When Pasteur had his eureka moment, the processes leading up to it were barely different than Archimedes’s. The scientist hypothesized,
created his tools, and executed his experiments with little need for input from his colleagues. My, how things have changed. As science has become increasingly complex and interconnected, even the smallest a-ha instance demands that researchers spend Continue reading »
The question is, have we now hit a point where scientific problems are so complex that one person alone can’t solve them? It would certainly seem that way. The problems science is pursuing today-issues like global warming and genomic mapping-demand a distributed approach across disciplines. But currently, journal articles, data, research, materials and so on are stopped by contracts and copyrights at such a rate that it’s become nearly impossible to pull them together. Continue reading »
It started for historical reasons-our initial funder was a Huntington’s disease research group that hoped that if it rolled up all of the research out there, it could move the discovery process along and help a drug company to find a cure. But over time, neuroscience proved to be an ideal focus. There are a lot of “orphan” diseases in the field of neurology: They’re devastating, but because they affect a limited number of people, they generally aren’t financially worthwhile for pharmaceutical companies to take on. But there’s really a lot of shared research between these diseases. Alzheimer’s, ALS, Continue reading »
We’re pretty pleased at how positive the response has been. It mostly comes from our focus on research. Every scientist would like to be able to move through research faster, to spend less time and money acquiring material or disseminating it. Continue reading »
As we blogged yesterday, CC has a booth at LinuxWorld and our Chairman & CEO Larry Lessig gave a keynote there on Tuesday. Yesterday, we were thrilled to learn that ccHost won the Linux World Product Excellence Award for “Best Open Source Solution.” The other nominees were rPath Conary and Novell SUSE Linux 10.x. Continue reading »
Linux Kernel in a Nutshell (O’Reilly) by Greg Korah-Hartman is now available online under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license in PDF and DocBook (easily modifiable source files for the book) formats. The author’s “Secret Goal i.e. why I wrote this book and am giving it away for free online. Continue reading »
Using innovative copyrights and a Web 2.0 platform, John Wilbanks may just transform how scientific discoveries are made by Abby Seiff When Pasteur had his eureka moment, the processes leading up to it were barely different than Archimedes’s. The scientist hypothesized, created his tools, and executed his experiments with little need for input from his colleagues. Continue reading »
I recently attended the second annual Science Foo Camp, co-sponsored by O’Reilly and Nature. See my entry on the Science Commons blog for a more in depth look at the discussion surrounding Open Science.
And, once again, many thanks to those from O’Reilly and Nature for putting together such a spectacular event, and Google for hosting us.
Check out the latest issue of CTWatch Quarterly for an article by John Wilbanks. The article, “Cyberinfrastructure for Knowledge Sharing”, explores the reasons behind the inefficiencies in knowledge sharing, and what role Science Commons’ efforts play in this debate. Continue reading »
James Boyle’s latest column in The Financial Times The irony of a web without science examines how the lessons learned from the world wide web can and should be applied to the sciences. From research funding to commercial publishing, Continue reading »