are automatically granted by agencies that approve medicines for sale (e.g., the FDA and Health Canada). They include:

• Data exclusivity, which prevents other companies from using your data to prove equivalence to market a generic version of your product
• Market exclusivity, which prevents others from gaining approval to use the medicine you developed to treat the same condition 

The applicability and duration of these exclusivities depends on the country, the medicine being developed, and the disease for which you are seeking approval. You can read more about regulatory exclusivities here.

Beyond regulatory exclusivity models, grantees can take advantage of novel approaches to defensive patenting, trade- and certification-marks, and open source licensing.

Yes. You can participate even if you already hold a patent. However, you must still meet the program’s open science requirements, which includes making project data publicly available and ensuring that any resulting medicine is accessible and affordable.

In practice, patents often have limited value in the kinds of indications with small or uncertain markets that Conscience focuses on. For that reason, many organizations would likely choose to stop maintaining those patents or license them broadly. Importantly, you can still rely on regulatory exclusivities, which provide a low-cost and effective way to ensure market exclusivity.

No. Once you publicly share an invention, it is no longer considered “novel,” which means it cannot be patented by you or anyone else. In fact, sharing more information provides stronger protection, because it leaves less room for others to claim a patent on related ideas. Done properly, open sharing does not affect your ability to benefit from regulatory exclusivities, which remain available even when data and results are public. You or others can, however, patent non-obvious improvements to that medicine.

Anyone can attempt to patent a genuine, non-obvious improvement to an existing innovation, whether the original work was patented or openly shared. Open sharing does not increase this risk. Any derivative invention must still meet all standard patent requirements: novelty, non-obviousness, utility, disclosure and enablement. 

If someone attempts to patent something that is based on your invention, any publicly disclosed information can be used to challenge that patent application and prevent it from being granted.

Whether something can be patented is influenced by all publicly available information, including information you or others share under an open science approach. 

While you should consult a lawyer for specific information on your case, generally, when assessing a patent application, examiners look for the core legal requirements of novelty, non-obviousness, utility, disclosure and enablement. In simplified terms, this means:

• The invention must not already be in the public domain (novelty)
• It must represent more than an obvious extension of what a skilled practitioner could do based on existing public knowledge (non-obviousness)
• It must serve a useful purpose (utility)
• The application must fully describe the invention and how to make it (disclosure and enablement)

Modifications or improvements must satisfy all of these criteria to be patented. Because these are legal standards, you should consider hiring counsel to advise you on their applicability in any given circumstance.

Attribution and authorship are not affected by the presence or absence of a patent. While you won’t be listed as an ‘inventor’ on a patent application, your name will still be associated with any publicly shared information about the invention, including publications, data, and other project outputs. 

Conscience also supports the use of open compatible copyright licenses, such as CC-BY, to ensure contributors are properly credited whenever their work is used or cited.

Yes you can. Conscience’s Open Science Policy only requires that specific project outputs are shared publicly t and explicitly allows projects to use existing proprietary methods (“Background IP”). Please be sure to review the Open Science Policy carefully, and contact us for guidance on how it interacts with your Background IP.

When practiced thoughtfully, open science is not only practical but can also drive innovation, create new collaborations, and accelerate progress in drug development. In fact, open science in certain forms is already practiced by many pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies who regularly share research through open-access publications, contribute to open resources, share software, and participate in open science collaborations. Even patents involve some level of openness by disclosing how an invention works, though they limit how it can be used. The more open a company is, the more opportunities there are for finding new collaborators and enabling the work of others. The key is finding the open science practices that make sense for your organization.

Patents are just one way for a scientist or company to gain a market advantage. Other forms of advantage include regulatory exclusivity, other intellectual property regimes, first mover advantage, privileged access to clients or suppliers, and branding. 

Patents work well in some contexts but are less effective in areas such as cell therapy, synthetic biology, and other technologies where small modifications can bypass patent coverage. Patents are also costly, uncertain, and sometimes invalidated in court – in the US, 43% to 46% of patents are challenged successfully.

Other market advantages can be far less costly and uncertain. For example,  regulatory exclusivity is free, virtually unassailable, and enforced by the government, making it an attractive alternative in open science. In fields supported by Conscience, where markets are often small or uncertain, patents usually create more cost than benefit. You can learn more about designing an intellectual property strategy that works with open science here: Intellectual Property Strategies in the age of AI.

Developing a new medicine relies on having the right people with the right tools working on the right problem. In the pre-competitive and basic discovery space, open science lowers costs and accelerates research. 

For many disease areas, the traditional model that relies on patent protections and trade secrets doesn’t work, especially when markets are small (e.g., rare diseases), uncertain (e.g., pandemic preparedness or antimicrobial resistance), or when we lack a deep understanding of the biology (e.g., many neurological disorders).In these cases, the potential commercial payoff doesn’t justify the high costs associated with the traditional path, leaving critical problems underexplored. Open science can help address these gaps by enabling collaboration, sharing knowledge and tools, and making research more efficient, giving discovery its best chance at success.

An open science drug discovery pipeline follows the same stages as a traditional drug discovery pipeline: hit identification, hit-to-lead, lead optimization, preclinical validation, and clinical validation. 

The key difference is in how knowledge and data are handled at each stage. In a traditional model, patents are  obtained early and work and data are kept secret. With an open science approach, researchers share data regularly, enabling faster collaboration with other companies and academic partners. Instead of relying on patents, firms use regulatory exclusivities for market protection. Early and ongoing disclosure also helps prevent others from claiming intellectual property on the same molecules.

Patents have several limitations in early-stage drug discovery. They are costly, time-consuming, and require legal resources for filing, licensing, and non-disclosure agreements. Confidentiality requirements before filing also limit opportunities for collaboration. 

Furthermore, patent enforcement is not automatic, meaning that patent holders must spend additional resources on legal action to stop others from using the invention.. These costs and restrictions divert resources away from actual drug development. While patents can be worthwhile in some contexts, they are much less useful when protection is weak or where markets are small or uncertain.

Pharmaceutical companies licence products they expect will generate a  return on investment. A medicine developed through open science that is protected by regulatory exclusivities rather than patents can still be licensed if it is commercially attractive. Many medicines currently on the market are protected only by regulatory exclusivities, either because patents expired before approval or because companies chose to rely solely on regulatory exclusivities. These medicines continue to provide a return on investment for the companies that sell them.

Although the impact of open science in a particular area of drug discovery is highly dependent on context, there are plenty of examples of open science having played an important role in accelerating discovery. A prime example is the development of AlphaFold – an AI that predicts the three dimensional structure of proteins – that came about only because of the availability of large, open, datasets. Another prime example is the COVID vaccine developed by Moderna, which was only developed as quickly as it was because researchers all over the world were sharing viral genomes rapidly and openly.

Conscience’s work focuses on areas where open sharing and collaboration are key to advancement towards accessible treatments. The most obvious examples are disease areas with small or uncertain markets. In these areas, open science is an effective way to enable collaboration that would not be possible with a traditional drug development model, thereby accelerating discovery and development.

Because open science-based drug discovery is still emerging, its long-term sustainability is not yet fully known. However, in many  other industries, such as software development and AI, some forms of equipment manufacturing, fashion, and even high end restaurant recipes, open approaches have proven to be commercially viable and  sustainable over the long-term. These examples suggest that open science can be a durable model in drug discovery as well, particularly as supporting practices and infrastructure continue to grow.

Yes, sharing a chemical structure openly is generally safe, and it works much like publishing a structure in a scientific paper. The key difference is that a structure that is openly shared cannot later be patented because it is no longer considered novel. Chemical structures alone are not patentable, you must also demonstrate an indication or specific use. If the supporting information for an indication is shared publicly, patents may not be available, but you can still rely on regulatory exclusivities, which provide a strong and practical form of market protection without restricting open sharing.

Yes. Open science makes it easier to find relevant research, work together, and build upon one another’s work. In areas with little or no private investment, there are few incentives for companies to compile data, coordinate efforts, or maintain shared infrastructure. Open sharing helps fill that gap by ensuring researchers can access up-to-date knowledge and avoid duplicating work, making it possible to move faster toward new treatments where they’re needed most.

Companies in many industries — including scientific software, hardware, and materials — regularly obtain funding from VCs and other investors while using open-science or open-source approaches.The most established examples come from  the open source software industry, where an entire ecosystem of investors and mature business models already exist. There are also more success emerging  in the open scientific hardware domain, such as Opentrons. Most relevant to drug discovery, Ginkgo Bioworks is  a leading research and development partner for biopharma and one of the originators and primary users of the Open Material Transfer Agreement.

In drug discovery, open science is a relatively new model, and evidence is still accumulating. Current projects tend to blend public and private investment. Conscience’s role is to help develop and validate sustainable open business models in this space, demonstrating how openness can support both scientific progress and viable investment.

ROI  is fundamentally the ratio of money earned from selling a product or service to the money spent on developing and marketing it. While patents can be helpful in securing investment or limiting direct competitors, they are not required to develop or sell a product or service.