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Following on from the discussion a few weeks back kicked off by Shirley at One Big Lab and continued here I’ve been thinking about how to actually turn what was a throwaway comment into reality:

What is being generated here is new science, and science isn’t paid for per se. The resources that generate science are supported by governments, charities, and industry but the actual production of science is not supported. The truly radical approach to this would be to turn the system on its head. Don’t fund the universities to do science, fund the journals to buy science; then the system would reward increased efficiency.

There is a problem at the core of this. For someone to pay for access to the results, there has to be a monetary benefit to them. This may be through increased efficiency of their research funding but that’s a rather vague benefit. For a serious charitable or commercial funder there has to be the potential to either make money, or at least see that the enterprise could become self sufficient. But surely this means monetizing the data somehow? Which would require restrictive licences, which is not at the end what we’re about.

The other story of the week has been the, in the end very useful, kerfuffle caused by ChemSpider moving to a CC-BY-SA licence, and the confusion that has been revealed regarding data, licencing, and the public domain. John Wilbanks, whose comments on the ChemSpider licence, sparked the discussion has written two posts [1, 2] which I found illuminating and have made things much clearer for me. His point is that data naturally belongs in the public domain and that the public domain and the freedom of the data itself needs to be protected from erosion, both legal, and conceptual that could be caused by our obsession with licences. What does this mean for making an effective data commons, and the Science Exchange that could arise from it, financially viable? Read more »

Posted: May 11th, 2008 under Collaboration, academic credit, data commons, data formats, funding, linking papers to open data, open access, open data, open-science-charter, osci-protocol, science21.
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I am thinking about how to present the case for Open Science, Open Notebook Science, and Open Data at Science in the 21^st Century, the meeting being organised by Sabine Hossenfelder and Michael Nielsen at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. I’ve put up a draft abstract and as you might guess from this I wanted to make an economic case that the waste of resources, both human and monetary is not something that is sustainable for the future. Here I want to rehearse that argument a bit further as well as explore the business case that could be presented to Google/Gates Foundation as a package that would include the development of the Science Exchange ideas that I blogged about last week. Read more »

Posted: April 27th, 2008 under economics, open data, open notebook science, open science, science21.
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Perimeter Institute by hungryhungrypixels (Picture found by Zemanta).

Sabine Hossenfelder and Michael Nielsen of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics are organising a conference called ‘Science in the 21st Century‘ which was inspired in part by SciBarCamp. I am honoured, and not a little daunted, to have been asked to speak considering the star studded line up of speakers including, well lots of really interesting people, read the list. The meeting looks to be a really interesting mix of science, tools, and how these interact with people (and scientists). I’m looking forward to it. Read more »

Posted: April 8th, 2008 under open access, open data, open notebook science, open science, science21, talk.
Comments: 3