The Lens Collective Action Project

The freedom to innovate is a biological imperative. It's in our DNA. So why are we excluding most of the world?

Time for Collective Action.

COVID, climate change, social inequity. These are shared crises and need shared solutions. But that needs innovation based on shared knowledge that we can build upon and establish trust. But over 80% of the world has no access to open, free, privacy-respecting innovation knowledge. The industry of 'science and patent knowledge' denies access to those who can't afford it, or drives users into surveilled opaque platforms that turn them into the product. The billion dollar corporations that control scholarly and patent knowledge rig the game, and ensure most of the world is left out. This must end.

The Lens is the world's first global public good innovation platform dedicated to ensuring that every person and every institution - university, government agency, non-profit, civil society - can become creative, committed and informed contributors to solving our shared problems. We host almost all of the world's patent and scholarly knowledge in an integrated innovation platform with a powerful user-friendly interface using only open data. Data that is shareable by all for any purpose. Allowing new partnerships, new collaborations, new opportunities.

Using a revenue model inspired by the Aravind Eye Care System, we ensure every institution gets a fair go. And we're starting with our LEAP (Lens Equitable Access Program ) in which we are giving totally free "Institutional Toolkits" to every public-good institution in 130 countries across the Global South, and adjusting the prices for every other institution to be only a few percent of what they currently pay. But without profit taking, and using open data, that's enough to ensure everyone gets access, whether they can afford it or not.

Your donations help us get to the sustainable revenue needed to provide this global open facility. Time for a Fair Go. Given our collective crises, it’s in everyone’s self-interest to empower all the world's problem solvers. Read more about the Lens Collective Action Project and Equitable Access Program here.

About The Lens

The Lens is the world’s leading integrated open platform for discovery, analysis and management of global patent and scholarly knowledge. Lens.org is provided as a public resource to make science and technology enabled problem solving more effective, efficient and inclusive. The development goals are to merge and expose linkages between all the knowledge corpora and the capabilities needed to innovate, and to incentivize latent knowledge to become publicly discoverable to guide improved partnering and performance in the creation of social outcomes. The Lens has been operating for over twenty years as a project of the long-established non profit social enterprise Cambia, with support from leading global philanthropies and public institutions.

For more information about the ideological underpinnings of The Lens, please see this keynote presentation  from Richard Jefferson at the Skoll World Forum for Social Entrepreneurship.