Governance of communities - non-profit organizations

Gaining non-for-profit status has proven a major milestone in the formation of key scientific communities, including some listed on the BioSharing website. Academic non-profit organizations (NPOs) gain credibility, branding and the independence required to work collaboratively across traditional institutional boundaries.

The reasons why a research community goes down the route of becoming a NPO are varied and the ways they get there are different, but they are all unified by needing to have a mission and transparent mechanisms of operation.

In order to gain NPO status, a community has to define its mission, elect officers and form a Board with bylaws. The rules that govern the Board (community) are encapsulated in its bylaws (Good template and explanation here).

Bylaws (also called constitutions or the charters) are usually made public on a community's website. Below is a list of NPOs contributing to real-world data sharing and links to their bylaws:


SAGE Bionetworks - Bylaws - Sage Bionetworks is a new, not-for-profit medical research organization established in 2009 to revolutionize how researchers approach the complexity of human biological information and the treatment of disease.

International Society for Biocuration - Constitution and Governance Guidelines - The ISB is a non-profit organisation for biocurators, developers, and researchers with an interest in biocuration. The society promotes the field of biocuration and provides a forum for information exchange through meetings and workshops.

PISTOIA: Bylaws - The PISTOIA Alliance aims to provide an open foundation of data standards, ontologies and web-services to streamline the Pharmaceutical Drug Discovery workflow (Chemistry, Biological Screening, Logistics) through common business terms, relationships and processes


Other initiatives have gained NPO status through an association with a parent
NPO (or fiscal sponsor). Science Commons is an initiative run by Creative Commons (Bylaws). Also, OBO Foundry uses iCommons (Bylaws) as as its fiscal agent. iCommons is a legal entity in its own right and is a former subsidiary of Creative Commons based in the UK (i.e. was incubated by Creative Commons).


There are many, many NPOs that contribute to science and scientific research - a few more are listed below for contrast (three scientific societies and the internet giant, the Wikipedia Foundation).


CSM: Bylaws - The Canadian Society of Microbiologists seeks to advance microbiology in all its aspects and to faciliate the interchange of ideas between microbiologists.

AAAS: Constitution revisions of AAAS and its divisions - The American Association for the Advancement of Science, "Triple A-S" (AAAS), is an international non-profit organization dedicated to advancing science around the world by serving as an educator, leader, spokesperson and professional association. It is the world's largest general scientific society.

ISCB: Bylaws and governing policies - The International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) serves over 2500 members from nearly 100 countries around the world by addressing scientific policies, providing access to high quality publications, organizing meetings, and serving as a portal to information about training, education, employment and news from related fields.

Wikipedia Foundation: Bylaws - The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. is a nonprofit charitable organization dedicated to encouraging the growth, development and distribution of free, multilingual content, and to providing the full content of these wiki-based projects to the public free of charge.