Edge.org has asked eminent scientists, futurists, and writers to imagine that they were the President's science advisor and identify the most pressing scientific issues facing the nation and world. An op-ed in today's New York Times summarizes nine of the responses. There, among proposals to map the genomes of all non-human life on Earth (Freeman Dyson), fund nanotechnology (K. Eric Drexler), and avert Earth-bound asteroids (Piet Hut), is the following from MIT's Seth Lloyd: "My advice is to keep science public. Secret knowledge, no matter how laboriously acquired, is less than science. Some knowledge, of course, must remain secret for the security of the nation. But unless there is a clear security risk, publish all else. Why? Science belongs to the people: they pay for it; they benefit from it. The benefits of scientific knowledge accrue far more rapidly when that knowledge lies open for all to see, to test and to try."
Posted by
Peter Suber at 1/04/2003 08:28:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
