Channelling the Power of Open Source

This blog tends to concentrate on two broad aspects of open source: the issues that affect enterprise users, and the companies based around creating free software. But this misses out a crucial player, that of the “channel”, also known by the equally unhelpful name of “value-added resellers”, or VARs....

On Open Enterprise blog.

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Haapy Birthday PLoS

The Public Library of Science did not invent open access, but there's no doubt it took it to the next level:

On the 13th of October in 2003, with the first issue of PLoS Biology, the Public Library of Science realized its transformation from a grassroots organization of scientists to a publisher. Our fledgling website received over a million hits within its first hour, and major international newspapers and news outlets ran stories about the journal, about science communication in general, and about our founders—working scientists who had the temerity to take on the traditional publishing world and who pledged to lead a revolution in scholarly communication (see, for example, [1,2]). It was not only scientists and publishers who wanted to see what this upstart start-up was doing; we had somehow captured the imagination of all sections of society. Not all of the reactions were positive, of course, especially from those in the scientific publishing sector with a vested interest in maintaining the subscription-based system of journal publishing. But thanks in no small part to the efforts of the founders—Pat Brown, Mike Eisen, and Harold Varmus—and an editorial team that included a former editor of Cell and several from Nature, our call for scientists to join the open-access revolution [3,4] did not go unheeded. Five years on, the publishing landscape has changed radically.

But what about the future?

The next challenge—for PLoS Biology, for PLoS and for all open-access publishers—is to demonstrate the utility of open access in advancing science beyond what can be gained from just making the information publicly available to read. The biggest misconception about open access is that it's only about putting online what was in print and removing any toll for access. It's not: it's about having the freedom to reuse that material without restriction [11]. Open-access publishing is therefore a crucial catalyst for a genuine shift in the way we use and mine the literature and integrate it with databases and other means of scientific communication. We are only just beginning to see the start of these: in video-based initiatives such as SciVee (Table 1); in knowledge discovery platforms such as Knewco, OSCAR, and the NeuroCommons (Table 1); with the increasing use of blogging in discourse about scientific research (see, for example, http://researchblogging.org/); and in the emergence of wiki projects in community-based knowledge curation [13,14].

I can't wait. Here's to the next five years.

C,mm,n? C'mon...

I've written about one open source car, OSCar, before, and now here's another, with a rather stranger name: C,mm,n. The idea, of course, is intriguing, though the Flash-infested Web site - literally the most sickening I have ever seen in terms of all the whooshing and sloshing of images - is rather thin on info:

Soon to be found here: detailed information on everything that is c,mm,n. Background stories, links to in-depth articles, blueprints, design schematics and much more. All you'll need to participate in the c,mm,n community and help develop the first real open source car in the world.

It will be interesting to see how exactly all those blueprints and design schematics actually feed into the open design process: applying openness to this kind of project is a real challenge, and it's not clear yet how easily complex objects of this kind can, in fact, be designed in this way. (Via Techmeme.)