science commons

The Boston Globe has recently published an article showcasing a few projects that belong to what they refer to as “a peaceful insurgency in science”, an open-science movement per se.

Barry Canton, Ph.D. graduate at MIT and co-founder of OpenWetWare, is portrayed as an example of this movement. By posting his work on OWW (and also to an established journal!), his work has been incorporated into 18 different projects in other labs.

Other projects mentioned are Science Commons, also based at MIT, and the Journal of Visualized Experiments (JoVE).

A couple of prominent names of the open access movement, Bora Zivkovic and John Wilbanks, have recently published articles in the Journal of Science Communication regarding the future of the scientific paper and copyright, respectively.

Peter Murray-Rust shares his view regarding the latter where he expresses his thoughts about licensing schemes and how they hinder scientific data management:

If we try and apply ANYTHING other than the public domain to scientific facts we shall no be able to manage scientific data. Problems include aggregation, restrictions (however reasonable) on re-use, cascading attribution, different jurisdictions.

Other great articles I would recommend are Alessandro Delfanti’s take on Collaborative web science and Elisabetta Tola’s run on science blogging.