Contribute your expertise

If you have particular skills in science, law, IT, business, political economics, intellectual property, trade policy, health, web design or modern languages, you may be interested in making pro bono contributions.

Interests of the BiOS Initiative include:

• intellectual property professionals to prepare, extend or comment on freedom-to-operate analyses around particular enabling technologies
• business law professionals to prepare, review and comment on contracts, by-laws and other matters
• economists to model evolving innovation systems
• IT specialists to assist in designing and implementing enhanced ways to search our patents database and ways for the searches to be used in projects
• programmers and database owners to develop connections to reference databases and other types of searches, such as protein sequence searching
• hosts and Internet access providers for local nodes in key geographies such as the Indian subcontinent, East Asia, Central Asia, Africa, Europe, and South America
• business planning, financial, marketing and communications strategies for the some of the projects that may be able to yield commercial products and the small and medium enterprises that may be able to market them in various localities
• translations and translation checking for the BiOS license, website content, and patent tools into Chinese, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Farsi, Arabic, Russian and other languages.

Contribute your resources

Our fundamental goal is to enable biological innovation by the economically disenfranchised worldwide.

People located in developing countries or in resource-poor areas are just as creative as those to whom financial capital is readily available. The BioForge was created to provide access on an equal basis to the means for innovation.

Providing this access requires funds for database maintenance, scientific work, and intellectual property analysis and provision.

The BiOS Initiative and all its participants can benefit from both monetary and in-kind donations.

You may be able to amplify your contribution of resources by suggesting to your employer or organizations with which you are affiliated that monetary, technology or equipment donations may be of interest.

Contributions to a registered not-for profit may be tax-deductible in your tax jurisdiction. The BiOS Initiative is administered by a registered not-for-profit and is in the process of registering as a tax-exempt foundation, the BiOS Initiative Foundation.

It is possible to make donations in any currency by credit card using PayPal. Payments can be made to paypal@bios.net. Instructions on how to use PayPal and information about the security of using this method for making transfers are available at www.paypal.com. You may also arrange to make donations using direct bank transfer. For information, contact us at info@bios.net

Contribute your technology

Putting technology under a BiOS license makes it more available for others to improve, but it doesn't change ownership. 

There are many reasons why a technology owner might prefer to see certain technology licensed via a BiOS license rather than in a traditional licensing process.

Unlike a traditional license or a patent pooling or cross-licensing arrangement, the BiOS license contains provisions for a growing pool of licensees to contribute improvements to each other, so that capability to use the technology is truly enhanced.

Through its grant-back provision, which mandates that improvements must be shared, BiOS licenses provide you with a covenanted access to improvements that other parties are able to make.

Furthermore, BiOS licenses allow you:

• the ability to access the intelligence and goodwill of a larger community of researchers and innovators without diverting the focus and resources of your in-house team
• portfolio growth through synergies obtained by combining pieces of your technology with technology of others that is also, by itself, too small or lacking enablement
• high leverage of costly investments in obtaining proofs of concept, developing improvements, and obtaining utility data You may have pieces of technology that are, by themselves, too small or lacking enablement for further investment, or the investment that would be required to bring the technology to commercialization is prohibitive or would draw limited resources from more urgent commercial projects. While on the shelf, technology is of no value to you or to anyone else. One major economic benefit is decreased transactions costs relative to out-licensing technology via bilateral license agreements. If you control technology for which you'd like to obtain these benefits, contact us about arranging for placement of the technology into a BioForge project that would be accessible to innovators who agree to the terms of a BiOS license.