The nightly news are filled with stories about the bird flu and the prospect of a pandemic that will kill millions of people. But it has also brought one issue back to the table, the access to medicines debate. There are reports that there is only one antiviral drug that Read more
An interesting piece of news via Axel Horn’s blog. Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) is starting a patent project for Open Source. It will house a database containing information about patents and patent pledges for the benefit of the OSS community. According to the release from OSDL, the project will Read more
The morning session started with a presentation by John Wilbanks about Science Commons. To me, this is one of the most important parts of the entire weekend, but I am biased because I am an advocate of open access. The possible application of FLOSS ideals into the scientific domain has Read more
This is part of the Science Commons project that encourages the adoption of open access principles in legal publishing. It seems like legal academics should be at the forefront of the open access debate by practicing those principles and negotiating harder with publishers to retain copyright and be able to Read more
The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) now has more than 1500 peer-reviewed open access journals. This is an impressive number, which is a great witness as to the vibrancy and power of the open access ideals. The main success of OA is that it empowers authors, who will usually Read more
Robert Terry, the Senior Policy Adviser of the Wellcome Trust, has written a paper in PLoS stating that the Trust will require the publication of all work that is funded by them through open access journals. This is a great boost for the open access movement, because it means that Read more
The main Scottish universities have signed the Scottish Declaration on Open Access, organised by OATS (Open Access Team for Scotland; what a great acronym). Timothy O’Shea, the Principal at the University of Edinburgh, said that “The University of Edinburgh wants to ensure that its research is as visible as possible Read more
Open biotechnology continues to gather momentum in the press. This is a new article in Wired, very similar to many other articles that have been showing up since The Economist produced an article where the phenomenon was explained. The article doesn’t really say anything new, but it is nice to Read more
This is an interesting article in the excellent WorldChanging blog. The article looks at the possibility of using open source models in drugs and biotechnology. Although the article cites many of the possible uses for the technology, it fails to mention that the reason why this is still in “planning Read more
This is an interesting exchange of ideas about open access journals between Matthew Cockerill, the editor of BioMed Central, and John Enderby, vice-president of the Royal Society. The centre of the debate is about the fact that publicly funded research is eventually made proprietary because the copyright is assigned to Read more