Can open-source R&D reinvigorate drug research? | Nature Reviews Drug Discovery

"The low number of novel therapeutics approved by the US FDA in recent years continues to cause great concern about productivity and declining innovation. Can open-source drug research and development, using principles pioneered by the highly successful open-source software movement, help revive the industry?...

Open-source research, which started as a counterculture movement in the software industry 15 years ago, has since grown into a business model whose best-known product, Linux, has become a credible alternative to Microsoft's Windows. Now, with biology increasingly becoming an information-orientated science, some have suggested that what worked for software might be part of the answer to the spiralling cost of drug R&D. With this in mind, this article examines the relevance to pharmaceutical R&D of the open-source model developed by the software industry. In this context, open-source no longer refers to source code, but instead to the open origin of contributors...."