Science Commons is a project of the non-profit corporation Creative Commons that was launched in 2005 with the support of the HighQ Foundation and Creative Commons. Science Commons is also supported by the Omidyar Network. The sciences depend on access to and use of factual data. Powered by developments in electronic storage and computational capability, scientific inquiry is becoming more data-intensive in almost every discipline and as a result, increasingly more difficult to leverage across public and private communities. Science Commons is an exploratory project to improve access to and use of scientific data on a worldwide basis by creating an open access forum for sharing and publishing research.

The backbone of neurological and is the set of facts published in previous research. These facts - "this gene causes Huntington's Disease" - represent the knowledge collected, reviewed, and published by scientists over decades of research. At the moment the vast majority of these facts are trapped in document formats that are readable only by scientists - PDF, Word, HTML, Excel, or database reports - and in many cases, usage is constrained by copyright. Although methods for generating data are transformed by miniaturization and automation, accessing data remains stolidly traditional: humans reading the peer-reviewed literature.

NeuroCommons is a proving ground for the ideas behind Science Commons: open legal contracts, advanced use of open-standards technology, and the construction of an open community involving all the stakeholders in scientific research.

Access to the NeuroCommons is provided by NeuroCommons.org. By building on TERANODE XDA, NeuroCommons.org will:

Lower the legal and technical barriers to finding and sharing knowledge and tools in the neurosciences