for those of you who haven’t yet updated yer feed readers…a new post on scholarly communication

Well, I finally decided to make a jump. Today I started blogging at Science Blogs.

I really like the community here, and have stayed on longer than I thought I would in some ways. For the entirety of my time blogging here (much more intermittently than I had hoped) I have been needling NN folks about a better technical platform and Creative Commons licensing. And when I got a chance to blog at SB, given those two options, it was hard to say no.

In the irony department, my desire for a better technical platform bit me on the butt in my first post – I failed to build my movable type templates quickly and the first comment on my first post made fun of my tech chops. A little different crowd from those here, methinks.

I’m going to stick around as a member of NN and am going to get to a pub night in Boston soon…

Third in the series after Health Commons and Scholar’s Copyright videos – here’s 11 minutes of non stop fun on data integration and common names!

There’s not a lot of original stuff to say about a hurricane in Louisiana post Katrina. New Orleans is an old home place but anything I could write would be about me and not about the storm. So let’s just say good luck to my friends who are riding the storm out across the South. If any of you read this, stay dry.

Here’s what the evacuation on 59 looked like.

Back to science a little later in the week.

I’m making a series of videos for the Science Commons website, the first of which is online now. It’s covering the Scholars Copyright project. This is part of me trying to travel less and, yaknow, actually use this internets thing to communicate a little better.

I’ll be posting one on the MTA project, one on the Neurocommons project, and one on the “Three C’s” (Content, Community, Contracts – the three essential elements of a digital commons – contracts being a broad word to include norms, technological contracts, and the social contract amongst users). As they come online, I will pimp them here.

I’m giving a lot of talks this fall, and they all started clustering around the idea of the “future of knowledge.”

Jeez. What a big topic. But putting aside the hubris of me talking about this for a moment – which is asking a lot – it’s a fun and challenging thing to take on. It requires synthesizing a batch of themes I’ve been talking about for a few years now.

I’m starting with a series of talks in September, two next week in Havana, then one at the UC Berkeley Center on Open Innovation, and then a series in Australia and Japan carrying into October. Below is the abstract for the Berkeley one – which is likely to serve as the basis for most of the talks I give the rest of the year. Figured I’d post it and get the phrasing out there early. As ever, comments welcome in the comment space or via email.

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We are seeing the transformation of knowledge from something that is primarily conveyed in paper formats into something else: a computable graph, in which the knowledge is written in formats that computers can understand and interconnect, based on the same technologies that underlie the internet and web. Paper technology simply contains expressions of ideas, but the very technology of paper makes integration of ideas very difficult, if not impossible.

Graphs allow ideas to “snap” together into larger and larger networks, which can in turn allow computers to help us interrogate the knowledge more effectively. There are competing technologies to achieve this, but the idea of “the paper” as the core container for knowledge is dying, and technology will be the killer. This transformation is happening first, like the transformation of documents to the Web, in the sciences.

The move to a computable graph as a knowledge storage technology holds enormous promise for open innovation. It can make innovations easier to discover and evaluate, serve as a network for low-cost transactions, provide new bases for credit and impact, and in general provide a technical infrastructure for the purposive inflow and outflow of ideas necessary for OI.

But this is “uncommon knowledge” – we’ve never dealt with knowledge this way, and it shows. There is a significant amount of legal and technical infrastructure failure to be addressed. And there’s a lot of barn raising to be done.

Larry Lessig posts wonderful news

In his own words:
I am very proud to report today that the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (THE “IP” court in the US) has upheld a free (ok, they call them “open source”) copyright license, explicitly pointing to the work of Creative Commons and others.

Short version is that if you violate the terms of a CC license, the license goes away, and you’re a copyright infringer. This is what we’ve always argued, and it’s great to see the courts agree. Contracts like the CC suite are kind of like uncompiled code before they get into court. This decision means the code in fact compiles.

Back in the office today after two weeks, thousands of miles, and what feels like at least 50 national forests driven through.

I spent my vacation driving around the mountain west of the united states. If you’ve never been, it’s worth doing – maybe not twice, but definitely once. As you drive over the sierra nevada mountains from the west coast, you enter the Basin and Range country. Carol and I drove around in this area for nearly two weeks, except for a run up into the Snake River Plain and on into the Montana high plains.

Everywhere you go in the West, you drive across a national forest. 8.5% of the land in the United States is part of the National Forest system.

As I was driving through the Wasatch-Cache Forest at night, it struck me that the vision required to start the protection of lands in 1891 was the kind of vision we need now in intellectual property. If nearly 10% of this country’s physical property can be reserved as a commons – which is so much harder to provide dual-use, public and private – why not for IP?

In other words, we have battles over who gets to use national lands. Drilling in the ANWR is a good example here. But there is such less conflict between dual-use options in non-rivalrous property, we should absolutely be able to pull off a National Research Park system for ideas…

I’m going to be playing with this meme for a while. Comments and suggestions welcome, either here or in email.

i am going to be taking most of the first half of august on vacation, and expect email to keep me away from the blog til the end of the month. i will come back hopefully rested and ready for more – and i will get to see the birthplace of PCR…and in mandatory science dork content, Yellowstone was the first national park to enter into a benefits sharing agreement for bioprospecting.

My brief excursion into the open source software world this week has a phrase ringing around in my head.

It’s from Bryan Kirschner at Microsoft (he has the once-unthinkable title of “Director of Open Source at Microsoft”). While we were talking over dinner he came back repeatedly to the idea that if you’re not going to ship code, you should share the code.

This is an idea that could really benefit the science community. So much work gets left behind on the laboratory equivalent of the cutting room floor that the adoption of this piece of open source philosophy would be welcome.

But, as I get tired of saying, science is a lot more complicated. It takes some work to make the stuff on the cutting room floor useful for other people, whether it’s data, or lab protocols, or DNA vectors. Some of that work becomes part of the lab’s institutional memory and finds its way into other projects at other times. Ship it or share it is going to have a hard road to hoe before it becomes a widely accepted policy.

I would however love to see this become a piece of open notebook science. I’m not sure that the hot stuff is ever going to be in open notebooks, but it’s a good place to do quick and dirty micropublication of otherwise lost information.

The issue of how to cite and what citations mean in such an environment is an interesting one, however – you don’t get credit for musing about science, you get credit for proving stuff. We need to have more ways to measure the geneaology of ideas than simple systems based on antique systems of citation, too.