Despite the urgent need for new, effective antibiotics, few antibiotics of value have entered the market during the past decades. Therefore, incentives have been developed to stimulate antibiotic R&D.

Open source drug discovery offers potential for developing new and inexpensive drugs to combat diseases that disproportionally affect the poor. The concept borrows two principle aspects from open source computing (i.e., collaboration and open access) and applies them to pharmaceutical innovation. By opening a project to external contributors, its research capacity may increase significantly. To date there are only a handful of open source R&D projects focusing on neglected diseases.