The Lens Collective Action Project levels the playing field with universal open access to patent and research knowledge.

"Today The Lens, an Australian-based non-profit and world leader in providing free and open innovation knowledge, announced the Collective Action Project (CAP), a multi-year initiative to equip individuals and institutions with the tools to contribute to shared solutions to these crises. Now, all scientists, investors, publishers, governments, businesses, and civil society can navigate open global research and patent information from over 134 million patent records linked with data from over 236 million research publications and 393 million biological sequences from patents....

What are the key barriers to progress? Jurassic business models.

The ability to discover, measure, map and analyze research and patent knowledge worldwide is big business, estimated at well over US$1.5 billion a year, much of it paid by universities and public institutions. But the real costs are vastly greater: much of the world is excluded from contributing and countless opportunities are lost.

“The big corporations that sell this knowledge use closed and siloed data that can’t be shared, making it difficult to build on each other's work or make informed decisions - the very foundation of how we’ve come so far as a species,” said Mark Garlinghouse, Director of Business Development at The Lens....

The Collective Action Project is guided by the Lens Equitable Access Program (LEAP). The Program charts a pathway towards community-supported autonomous financing of The Lens, to keep it inclusive, growing, open and comprehensive.

Under LEAP, every person in the world can use the platform anonymously for free with powerful analytic tools, and access to all the data. Any registered user can benefit from personalized workspaces and customized features - at no cost for personal public-good users, or for a modest cost for commercial use. Furthermore any institution worldwide that needs or wants suites of powerful management and exploration tools in our Institutional Toolkit will have access based on low, fair, tiered pricing. All fees go towards keeping knowledge universally available as a community-supported public-good. “We announce here that we are offering at no cost these Institutional Toolkits to all public-good institutions across much of the Global South - almost 130 countries - including universities, libraries, government agencies, NGOs and civil society,” said Richard Jefferson...."