Designing the Microbial Research Commons Proceedings of an International Symposium (2011) / Chapter Skim
Currently Skimming:
11. The Web-Enabled Research Commons: Applications, Goals, and Trends
11. The Web-Enabled Research Commons: Applications, Goals, and Trends
Pages 91-102
The Chapter Skim interface presents what we've algorithmically identified as the most significant single chunk of text within every page in the chapter.
Select key terms on the right to highlight them within pages of the chapter.
From page 91... ...
In the first part of my talk, I will take a specific example -- a bioinformatics project undertaken by Science Commons -- to provide some motivation and context for a set of goals that I want to propose for data sharing. Second, I will map those goals against three, broad categories of legal regimes that typically we see in data sharing.
|
From page 92... ...
The human genome research community is one example, which evolved from the very deliberate consensus formed by the Bermuda Principles. The second kind of regime is of community licenses, such as open source licenses, like GPL, and the Creative Commons licenses.
|
From page 93... ...
* Depends on restrictions, but not scalable; permutations too large Transaction costs and the administrative burden are significant barriers to data integration.
|
From page 94... ...
Edwards Deming in the phrase, "In God we trust, all others must bring data." The availability of data in the public domain is crucial for its operation of this norm. Public licenses, like open source licenses and Creative Commons licenses, come in a distant second.
|
From page 95... ...
In addition, even those of us who design these licenses do not yet understand how to adapt these types of licenses to the scientific enterprise, and so they can present hidden dangers. For example, the embedded attribution requirements discussed above, which is a feature of all open source licenses and Creative Commons licenses, may seem perfectly reasonable to a computer programmer or artist who only cares about a single work, but for a scientist who must integrate data across many sources, such legal rules quickly become burdensome, if not impossible to follow.
|
From page 96... ...
Without such a consensus, a fragmented landscape of norms and legal rules will make data integration and sharing difficult or impossible. Of all the possible rules, the public domain remains the best choice for most public sources of data.
|
From page 97... ...
A third path that might lead toward open access -- and which is the one that I want to emphasize -- is a parallel path in which these proprietary journals continue to exist but, at the same time, one promotes open-access manuscript repositories. 36 Presentation slides available at: http://sites.nationalacademies.org/xpedio/idcplg?
|
From page 98... ...
I have to be a bit of a wet blanket on the idea of using law reviews as a model. From personal experience of having published in both law reviews and scientific journals, I do not think the laws reviews offer a good model, for a simple reason.
|
From page 99... ...
The manuscript repository concept also tends to mitigate concerns with database protection statutes in Europe because even if the journal maintains its own database, it is not sole source anymore. Of course, one would hope that this could be integrated with material in data repositories.
|
From page 100... ...
Or perhaps in the long term it might turn out that the proprietary journals are not commercially viable. If so, then the scientific societies or the universities or the knowledge hubs could essentially replace them or take them over, inheriting their impact factors.
|
From page 101... ...
Finally, what about people who are not academics, such as scientists who are in industry? We should think carefully about what to do about industry scientists because of the free rider problem of people withdrawing data without contributing.
|
Key Terms
This material may be derived from roughly machine-read images, and so is provided only to facilitate research.
More
information on Chapter Skim is available.