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An old tradition and a new technology have converged to make possible an unprecedented good. The old tradition is the willingness of scientists and scholars to publish the fruits of their research - coming from their brains - in scholarly journals without payment, for the sake of inquiry and knowledge. The problem with this approach is that the brains are not exposed, just the thoughts, and that the brains available have been those physically accessible, such as those at the local university. Thus, those desiring to gain new knowledge through the consumption of peer-reviewed brains have been…
As part of the series of posts reflecting on the move of Science Commons to Creative Commons HQ, I'm writing today on Open Data. I was inspired to start the series with open data by the remarkable contribution, by GSK, to the public domain of more than 13,000 compounds known to be active against malaria. They were the first large corporation to implement the CC0 tool for making data into open data. CC0 is the culmination of years of work at Creative Commons, and the story's going to require at least two posts to tell... Opening up data was a founding aspect of the Science Commons project at…
Creative Commons was fortunate enough to be involved in a fascinating workshop last week in New York on Open Hardware. Video is at the link, photos below. The background is that I met Ayah Bdeir at the Global Entrepreneurship Week festivities in Beirut, and we started talking about her LittleBits project (which is, crudely, like Legos for electrics assembly - even someone as spatially impaired as me could build a microphone or pressure sensor in minutes). Ayah introduced me to the whole open hardware (OH) world and asked a lot of very good, hard to answer questions about how to use CC in…