Table 1.

 Comparison of the structure of the science commons in the life sciences to the Science Commons project

	Ownership and management	Access and direct use	Follow‐on use
Science Commons	The author	Open access, conditions for direct use specified in the licence	Allowed if open access preserved
GenBank (International Nucleotide Sequence Database)	Public domain or patent	Open access, direct use allowed	Licence required if patented matter (in case of university research, settled practice of rational forbearance for suing)
GBIF (global portal to access databases of non‐human biological material)	Original database in the home countries	Open access, direct use allowed	Follow‐on applications specified in the original database
MOSAICC (international code of conduct adopted by an international network of culture collections)	The culture collections	Open access and direct use upon payment of a small handling fee	Allowed, with appropriate sharing of the benefits with the original provider of the material (if known)