Open Science Summit

#oss2011

Jenny Molloy and I are representing the Open Knowledge Foundation at Open Science Summit in the Computer History Museum, Mountain View, Silicon valley(haven’t had time to look at ANY of the museum!). It’s a fantastic meeting, run by Joseph Jackson with huge dynamism and belief. Open Science is a forum bringing together a wide range of those interested in doing things Openly. See http://opensciencesummit.com/ for the programme.

But last night there was a party in Biocurious (the open science company that Joseph started) in a warehouse in Sunnyvale. Great atmosphere. Core Californian – young, enthusiastic people – each with their startup. Total faith in their success. (They contrast this with the east coast where everyone is cautious).

Victoria Stodden kicked off with Reproducible Research – it’s clear that a lot of people are committed to the importance of this – funders, (some) editors, researchers.

Then a session on Patents. Most interestingly a project involving people playing a game with real money and several different models of patents (conventional, conventional+”pantentleft”, and completely open). The completely open approach (i.e. no patents) brought in the most money and was at least twice as efficient in time and cost.

Awesome presentation from Beijing Genomics Institute. Non-profit, with as much output as the whole of the US (I think I got this right).

Several things I already knew about, but no less interesting for that – Mendeley (which has fully opened its content – I need the URL for that). Mathoverflow. Digital Ocean I didn’t know.

Jai Ranganathan promoting #crowdfunding. Great idea. (They raised 60K USD for a statue of Robocop – I thing average of 20 USD per donation). So they’ve moved to #scifund which is asking for science projects which can be exposed to the world for funding. You’ve clearly got to get your idea across rapidly – but, hey, that’s what it’s about. A great way of getting science into the community and getting the community driving science.

Alex Hodgson who I met in the Biocurious party runs a recommender company for antibodies. Many antibodies are crap (there’s a sticker saying – “Say no to crap antibodies”). So it’s like hotel reviews (“rude staff and bedbugs” translates to “complete crap” or “wasn’t what was on the label”). IN this way we get a system of trust created for different suppliers. Would that it happened for chemicals! Alex’s company has been invested by Digital Science.

There’s a great buzz. No doubt that Open Science Summit is here to stay (several people elsewhere indicated to me that they would have loved to come or would be coming next year).

The next post will describe what Jenny and I presented.