Become a Lens Partner
We believe the climate crisis is real and that we need diverse, effective solutions, fast.
We believe that Academia, Enterprise, Government and Civil Society will need to cooperate to create these solutions. We need the best open and shared information possible for evidence-based problem solving. While we have to pay the bills, we seek investors and partners who respect the mission and the transparency mandates of the Lens. There are many modes of participation that we can discuss on a case-by-case basis that can both create value for a Partner and support The Lens.For example, a Lens Partner can:
- Contribute financially to ongoing and future Lens operations. Besides our many philanthropic funders, we have had no-strings contributions from companies and individuals who see value in Lens’ success, per se.
- Defray costs associated with higher performance API use-cases.
- Request and financially sponsor new Lens functionality. Primed by a $300k contract from the USPTO, Lens.org primed its work extracting, identifying and linking non-patent literature from the global patent corpus.
- Increase the visibility and context of your capabilities on the Lens; allowing others to discover your value proposition as a meaningful partner. See the Dewey, Cheatham and Howe law firm promote their capabilities on the Lens
- Assist Lens.org to acquire, parse, integrate, link and serve new open data.
- Integrate Lens data into your institution’s web applications. Imagine a patent law firm, or a funding agency, or even a University, like our friends at the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople, who want to give all their students, staff and academics the opportunity to use a shared, world class, open and privacy-assured facility to discover, annotate, share and understand the world of research publications and metrics.
- Wrap and Brand Lens functionality within your domain. For instance, the ever-creative Chilean Patent Office, INAPI, explored with us how they could empower more Chilean innovative partnerships with academic institutions and businesses, by creating an INAPI Lens portal. Imagine this for any national enterprise whose mission must encourage real problem solving.
- Cooperate in our engineering and data science efforts, and enhance the open source software used by Lens.org, see our for developers page for examples.
- Enrich the Lens support and tutorial content.
- Promote lens.org by creating your own tutorials or blog/tweet on the various tools.
Lens Sponsor Example
Several Lens sponsors, in the academic or the industrial world, have invested non-monetary and monetary resources to help create new features and applications in the Lens, increase transparency metrics to reduce risks, and boost confidence in business. In 2014, Syngenta Corporation - then one of the largest companies in the agriculture sector - invested $400k USD to enable the Lens bioinformatics team to update and upgrade the open source PatSeq platform, with no ownership. Why did they do this? Because they needed transparency to reduce their avoidable risk and increased confidence from various data sources to conduct the business of making new products without infringing other’s rights. Their mandate was an improved data quality and efficient reliable and comprehensive service so that many others in the industry will be able to use as well. They enriched this public platform to compete with and complement the closed single-source commercial provider, and by doing so, they expanded the industry’s options to search, analyse, and validate information about patented biological sequences.Today innovation is increasingly driven by collaboration and integration... If we do not evolve IP use and step away from the exclusion, eventually the entire IP system may lose its societal trust and be done. Michael Kock, Head of Intellectual Property, Syngenta on January 17, 2013