David Weinberger has blogged some notes on a talk by Dan Burk at Harvard's Berkman Center on open-source science. Excerpt:
Dan Burk from U of Minnesota Law School is talking about open source science. [As always, I'm paraphrasing at best.]
He notes some strands of open sourciness. 1. Open Source Genomics saw a clash of the scientific and hacking cultures. 2. Open Source patenting wonders if what worked for sw could work for biotech licensing. 3. Cyberinfrastructure (= e-science), i.e., use of networks to do collaborative science, enables transborder collaboration.
Dan looks at scientific norms as proposed by Merton: Communalism, universalism, independence, organized skepticism and originality. Not that science always achieves this ideals, he says. But if you follow these norms, you get scientific reward, including the respect of one's peers. in the 1980s, Rebecca Isenberg, among others, pointed to the "intellectual property" system as providing another set of rewards: Money. But that can require secrecy and exclusion, which works against the reputational reward. Patents at least require disclosing what you've learned, as opposed to trade secrets. The Human Genome Project in the '90s started patenting snippets of DNA. They agreed to "Bermuda" rules, making info public within 24 hours....
Can bio-med sciences adopt [an open-source] licensing scheme? A couple have tried: the Haplotype Mapping project uses OS-style licenses. The BIOS project makes physical tools (enzymes) and requires you to contribute back to the system any improvements of the tools you make, although you can patent what you make with the tools. The Science Commons uses OS-style licenses for literature....
There are also cultural impediments, he says. "Science has a much more structured set of institutions than Open Source generally does." There are universities, funding agencies and labs who have interests in what gets developed. There are also systemic differences: Peer review, publication, scientific societies....
Q: (me) Assuming we're going to have both OS and proprietary science, how do the ambiguities get resolved? A: We've had both systems for a long time: Patents and reputational reward. Now they've intersected. Generally they accommodate each other. Biomed scientists are figuring out that if they want the reputational reward they have to do X, if they want the patent they have have to do Y. If you view OS as an extension of that (and remember, he says, that the hacker mentality comes out of universities, just as reputational science does), it seems to be working....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 10/11/2006 02:23:00 PM.
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.
