SGC Open Science Policy

To enshrine its model, the SGC has adopted an Open Science Policy, which sets out the open science practices to which the SGC and its scientists at host academic institutions are committed, including in their external collaborations with both industry and other academic groups. These practices center around two core commitments: 

1. deliver the enabling research tools, knowledge, and data generated by SGC scientists (including those developed in collaboration with partners in industry and academia) into the public domain as rapidly as possible; and 
2. refrain from pursuing patents or other forms of restrictive intellectual property rights on these research outputs, so that research communities in academia and industry have unrestricted access to pursue new therapeutic opportunities. 

Read SGC’s Open Science Policy

Why Open Science?

SGC’s open science model is attractive to partners in both industry and academia because it accelerates new insights into human disease biology and in turn speeds up the advent of new drug development opportunities, including: 

• Enabling efficient, multi-sector collaborations among a large network of scientists in academia and industry with complementary expertise and capabilities, by reducing transactional barriers and facilitating rapid knowledge and information exchange; 
• Allowing companies and research institutions to share costs and risks associated with the large-scale efforts required to elucidate new therapeutic opportunities from underexplored areas of the human genome; 
• Reducing the duplication of effort often inherent to more proprietary drug discovery approaches, which in turn unlocks significant resources for other research avenues; Providing a publicly available, patent-free commons of resources, knowledge, and data (including both positive and negative data) that both de-risk subsequent therapeutic development and provide companies and research institutions with the freedom to operate; 
• Improving scientific reproducibility and research quality, thereby enhancing the research community’s trust in SGC’s scientific outputs; 
• Enabling open access to datasets that are essential inputs to machine learning tools aimed at accelerating new drug discovery. 

The SGC’s open science model has been the central ingredient enabling the SGC and its collaborators to achieve significant impact since the SGC’s inception in 2003.

Learn More About Why Commercial Organizations Enter Into Open Science Partnerships With SGC.

Maxwell Morgan, SGC’s Chief Policy Officer and General Counsel explains why companies enter open science partnerships with SGC.

This video is part of the University of Toronto’s IP Education Program.