jwilbanks

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December 7, 2008
The good people at Autism Speaks have announced a major policy shift on open access. Basically they're saying if you take their money, you have to make the research open. I love this for all sorts of reasons. First, it's smart. Opening up research to more readers means you increase the chances of…
December 3, 2008
Copyrights and open access and curation are all important. But the real tragedy today is that a bacon costume was stolen, in my town of Boston to boot. If you see someone running around dressed like bacon, or more likely, see it in a second-hand costume shop, send email to the nice folks at Bacon…
December 1, 2008
If you have questions or comments you'd like to see the Digital Curation Centre tackle about Science Commons, here's your chance. Their next legal watch paper is on us. For those of you who are interested in what I have to say, I'm keynoting their conference tomorrow in Edinburgh. My topic is "how…
December 1, 2008
Deciding on the right license for an online community can be a touchy process. Sometimes the community is focused on the organizing principles learned from software. Copyleft has been powerful in growing free software, and is regularly insisted on by online communities that build data, or…
December 1, 2008
Hope all the Americans had a good holiday, and that the rest of the world finds peace in a troubled week. To my friends in India and Pakistan, to my colleagues at the Internet Governance Forum this week in Hyderabad...my thoughts are with you all. Two quick links of much importance in my world: 1.…
November 19, 2008
A lot of people have asked me lately about how I compose my presentations, so I figured I might as well address it here, then link back here in future discussions. I'll start with links to four recent talks on my slideshare account. They're all CC-BY licensed PDFs (I can't yet upload them as…
November 13, 2008
The nice folks at Seed named me a revolutionary mind this month. It's an honor to be in the company of the minds behind GISAID, Eigenfactor, Voice of Young Science, and CubeSat. Click through and check all of them out. It's surreal to be photographed by a real photographer and followed around by a…
November 13, 2008
As much as I loathe to quote Rumsfeld, there's something inside the concept of known unknowns versus unknown unknowns. This is at the root of much of the work that I do, and this post is meant to address the role of the unknowns in the life sciences generally, but pharmaceutical development…
November 7, 2008
Just so everyone knows, I will post this twice, once today, and once more during the campaign. But in times of economic downturn, keeping non-profit organizations going is hard. Keeping user-supported ones going is harder. We're committed to raising about 20% of our operating funds from our users,…
November 7, 2008
Just a quick hat tip to our new president, who understands that Creative Commons is a nice way to be a good citizen on the Web. He's shared his election night candid set on Flickr under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike license. That means any of you who want to make…
October 29, 2008
Subject says it all...the editors of SEED have endorsed Obama for President.
October 23, 2008
I'm at a workshop on eChemistry today, and we were asked to prepare position statements. I'm not going to blog the conference - it's a private thing - but figured I would post my position statement here. We were asked to answer some questions. I chose to answer this one: "do you assess the…
October 14, 2008
So today is Open Access Day. (If you don't know what Open Access is, get thee to Peter Suber's blog for background). I've spent a lot of the past week in and around OA meetings. I went to the Bethesda 2 meeting on Friday at Howard Hughes Medical Institute, where a lot of the people who started the…
October 8, 2008
On the Googles, Common Knowledge gets more than 25,000,000 hits. It's a market research company, a scholarship foundation, a non profit fundraising firm, and in its inverse as Uncommon Knowledge part of a conservative group site, and an interview series at the Hoover Institution. We can take the…