This is an awesome way for us to finish out Open Access week. I’m a bioinformatician and cancer neurobiologist at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital. Earlier this week, I had the pleasure of attending a talk on Open Science presented by John Wilbanks, Executive Director of Science Commons. Cincinnati Children’s Hospital posted a video of the talk here (that guy drinking coffee down in the lower right-hand corner of the screen at the beginning of the video is me). For those of you unwilling or unable to install Microsoft Silverlight, you can view a copy the video below, albeit at lower quality and without slides.

Some interesting quotes from the presentation:

• Companies that are in the business of protecting their business model don’t invest in the sorts of technologies that change the system. (ca. 11:58)
• Value is shifting from control over the copyrighted stuff to the services that they provide to the authors. (ca. 36:53)
• “Open” does not stop with the digital world, so when we think about the way the network has transformed our lives, eBay is a pretty good example of the way the network moves physical things around the physical world by lowering the transaction costs and increasing the transparency. (ca. 37:16)

Wilbanks closed by saying:

So that’s a lot of stuff, there’s the narratives, which carry copyrights, there’s the materials that carry contracts, there’s the data, which we think needs to be in the public domain, and there’s the technology that needs to put it all together, and the whole point of this is that the Digital Commons is essentially a way that we can bring the power of the distributed net that we see and take for granted really in culture and in commerce, and get some of that into science, because the web actually was started for scientific purposes, it was started to share and integrate data but the resistance in the system, the institutional resistance, the legal resistance, the funding resistance, the tenure resistance, the journal resistance held it back and the places where there wasn’t any of that resistance exploded and gave us Wikipedia and gave us Open Source Software, gave us Twitter, gave us Facebook, gave us everything we take for granted on the Web, and so now it’s easier to find shoes, pornography, hotel reviews, than it is to do science on the Web, and so the whole point of this is that by using a Digital Commons we can work within the existing framework to basically rewire the technology and the law and the society in a way that we get some of those benefits, and it takes not just the law but it takes the law, the technology, the content and the community to come together, and so one of the reasons why I spend so much time on the road giving talks like this is I’m trying to build the community because we can make the contracts and we can make the technology and we can liberate the content, but if the users don’t change at some level what they do and how they do it, that’s the ultimate resistance to change in the system, and this is really going back to one of the most famous sociologists of science Robert Merton who talked about science is a little different and this is why it ought to be easier if we can wire it right, which is that there’s almost no value to science until you tell someone about it and what we have to do is get the system set up so that you get rewarded for telling people all the little bits and making it provable and certifiable and rebuildable, because we didn’t get to the position we are because we wanted it to be a controlled system that failed to achieve the potential of a networked science culture, these are just the after effects of an analog world and we’ve got to get rid of that hangover and get back to some of this.

What can each of us do as individual researchers to get involved in Open Science?

• Publish in an open journal.
• Make a copy of your paper available in a closed journal through other means.
• Find an existing open science project inside your institution.
• If you are an alpha geek or programmer, work on the semantic web.
• If you maintain a database, make it available on the web.
• If you have a biobank or collection, publish a catalog on the web.

Science Commons is a groundbreaking initiative that aims to bring the openness and sharing that have made Creative Commons licenses a success in the arts and cultural fields to the world of science. The Open Science framework seeks to overcome many of the “transaction costs” of research and scientific communication (money, time, effort) that hamper learning and collaboration. Science Commons promotes policies and tools to help the scientific community open and allow the re-use of research tools and data, creating incentives for transparent sharing of findings. You can read more about Science Commons at http://sciencecommons.org.

John Wilbanks blogs at Common Knowledge. You can also follow him on Twitter @Wilbanks.

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