“Moving his right eye to control his computer, [Eric Valor] used social media to build a coalition of other open-science activists who work in amateur labs such as BioCurious, Berkeley Biolabs, and Bio Tech & Beyond. Then he founded SciOpen Research Group, a virtual company for research that relies on crowd-sourced fundraising, global collaborations and shared scientific discoveries, all contrary to the traditional closed private-research model. The open approach, writes Valor, ‘allows people with ideas to bootstrap investigations and complete them doing professional-quality research at a tenth of the cost of traditional research institutions. The failure rate might be high, but the barrier to entry for innovation is quite low. So it will allow for novel ideas to be tried against problems which have seemed insurmountable — i.e. “unprofitable” — for a long time.’ Data, he says, is not a profit-generating commodity; it is a ‘shared commons in which ideas can flourish.’  …”