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In aspiring to become a true engineering discipline for the biological sciences, the field of synthetic biology has a unique opportunity to create and encourage the widespread adoption of standards to enhance innovation and social impact in the field. This article presents a study of the standards setting efforts by the institutions, firms, governments, and individuals within the field of synthetic biology. Numerous standards have been proposed in synthetic biology, including those relevant to structure, function, description, measurement, data, information exchange, software, biosafety and biosecurity, and even law. At the present time, the adoption of technical standards has been relatively modest and no one technical standard appears to have dominated the field. Standards covering policies in biosecurity, by comparison, are more firmly established and biosecurity practices governing commercial orders for synthetic DNA have been widely adopted. Among standards-setting groups within the synthetic biology community, most have expressed a preference that standards remain open and accessible to the community as a whole. Recent developments, including the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in AMP v. Myriad and the Leahy-Smith America's Invents Act, could help give greater clarity to the scope of patent rights covering innovations and standards in synthetic biology. Copyright and trademark may provide alternatives mechanisms for conferring rights in synthetic biology inventions, setting and reinforcing standards, or promoting open innovation. Whether formal policies requiring the disclosure and licensing of property rights covering technical standards could be made mandatory or would ultimately be beneficial to the field of synthetic biology remain open questions. What is certain is that the synthetic biology community is unusually attuned to debates surrounding intellectual property and standards setting, and views its engagement in these debates as vital to ensure the continued success of synthetic biology.

Serious concerns about the way research is organized collectively are increasingly being raised. They include the escalating costs of research and lower research productivity, low public trust in researchers to report the truth, lack of diversity, poor community engagement, ethical concerns over research practices, and irreproducibility. Open science (OS) collaborations comprise of a set of practices including open access publication, open data sharing and the absence of restrictive intellectual property rights with which institutions, firms, governments and communities are experimenting in order to overcome these concerns. We gathered two groups of international representatives from a large variety of stakeholders to construct a toolkit to guide and facilitate data collection about OS and non-OS collaborations. Ultimately, the toolkit will be used to assess and study the impact of OS collaborations on research and innovation. The toolkit contains the following four elements: 1) an annual report form of quantitative data to be completed by OS partnership administrators; 2) a series of semi-structured interview guides of stakeholders; 3) a survey form of participants in OS collaborations; and 4) a set of other quantitative measures best collected by other organizations, such as research foundations and governmental or intergovernmental agencies. We opened our toolkit to community comment and input. We present the resulting toolkit for use by government and philanthropic grantors, institutions, researchers and community organizations with the aim of measuring the implementation and impact of OS partnership across these organizations. We invite these and other stakeholders to not only measure, but to share the resulting data so that social scientists and policy makers can analyse the data across projects.