Yonatan Cale comments on Biosecurity Dual Use Screening—Project Proposal (seeking vetting & project lead)

[Yonatan Cale]

Trying to collect some comments that seem relevant:

Daniel Greene said:

+1 to [doing things at arXiv]. arXiv could play a big role in contributing to a norm around not publishing dual use bio research. There are challenges of screening large numbers of papers, but they can be met. See here for an example from ASM. bioRxiv may or may not be screening already, but they aren’t sharing information about their practices. It would be helpful if they were more vocal about the importance of not publishing dangerous information.

ASB seems to agree:

See Daniel Greene’s comment about creating better norms around publishing dangerous information (he beat me to it!).

Tessa said:

Relatedly, an area where I think arXiv could have a huge impact (in both biosecurity and AI) would be setting standards for easy-to-implement manged access to algorithms and datasets.

This is something called for in Biosecurity in an Age of Open Science:

Given the misuse potential of research objects like code, datasets, and protocols, approaches for risk mitigation are needed. Across digital research objects, there appears to be a trend towards increased modularisation, i.e., sharing information in dedicated, purpose built repositories, in contrast to supplementary materials. This modularisation may allow differential access to research products according to the risk that they represent. Curated repositories with greater access control could be used that allow reuse and verification when full public disclosure of a research object is inadvisable. Such repositories are already critical for life sciences that deal with personally identifiable information.

This sort of idea also appears in New ideas for mitigating biotechnology misuse under responsible access to genetic sequences and in Dual use of artificial-intelligence-powered drug discovery as a proposal for managing risks from algorithmically designed toxins.