Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Friday, April 04, 2008

OA for pre-pre-prints as a spring for collaborative research

Noam Harel has launched a site called SCIEnCE, for Share Collaborative Ideas, ENact Cooperative Efforts.  (Thanks to Heather Piwowar.)  The idea is to share scientific ideas before they are turned into research projects or funded.  Think of it as OA for pre-pre-prints.  As he puts it:

Have you ever had a great idea along the lines of: 

  • An innovative approach to answering a scientific question?
  • An ingenious insight that you wonder if someone else out there has already come up with?

Do you hold onto that idea so that you can explore it on your own when you get the chance, maybe years down the road? Does this great idea become your lottery ticket to personal fame and fortune? Like lotteries in general, this is a pipe dream. Much worse, it deprives society of benefiting from your good idea right now.

SCIEnCE...is part of the growing movement dedicated to encouraging the public sharing of testable ideas. Not just ideas, but plans of action – ideas will be developed into specific, step-by-step proposals via Wiki-inspired community editing. A new system for attributing credit will be used to distribute funding for SCIEnCE projects. The projects outlined by these collaboratively written proposals will be tackled with a cooperative experimental approach....

Here's his prototype wiki to collect and organize the ideas, and here's one of his own ideas:  a Centralized Grant Proposal Repository.