jwilbanks

User Image

Posts by this author

May 28, 2009
So, I was supposed to go up to Montreal and Ottawa the past couple of days, but a series of miserable luck in terms of planes made it unworkable (it's complicated). Instead, I tried to record a presentation and get it onto the web so we could play it for them, and then take questions by skype. That…
May 27, 2009
As noted on the Creative Commons blog, the folks at Digg have converted to CC0 (replacing a multiyear use of a different public domain legal tool). This is very cool on lots of levels. But Daniel Burka of Digg said it best, so I'll make this a short post by simply quoting him... This is good for…
May 20, 2009
This was in the comments from my blog post on Pfizer's semi-open innovation. I don't normally highlight comments like this, but sometimes you have to give credit where credit is due. Why deal with Pfizer in the first place? Anything you might find they'll keep and you're SOL. We have a compound…
May 19, 2009
I ran into Virginia Acha last week at the NESTA event in London, but she didn't tell me about this! Derek Lowe at In the Pipeline notes that Pfizer is apparently allowing external companies to screen against their internal library. But I'm told that Pfizer has been meeting with several other (…
May 18, 2009
Open Knowledge Foundation have released a short guide to open data as part of the open data commons project. I have my philosophical disagreements with OKF on some issues - and they with me! - but they're the kind of disagreements that come from people on the same side of the fence. We all want…
May 18, 2009
(note - I have edited this post to add in Rufus Pollock, who I left out primarily because I wasn't sure he would endorse the ideas in this post - Peter notes that he was not only at the meeting but essential, so I'm happy to add these edits!) Peter Murray-Rust has posted some essential reading for…
May 16, 2009
Lately I've been spending a fair amount of time talking to the folks at NESTA in the UK. There's a lot of interest in how the kinds of legal and technical infrastructures we're building at Creative Commons might work at scale in the UK, and yesterday NESTA hosted me and James Boyle (founder of…
May 12, 2009
I was invited to join a meeting last week in New York to kick off something called the "Concept Web Alliance." It's an emerging non profit hoping to stimulate the emergence of lots and lots of marked-up content from the life sciences and it's claiming the mantle of open access. The potential value…
May 1, 2009
Quick hit at the end of the week. I've got a couple of posts I'm trying to finish up and post next week. But it's worth noting that the new H1N1 is sequenced and available under the same open access terms as the rest of the NCBI data and contents. All that misery and expense and illness, from this…
April 22, 2009
The Tropical Disease Initiative has released a "kernel" for open source drug discovery. It's been published in both Nature Biotechnology (ugh, subscription required) and in PLoS Neglected and Tropical Diseases (yay, open access fulltext under CC-BY). I am not steeped enough in the reality of drug…
April 9, 2009
Michael Nielsen gets it right, again. This is what I'm on about when I talk about ontologies and object-orientation of knowledge. In science, the code is the knowledge. Unlike computer programming, the code is locked up PDF and XML formats, and behind firewalls and copyrights (at least in code you…
April 7, 2009
After Science Commons hit the reddit heights earlier this year, I started talking to Alexis Ohanion about how we could start to work together. We are still scheming. But in the interim, he's launched a cool and inventive way to raise a little cash for Science Commons. In the goal of creating the…
April 6, 2009
I don't like getting into blog back and forths, but this post from the Information Research folks really deserves a reply of its own. I believe this is an honest piece of confusion, and it's likely the result of FUD from the traditional publishing community. I invite the Information Research folks…
April 1, 2009
Big FriendFeed chatter on the interwebs yesterday about JoVE "moving" to a closed access model. This is being covered extensively on the FF conversation so I won't dredge through the points there - if you want to see the arguing and JoVE responses, head over there. What's interesting for me is the…
April 1, 2009
No, this is not an April Fool's post. I found the argument about mexican lemons at Derek Lowe's In the Pipeline (if you've not got it on your RSS aggregator, get thee behind me) and thought it was a better way to celebrate the day of fools than by doing something fake like "I'm going to work at…
March 26, 2009
I gave a talk at eTech two weeks ago. It was a busy time - I was in the middle of my wedding, which was in Brazil, and I actually had to leave Brazil and fly to San Jose to give the talk, have a couple of meetings, and fly right back so that I could rejoin the wedding festivities. We were…
March 25, 2009
I am just back from my wedding and have a lot of catching up to do - notably I will respond to the eTech announcement of the Science Commons collaboration with Microsoft, and the small furor that my comment "there is no crowd" in science has caused. But first things first. I'm a day late posting…
February 27, 2009
Big news today at the CHI Medicine Tri-Conference. Merck has pledged to donate a remarkable resource to the commons - a vast database of highly consistent data about the biology of disease, as well as software tools and other resources to use it. The resources come out of work done at the Rosetta…
February 23, 2009
Sorry for the long delay between posts. I was robbed at the beginning of the month, losing my laptop, passport, other pieces of digital technology and identification, house keys, work keys, pens, papers, business cards and so forth. I'm just now catching up with all the real-life work that piled up…
January 27, 2009
Science Commons got picked up on reddit this week. It was surreal - we hit the top of the charts for about 24 hours, got way more web traffic than usual, and the SC/Dylan video got almost 4000 views. Wacky. And now our logo's embedded on the reddit logo on the home page. This is neat. We've spent…
January 26, 2009
In the first post, I talked about how factual data aren't creative works, and how compiling them into collections doesn't make them creative - at least in the US. This aspect of data rips away the core "incentive" provided by copyright law to creators: the right to sue people who make copies. It…
January 24, 2009
I got drawn into a debate about copyrights and factual data this week that felt like it merited its own blog post. It was kind of surreal new media debating - I was going back and forth with a smart guy from the UC Berkeley school of information on a friend's Facebook wall for most of a day on the…
January 15, 2009
Gerry Bayne of Educause interviewed me in December as part of the Coalition for Networked Information annual meeting. It's available in excerpts as part of the Educause Now monthly podcast and in full as a standalone cast. It's always a little hard to explain this stuff, but Gerry's done a good job…
January 5, 2009
I've been working on some text for a series of papers lately. I'm writing the core of a book proposal and working through the ideas around the knowledge web and the knowledge economy, and thought I'd post some interim thoughts here. Knowledge is a funny thing. Philosophers have spent eons debating…
December 30, 2008
Added to the Japanese version I blogged about recently, the SC video with Jesse Dylan has been subtitled into Spanish. Found via userbarna.net.
December 17, 2008
Keita Bando Mr. Komada has translated the SC video done by Jesse Dylan into Japanese. Keita told me about this and has used the service dotsub to add the subtitles to the video directly. See what happens when you empower users? (of course, if he's given us the slip like that Max Planck journal who…
December 15, 2008
Spent the morning at the American Geophysical Union annual meeting. It is a massive affair, right across the street from another big one (American Society of Cell Biology, which I've also spoken at in years past...). The area around Moscone is filled with dazed science geeks wearing nametags; I…
December 10, 2008
From the Independent: A respected research institute wanted Chinese classical texts to adorn its journal, something beautiful and elegant, to illustrate a special report on China. Instead, it got a racy flyer extolling the lusty details of stripping housewives in a brothel. Let me be the first to…
December 9, 2008
I gave a project briefing yesterday at the CNI fall meeting. I talked about our experience in building the Neurocommons project and the release of our RDF distribution for data integration in molecular biology. The meeting was PACKED. 400+ people. I was sad that my briefing was up against the OAI-…
December 8, 2008
One of the hardest parts of the day job is trying to explain why the commons works for science to people. I find that I have to start by explaining what science actually is, how science works, and how that doesn't take advantage of the possibility of the internet, which means I have to explain the…