The Internet, according to John Wilbanks, has democratized creative culture. Science lags far behind. "The vast majority of science is actually a secret," Wilbanks says. "It's hidden in labs until it gets published, or it's thrown in the autoclave if it's not thought to be worth publishing, or it sits in a fridge because no one knows how to make it available. The fragments never come back together because too many different people have to give permission, and no one can put all the pieces together to ask interesting questions." Wilbanks heads the four-year-old nonprofit Science Commons, an offshoot of Creative Commons. Like its parent, Science Commons is dedicated to creating an open web culture in which users — in this case scientists — can easily share their work. < Back | Continue >

Under the system Wilbanks hopes to create, for example, a scientist reading a paper online in which a novel mouse strain or stem cell line appears could simply click a button to order a supply of these materials. Wilbanks thinks such an arrangement would reduce duplicated research and wasted resources, but he also says that if Science Commons works, there's no predicting the ways in which it revolutionizes science. For this new approach to research publication to work, though, Wilbanks argues that we must ask a largely unposed question: Who has rights to science? Wilbanks isn't suggesting that we throw "everything into the public domain." But for science to truly work, the law must recognize what Wilbanks calls "fundamental rights: the right to know and to build new knowledge." < Back | Continue >

Whoever owns a particular piece of knowledge is not beside the point, but everyone should be able to exercise an "explicit right to do research and experiment without having to hire a lawyer." If we can find the willpower, as a society, for that kind of reform — well, just watch for the fireworks. < Back | Continue >

More: sciencecommons.org