OK if you swap my example from a software example to a piece of research I think the concern still exists. Pulling the central concept out of the mix does not feel like a step forward.
Richard J Roberts, Nobel Prize winner for Physiology or Medicine in 1993, said: "Open access to the published scientific literature is one of the most desirable goals of our current scientific enterprise. Since most science is supported by taxpayers it is unreasonable that they should not have immediate and free access to the results of that research. Furthermore, for the research community the literature is our lifeblood. By impeding access through subscriptions and then fragmenting the literature among many different publishers, with no central source, we have allowed the commercial sector to impede progress. It is high time that we rethought the model and made sure that everyone had equal and unimpeded access to the whole literature. How can we do cutting edge research if we don't know where the cutting edge is?" The petition is available at: http://www.ec-petition.eu/ Here are some links to sites where authors are aiming to release their research papers as a matter of public policy. Many universities have found the control of research by the publishers to be counter productive as a way to encourage futher innovation in a kind of work by students and peers of the author in partnership with the author. This is what the author groups are working on: http://ec.europa.eu/research/science-society/pdf/scientific-publication-study_en.pdf http://www.ifla.org/III/clm/p1/A2K-7.htm http://www.arl.org/sparc/ http://www.law.yale.edu/news/1758.htm http://www.cptech.org/a2k/ http://www.access2knowledge.org/cs/ http://www.ifla.org/III/clm/p1/A2K-7.htm http://cgkd.anu.edu.au/menus/PDFs/jamielove-2005-09-09-australia.ppt http://regnet.anu.edu.au/program/review/pdrahos.php http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/subject.html http://drn.okfn.org/taxonomy/term/17 Wesch: "For me, cultural anthropology is a continuous exercise in expanding my mind and my empathy, building primarily from one simple principle: everything is connected. This is true on many levels. First, everything including the environment, technology, economy, social structure, politics, religion, art and more are all interconnected. As I tried to illustrate in the video, this means that a change in one area (such as the way we communicate) can have a profound effect on everything else, including family, love, and our sense of being itself. Second, everything is connected throughout all time, and so as anthropologists we take a very broad view of human history, looking thousands or even millions of years into the past and into the future as well. And finally, all people on the planet are connected. This has always been true environmentally because we share the same planet. Today it is even more true with increasing economic and media globalization." http://battellemedia.com/archives/003386.php Karim Lakhani: Innovations happen at the intersection of disciplines. People have talked about that a lot and I think we're providing some systematic evidence now with this study. Another example is that a pharmaceutical company got unusual toxicology results for an ongoing drug study. The best toxicologists within the firm had a look at the results and couldn't understand them. Their external academic consultants, also toxicologists, also failed to interpret the results. Then they finally posted it onto InnoCentive. A protein crystallographer looked at the problem and basically gave an off-the-shelf solution. The pharmaceutical company had never viewed the problem as a crystallography problem; they thought it was a toxicology problem. Again, this opened up a whole new domain for the firm to pursue in terms of future studies as to how to think about the types of problems they face. We see this in many different places. The insight is that what you want to do is open up your problem to other people—not just to serendipity, but in some systematic way. http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/5544.html _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://freeculture.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss
