jwilbanks | December 7, 2008The good people at Autism Speaks have announced a major policy shift on open access. Basically they're saying if you take their money, you have to make the research open. I love this for all sorts of reasons. First, it's smart. Opening up research to more readers means you increase the chances of someone innovating on top of that research. Second, it's a good market indicator. Legislation and mandates are all well and good, but there's nothing as powerful as the customer standing up and changing the deal in the market...
I guess I delayed my post on this for personal reasons. Autism is a…
jwilbanks | December 3, 2008Copyrights and open access and curation are all important.
But the real tragedy today is that a bacon costume was stolen, in my town of Boston to boot. If you see someone running around dressed like bacon, or more likely, see it in a second-hand costume shop, send email to the nice folks at Bacon Salt.
Oh yes. If this is viral marketing, bacon salt people, you're dead to me.
jwilbanks | December 1, 2008If you have questions or comments you'd like to see the Digital Curation Centre tackle about Science Commons, here's your chance. Their next legal watch paper is on us.
For those of you who are interested in what I have to say, I'm keynoting their conference tomorrow in Edinburgh. My topic is "how radical sharing out-innovates traditional models" and it is already turning into a fun talk to write. I'll post slides to my slideshare afterwards.
jwilbanks | December 1, 2008Deciding on the right license for an online community can be a touchy process.
Sometimes the community is focused on the organizing principles learned from software. Copyleft has been powerful in growing free software, and is regularly insisted on by online communities that build data, or community science content - not because it makes legal or technical sense for data or community science content, but because it's a security blanket known well from software.
The problem is that in a lot of cases, share-alike breaks the interoperability of data and content, in a way that it doesn't in…
jwilbanks | December 1, 2008Hope all the Americans had a good holiday, and that the rest of the world finds peace in a troubled week. To my friends in India and Pakistan, to my colleagues at the Internet Governance Forum this week in Hyderabad...my thoughts are with you all.
Two quick links of much importance in my world:
1. Obama's transition site is under CC-BY.
Via Lessig's blog:
Consistent with the values of any "open government," and with his strong leadership on "free debates" from the very start, the Obama team has modified the copyright notice on change.gov to embrace the freest CC license.
Wow. Obama's team,…
jwilbanks | November 19, 2008A lot of people have asked me lately about how I compose my presentations, so I figured I might as well address it here, then link back here in future discussions. I'll start with links to four recent talks on my slideshare account. They're all CC-BY licensed PDFs (I can't yet upload them as keynote files).
The first is a talk I gave at Henry Chesbrough's class at the University of California at Berkeley's Haas School of Business, on the idea of a commons as the platform for open business models based on services. Then I gave a talk at the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information…
jwilbanks | November 13, 2008The nice folks at Seed named me a revolutionary mind this month. It's an honor to be in the company of the minds behind GISAID, Eigenfactor, Voice of Young Science, and CubeSat. Click through and check all of them out.
It's surreal to be photographed by a real photographer and followed around by a film crew. When I think of all the shots and film unused, I think about how nice it would be to see media companies releasing the backfile under CC licenses so that others could start to do remix on the unused content.
jwilbanks | November 13, 2008As much as I loathe to quote Rumsfeld, there's something inside the concept of known unknowns versus unknown unknowns. This is at the root of much of the work that I do, and this post is meant to address the role of the unknowns in the life sciences generally, but pharmaceutical development specifically.
Quite simply, the google searches work pretty well for the "unknown knowns" - stuff that someone else has posted somewhere on the web, something that is known or at least believed, something that is hyperlinked and indexable. This is the modern version of common knowledge, and some…
jwilbanks | November 7, 2008Just so everyone knows, I will post this twice, once today, and once more during the campaign.
But in times of economic downturn, keeping non-profit organizations going is hard. Keeping user-supported ones going is harder. We're committed to raising about 20% of our operating funds from our users, and in the middle of our fall campaign.
If you use CC licenses, please stop by and drop $25 or so into the tiller. It's like NPR - the more you give, the more swag you get. But hopefully what you really get is the good feeling from supporting something you care about.
A $25 donation is about the…
jwilbanks | November 7, 2008Just a quick hat tip to our new president, who understands that Creative Commons is a nice way to be a good citizen on the Web. He's shared his election night candid set on Flickr under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike license. That means any of you who want to make copies or derivative works are free to do so, as long as you don't sell the works, give credit where credit is due, and release your own derivatives under the same license.
This is a small step, but an important one. The very fact that our president understands that 1) the existing copyright system and…
jwilbanks | October 29, 2008Subject says it all...the editors of SEED have endorsed Obama for President.
jwilbanks | October 23, 2008I'm at a workshop on eChemistry today, and we were asked to prepare position statements. I'm not going to blog the conference - it's a private thing - but figured I would post my position statement here.
We were asked to answer some questions. I chose to answer this one: "do you assess the potential of new web-based communication models in Chemistry, i.e. their benefits or liabilities, their transformational power, and their chance of success?"
Full text is after the jump.
A good place to start is the transformation of scholarly communication from "using the internet" to "existing in…
jwilbanks | October 14, 2008So today is Open Access Day.
(If you don't know what Open Access is, get thee to Peter Suber's blog for background).
I've spent a lot of the past week in and around OA meetings. I went to the Bethesda 2 meeting on Friday at Howard Hughes Medical Institute, where a lot of the people who started the movement were gathered to talk about the next five years. I'm sitting in a meeting of scientists in NYC right now trying to figure out how principles of OA, expanded to include the idea of open for data, databases, biological materials, and more, can transform the way rare diseases get explored and…
jwilbanks | October 8, 2008On the Googles, Common Knowledge gets more than 25,000,000 hits. It's a market research company, a scholarship foundation, a non profit fundraising firm, and in its inverse as Uncommon Knowledge part of a conservative group site, and an interview series at the Hoover Institution.
We can take the Wikipedia entry:Common knowledge is what "everybody knows", usually with reference to the community in which the term is used.
or we can take an anti-plagiarism guide to heart:
The two criteria that are most commonly used in deciding whether or not something is common knowledge relate to quantity…