Science Commons, Open Access … and affiliate marketing!!! : business|bytes|genes|molecules

 Science Commons, Open Access … and affiliate marketing!!! : business|bytes|genes|molecules

Science Commons, Open Access … and affiliate marketing!!!

February 29, 2008

In association with SPARC and ARL, the good folk at Science Commons have released (under a CC-BY-NC license) a whitepaper to help scientists comply with the NIH mandate to archive their work on PubMed Central. The white paper is a good read for any scientist doing any publishing, especially the section on compliance options (Section IV).

In related news, Richard Poynder interviews John Wilbanks of Science Commons (the interview is made available as a PDF file under a CC license). In the blog post, Richard talks about John’s vision for the internet and open science

In addition, Wilbanks believes the Internet should be viewed as a platform for facilitating the free circulation and sharing of the physical tools of science — cell lines, antibodies, plasmids etc. In a sense, he wants to see these tools embedded into research papers — so if a reader of an Open Access paper wants more detailed information on, say, a cell line, they should be able to click on a link and pull up information from a remote database. Should the researcher then want to obtain that cell line from a biobank, they should be able to order it in the same way as they might order an item on Amazon or eBay, utilising a 1-click system available directly from the article.

I couldn’t agree more. That’s exactly the kind of thing I was imagining when I blogged about Assay Depot. It is also one way to monetize the open science web. I doubt John is saying that assays, equipment, etc accessed from an open science paper should be available for free. Given a semantic web of scientific information, or some form of semantic markup, which allows people to perform the kinds of actions described by John, one could think about publishers setting up affiliate relationships with vendors, perhaps coming up with one way of funding open access journals. Of course, everything will have to be on the up and up (in other words, full transparency and no special treatment for papers with affiliate vendor equipment used).

Science Commons, Open Access … and affiliate marketing!!! : business|bytes|genes|molecules