With the dangers of proprietary systems and surveillance technologies as a backdrop, the SPARC Impact Story on The Lens caught my attention. The Lens is an online, open, public good platform developed over 20 years by the non-profit Australian organization Cambia which is “committed to its mission of making knowledge open, meaningful, useful and accessible” to individuals and institutions alike. “The Lens serves global patent and scholarly knowledge as a public resource to make science- and technology-enabled problem solving more effective, efficient and inclusive.” It ingests and normalizes metadata from 10 partner organizations, including CrossRef, ORCiD, PubMed, USPTO and WIPO, to form a database of over 225 million scholarly works, 127 million global patent records and 370 million patent sequences. The platform has a strong privacy policy summed up by “Your use of the Lens is your business, not ours.” In addition to its global coverage, it sports a nifty search and filter interface. It’s designed to spur collaboration among research institutions, policy makers, researchers, funders, prospective students, patent offices and publishers, and you can examine use cases for all of them.
