Science Commons Announcements

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

Are you part of open science?

April 16th, 2008 by dwentworth

A few weeks ago, I asked you for your ideas for people and organizations to profile here at Science Commons, with the goal of highlighting efforts to open new frontiers for innovation and discovery in science. I got some great responses, including a marvelously detailed, thoughtful email from Valentin Zacharias, a doctoral student and researcher at FZI who identified groups in five broad areas of open science:

• broad efforts to bring more scientific knowledge online, such as E.O. Wilson's Encyclopedia of Life project
• initiatives to define open access (OA) and develop resource sites, such as the Directory of OA Journals (DOAJ) and the Registry of OA Repositories (ROAR)
• efforts to share pre-publication research — science as it happens — including everything from preprint servers to open notebook projects
• initiatives to create evaluation mechanisms and bibliometrics
• efforts to integrate and make scientific content understandable by computers, such as the Semantic Web approaches we use at Science Commons

This is, of course, only the tip of the proverbial iceberg — or to use a more apropos metaphor, the stack. There is an incredibly diverse range of projects that use "open" approaches to building knowledge and accelerating discovery. In the profiles I'll be publishing here, a connecting thread will be the question of whether and how we can enable independent contributions to feed into one another. Or to put it another way, how do we build an integrated commons of research and tools that's truly useful for scientists?

I hope you'll stay tuned. And if you're part of an open science project and you haven't yet sent me a pointer, please do. I'd love to hear from you.

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