The Open Bioeconomy Lab announces the launch of the Public Domain Gazette, an online resource seeded with information from patent offices and open-source initiatives that enables researchers to easily identify technologies that are freely available in the public domain.

The Gazette was created as a response to the growing number of expired patents and increasing dedication of technologies to the public domain through initiatives such as OpenPlant, Structural Genomics Consortium, Gathering for Open Science Hardware, and more.

“The patent system is one of the best mechanisms for building the public domain,” said Dr. Linda Kahl, Advisory Board Chair for Open Bioeconomy Lab. “By making it easy to discover technologies that can be used by everyone, PDG helps researchers leverage the public domain to advance innovation in the life sciences.”

PDG includes foundational tools in biotechnology, such as fluorescent proteins, reporter molecules, and enzymes, together with summaries of how these tools can be used to accelerate research.

“Many scientists are unaware of their freedom to operate with a technology,” explains Dr. Jenny Molloy, Shuttleworth Fellow and Founder of the Open Bioeconomy Lab, “and so we built a ‘shop front’ for public domain biotechnologies that highlights the most useful tools and enabling technologies, making them discoverable by biologists and biotechnologists.”

The team at Open Bioeconomy Lab hand curated this first iteration of PDG to create a proof-of-concept demonstrating utility and value to the biotechnology community. Potential users of PDG are invited to volunteer as curators and share their ideas for shaping the next iteration of PDG by emailing info@publicdomaingazette.org