Science Commons Announcements

["Donna Wentworth" <dwentworth AT creativecommons.org>]

Could the key to feeding the world be locked up in a company fridge somewhere?

				January 10th, 2008

That's the question Australia's Science Show asks to introduce a newly available podcast discussion featuring Science Commons' own John Wilbanks and Brian Fitzgerald, who heads up Creative Commons Australia. The question isn't nearly as tongue-in-cheek as it sounds; the discussion is about how to unlock the value of scientific research when so much of it is routinely balkanized — hidden away behind walls of secrecy, cost and technical obscurity.

At Science Commons, we work to make scientific research easier to find, share and use. This includes providing tools to "mark" research with usage rights, so scientists can work and collaborate within zones of legal certainty. But as Wilbanks explains in the lecture, "we need freedom to innovate, not simply freedom to operate" — something that requires more than developing licenses and contracts:

I think it's clear that we face an exponential set of problems but we don't have an exponential innovation capacity…we need to think about what we can do to enable that innovation to emerge.

If you'd like to learn more about what Science Commons is doing to spur innovation and discovery in science, follow the link above to the podcast and podcast transcript, or browse our slides for the lecture.

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