A massive project is harnessing the power of tens of thousands of personal computers around the world in a bid to winnow out potential drugs to more effectively fight the global scourge of AIDS.
A virtual supercomputer grid, created by IBM, will allow individuals and businesses to donate down-time on their personal computers via a secure website.
The idle PCs will be used to run millions of computations in the search for chemical compounds that could eventually provide more effective HIV therapies, the company was to announce Monday.
"This project was created about a year ago . . . essentially to create a virtual supercomputer devoted specifically to humanitarian purposes," said Stanley Litow, IBM vice-president for corporate community relations....Promising compounds would be published in open-access scientific journals so that other researchers could retrieve data for their own experiments.
(PS: Good plan. But note to the developers: you can submit promising results to OA journals, as planned, OR deposit them in OA repositories. One benefit of the latter option is that you can then publish them in nearly any journal, OA or not.)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 11/21/2005 10:23:00 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.
