Science Commons Announcements

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

Boston Globe on the open science "insurgency"

August 21st, 2008 by dwentworth

The Boston Globe today profiles three local organizations that leverage the Web to accelerate scientific research and discovery:  OpenWetWare (OWW), the Journal of Visualized Experiments (JoVE) and Science Commons. The article, Out in the open: some scientists sharing results, tells the story of Barry Canton, a young researcher here at MIT who has joined the "peaceful insurgency" in scientific research by publishing preprint research and raw data, a practice often called open notebook science.

The article also touches briefly on the broader spectrum of endeavors in open science, including the work we do to help realize the vision of fully automated, permission-free access to the available research, data and materials.

If you've read the Globe piece and want to learn more about what Science Commons does, here's a quick tour of our current projects. We focus on:

• Scholar's Copyright and Open Access Data — making scientific research "re-useful" by providing free tools for opening and marking research and data for reuse
• Biological Materials Transfer Agreement Project — facilitating "one-click" access to research materials by streamlining and automating the materials-transfer process, so scientists can more easily replicate, verify and extend research
• The NeuroCommons — integrating fragmented information sources in the field of neuroscience, in our "proof of concept" project to help researchers to find, analyze and use research, data and materials from disparate sources
• The Health Commons — building the legal framework for a permission-free marketplace of drug discovery data, materials and services, to make it easier for anyone to pull together the resources for accelerating disease research

If you have any questions, please let us know — we'd like to hear from you. And if you work in scientific research and want to collaborate with us to lift legal and technical barriers to research, you can click here to learn about your options.

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