[sc-announce] Building the foundation for open science -- Science Commons blog

Donna Wentworth dwentworth at creativecommons.org
Wed Jul 23 14:28:46 EDT 2008


Building the foundation for open science

July 23rd, 2008<http://sciencecommons.org/weblog/archives/2008/07/23/building-the-foundation-for-open-science/>by
dwentworth

The *New York Times* ran a
much-discussed<http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-a&um=1&q=innocentive%2C+nyt&btnG=Search+Blogs>
piece <http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/22/science/22inno.html> this week on
open science and our colleague Karim
Lakhani<http://drfd.hbs.edu/fit/public/facultyInfo.do?facInfo=ovr&facEmId=klakhani>at
the Harvard Business School. John
Wilbanks <http://creativecommons.org/about/people/#34> was with Lakhani at
OSCON <http://en.oreilly.com/oscon2008/public/content/home> when the story
broke, speaking at a forum on participatory cultures<http://participate08.com/>
.

The piece gives a tantalizing glimpse of the potential for open science.
With a foundation in a shared legal and technical framework, we could scale
initiatives like the ones Lakhani has identified, with the Web itself
functioning as an innovation engine for science.

That was the impetus behind the open science
workshop<http://sciencecommons.org/events/esof-satellite-event/>we
held last week in Barcelona in conjunction with ESOF
2008 <http://www.esof2008.org/>. We've now published our
recommendations<http://sciencecommons.org/wp-content/uploads/esof_recommendations_onepage.pdf>[PDF]
for foundational principles to help foster the growth of open science
across the globe — a way to connect and empower the people and organizations
using open approaches to accelerating discovery. It provides definitions for
four pillars of open science: open access to literature, access to research
materials, open data and open cyberinfrastructure.

"We have to look hard at the foundations of science on the network and
advocate ceaselessly for the necessary upgrades — to science as well as the
network — that will allow us to get millions of new eyes on science, asking
millions of new questions," writes Wilbanks in a
post<http://network.nature.com/blogs/user/wilbanks/2008/07/21/user-innovation-in-science>on
his blog at Nature
Network <http://network.nature.com/>. "Until that happens, we won't really
have a digital science culture. We'll have simply made the old problems into
digital problems."

We're grateful to all of the participants for joining us and helping to make
the workshop a success. Special thanks go to Dr. Cameron
Neylon<http://www.isis.rl.ac.uk/largescale/LOQ/dcn.htm>,
who not only participated but also blogged the event at Science in the
open<http://blog.openwetware.org/scienceintheopen/>,
sharing his insights with the community at large. Here are links to his
notes, along with a few brief excerpts:

   - Policy and technology for e-science: a forum on open science
policy<http://blog.openwetware.org/scienceintheopen/2008/07/17/policy-and-technology-for-e-science-a-forum-on-on-open-science-policy/>:
   "James Boyle (Duke Law School, Chair of board of directors of Creative
   Commons, Founder of Science Commons) gave a wonderful talk (40 minutes, no
   slides, barely taking breath) where his central theme was the relationship
   between where we are today with open science and where international
   computer networks were in 1992. He likened making the case for open science
   today with that of people suggesting in 1992 that the networks would benefit
   from being made freely accessible, freely useable, and based on open
   standards."
   - Policy for open science: the wrap-up
session<http://blog.openwetware.org/scienceintheopen/2008/07/17/policy-for-open-science-the-wrap-up-session/>:
   "The benefits of the open web come from the explosion of people actually
   using a computer network. We must think of the users of an open-architected
   science [having] the same potential for explosion. "
   - Policy for open science — reflections on the
workshop<http://blog.openwetware.org/scienceintheopen/2008/07/18/policy-for-open-science-reflections-on-the-workshop/>:
   "The workshop that I've reported on over the past few days was both positive
   and inspiring. There is a real sense that the ideas of Open Access and Open
   Data are becoming mainstream. As several speakers commented, within 12-18
   months it will be very unusual for any leading institution not to have a
   policy on Open Access to its published literature. …Open Data remains
   further behind, both with respect to policy and awareness. … We need to look
   critically at different models [for building a commons], what they are good
   for, how they work."

We're hoping to continue the fruitful conversations started the Barcelona
workshop. If you're interested in joining us, send us an
email<science at creativecommons.org>to let us know.

................
 Donna Wentworth
Communications Specialist
Science Commons
http://sciencecommons.org
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