openinnovation openaccess creativecommons sciencecommons
jwilbanks | November 5, 2009I got a lot of feedback on my last post in which I argued that open source is the wrong metaphor fo science, because it ties us too closely to the artifact that is open source software. The core of my argument remains the same - science is not software, and we shouldn't treat it the way we treat software. But I got a few comments, here on the blog and in email, that are worth looking at.
Here's comment #1.
You cite openwetware and the biobricks registry, but if you look closer, openwetware is a wiki, not a website about open source wetware tech. To my knowledge, other than the people over at…
jwilbanks | July 31, 2009Following on to yesterday's post, where I wrote about the four functions that traditional publishers claim as their space (registration, certification, dissemination, preservation), I want to revisit an argument I made last week at the British Library.
In my slides, I argued that the web brings us at least three additional functions: integration, annotation, and federation. I wanted to get this argument out onto the web and get some feedback...
Let's start with integration. The article no longer sits on a piece of dead tree, inside a journal formatted by date and volume and page number. It…
jwilbanks | May 19, 2009I ran into Virginia Acha last week at the NESTA event in London, but she didn't tell me about this!
Derek Lowe at In the Pipeline notes that Pfizer is apparently allowing external companies to screen against their internal library.
But I'm told that Pfizer has been meeting with several other (mostly smaller) companies, offering their (entire?) compound library as a screening resource. As I understand it, you need to come to them with a reasonably formatted HTS assay, and there's a fee in the high hundreds of thousands to run the screen.
This isn't all the way towards open innovation. In a…
jwilbanks | May 16, 2009Lately I've been spending a fair amount of time talking to the folks at NESTA in the UK. There's a lot of interest in how the kinds of legal and technical infrastructures we're building at Creative Commons might work at scale in the UK, and yesterday NESTA hosted me and James Boyle (founder of Creative Commons, and a guiding force in our science work from the very beginning) at an event labeled Open Innovation and Intellectual Property, jointly hosted by the Wellcome Trust and Creative Commons.
It was an interesting day. It was one of the few times I've had the scope of topic to cover all the…