Creative Commons has started an organization called Science Commons that has done some great work on getting scientists to share their data:

http://sciencecommons.org/

A promising step in this direction is Sage Bionetworks, which is attempting to use an open source style approach to drug development:

http://www.sagebase.org/

There are some very well known people behind Sage, and it's received backing from Merck (and Science Commons), among others. See, e.g., http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/19646, which states that Merck has backed them to the tune of 150 million dollars. At the moment they're just getting off the ground.

A much broader overview on open data and related issues can be found in Peter Suber's open access timeline: http://oad.simmons.edu/oadwiki/Timeline

Another interesting step is the Federal Research Public Access (http://www.arl.org/sparc/publications/articles/FRPAA-introdu... ), which would make most US-government sponsored research publicly available. It's not quite the same as open data, but is very consonant with it.