[sc-announce] Toward a global platform for open science -- Science Commons blog

Donna Wentworth dwentworth at creativecommons.org
Mon Sep 8 09:31:20 EDT 2008


Toward a global platform for open science

September 8th, 2008<http://sciencecommons.org/weblog/archives/2008/09/08/toward-a-global-platform-for-open-science/>
by
dwentworth

Watching the new video <http://blip.tv/file/1238016> about the
NeuroCommons<http://neurocommons.org/page/Main_Page> project,
I was struck by how many elements are necessary for making knowledge from
one domain in science interoperable and "remixable" with knowledge from
another.

In a recent piece on open science, *Era of Scientific Secrecy Near
End<http://www.livescience.com/culture/080902-open-science.html>
* (*LiveScience*, Sept. 2), Cameron
Neylon<http://www.isis.rl.ac.uk/LargeScale/LOQ/dcn.htm> articulates
the vision of a global platform to do just that, built using design
principles from open source software:

"Making things more open leads to more innovation and more economic
activity, and so the technology that underlies the Web makes it possible to
share in a way that was never really possible before, while at same time it
also means that [the] kinds of models and results generated are much more
rich," he said.

This is the open source approach to software development, as opposed to
commercial closed source approaches, Neylon said. The internals are
protected by developers and lawyers, but the platform is available for the
public to build on in very creative ways.

"Science was always about mashing up, taking one result and applying it to
your [work] in a different way," Neylon said. "The question is 'Can we make
that as effective [for] samples [of] data and analysis as it [is] for a map
and set of addresses for a coffee shop?' That is the vision."

That's a vision Science Commons shares. The past ten years have brought the
rise of a robust infrastructure for sharing and remixing cultural content,
and thanks to the emergence of innovative tools like Google
Maps<http://googlemapsmania.blogspot.com/2007/01/google-maps-starbucks-tim-hortons.html>,
more people are grasping the power of open systems for connecting
information from disparate sources to make it more useful. Yet we remain in
the early stages of building an open infrastructure for science that would
make it easy to integrate and make sense of research and data from different
sources.

The NeuroCommons <http://neurocommons.org/page/Main_Page> is our effort to
jumpstart the process, with the goal of making all scientific research
materials — research articles, annotations, data, physical materials — as
available and as useable as they can be. If you're new to the project, we
hope you'll take a look at the video and let us know what you
think<science at creativecommons.org>
.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/sc-announce/attachments/20080908/d00d2646/attachment.htm 


More information about the sc-announce mailing list