Thanks to Corie Lok for the invitation to blog here.

I’m behind in blogging at my regular job location, so I’ll probably be doing a fair amount of reposting of material from that blog to this one. And I’ll make some Boston specific posts here as well.

First off, I’ll introduce myself. I run the Science Commons project at Creative Commons. I’ve got a background as a software entrepeneur and in technology policy, with a focus on the intersection of intellectual property rights and S&T policy. I’m happy to be blogging here.

Second, I’d like to thank the folks at Nature for taking a very restrictive original copyright policy off the site, and making it much more amenable to open licensing regimes like Creative Commons. But I will be agitating on these pages for open licensing until it arrives.

It doesn’t make a lot of sense to run a blogging site or a community site with restrictive licensing. If you look at the Web 2.0 sites that have really taken off, they don’t have massively restrictive terms of use. Wikipedia and YouTube come to mind. And I think it’s even more important in the sciences to let that reuse be as frictionless as possible.

It’s an interesting experiment to see just how far a science blogger is willing to go in terms of talking about science. Maybe for now it’s just complaining about reagent quality or a vendor. Maybe next year it’s describing a quandary or a hypothesis. Maybe trackbacks and pings will establish enough priority to start affecting authorship, to start affecting fear of scoops.

More likely not in the short term though. If we knew that was going to happen we’d know what kind of licenses would work here. But this is a dream. And placing early limits on dreams has a nasty habit of constraining creativity when it’s most needed.

I’ll try to blog weekly and start describing the Science Commons project space…

Thanks again to the editors for letting a contrarian into the compound.