Karen Lowry Miller, Innovation Sails Free: The open-source idea is moving beyond guerrilla software, October 18, 2004. Excerpt: "[T]he basic idea of open-source design has been practiced for centuries --for example, by farmers who have crossbred crops, says Eric von Hippel, MIT's head of innovation and entrepreneurship. In the 19th century, once the patent for the steam engine expired, other inventors quickly made, and shared, long-awaited improvements. The radical success of Linux is making such freely revealed innovation (the term 'open source' really applies only to software) a hot idea again. After decades in which patents closed off the innovation process, open source has caught the attention of businesses because "it so violated accepted wisdom and [has] so clearly worked," says Yochai Benkler, a Yale scholar writing a book on the economics of peer production....Freely shared innovation is already seeping into pharmaceuticals, a field where most profits are gained from expensive patented drugs. The BioBricks project at MIT, for example, is trying to establish standardized tools and processes for basic DNA work....An open system also makes sense when the payback is too small to entice Big Pharma, as in the case of tropical diseases like malaria....The BIOS Initiative, recently launched by Cambia, an Australian nonprofit, aims to make publicly available an alternative technology to the patented method of inserting a gene into a plant. (People are free to patent any resulting discoveries.) A Web site called BioForge.net, modeled after SourceForge.net in software, will be a clearinghouse for open biology projects."
Posted by
Peter Suber at 10/12/2004 08:19:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
