March 8, 2009

Open Source Science

Science is for the good of society, the scientists must work together for the progress and prosperity of the world, but unfortunately the competition for intellectual property protection and for other reasons that is not happening in the real world. Sharing the ideas and Opening Scientific problems to a community of Experts will only help the problem or experiment to be solved or improved in one way or other.

I recently had a talk about this situation with one of my friend (1 degree of separation), he is working as a Biotechnology Scientist. So I told my opinion about the situation and He replied that the idea seems good, but he's not much sure if it will work or not. He also added that it will help students a lot.When I came back home, I Googled to know if there is any Open Source technologies available for that. To my surprise I stumbled on a site - OpenSourceScience.net

Open Source Science

Open Source model can help increased participation, rapid and innovative results. And the best thing is that unlike the normal research scenarios even laypeople can contribute to the design.

There are also certain amount of danger involved in making experiments Open Source,the possibility of Open Source Experiments used by unwanted people for dangerous purposes.

OpenSourceScience.net is a main Open Source Science initiative.The site says that it is a public space for managing controversial scientific experiments in a way that provides open access to all phases of the research. The site also provide a centralized resource for scientific collaboration, and help underwrite scientifically rigorous experiments that may contribute to an improved understanding of consciousness.

It seems like Open Source ideology is moving beyond it's normal scope. Let's all hope for a better world of free thinkers and Open Minded [:)] people.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Check out the "Science Commons" project:

http://sciencecommons.org/

Yes, the ideology behind free software is rapidly spreading to various other fields of human endeavour - and that is definitely a good thing!

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