...According to the National Science Foundation, there are over 2.5 million research workers worldwide, with more than 1.2 million in the U.S. alone. If we look at all the articles, reports, emails and conversations that pass between them, we could count billions of knowledge transactions every year. This incredible diffusion of knowledge is the very fabric of science.
Given that the diffusion of knowledge is central to science, it behooves us to see if we can accelerate it. We note that diffusion takes time. Sometimes it takes a long time. Every diffusion process has a speed. Our thesis is that speeding up diffusion will accelerate the advancement of science....
Science will progress faster if this diffusion lag time is diminished. The concept of global discovery is to transform this sequential diffusion process into a parallel process. This means that new knowledge flows directly to distant communities. The goal is to reduce the lag time from years to months and from months to days....
In thinking about how to speed up diffusion across distant communities, we have looked at diffusion research, including computer modeling. We are particularly interested in recent work that applies models of disease dynamics to the spread of scientific ideas. The spread of new ideas in science is mathematically similar to the spread of disease, even though one produces positive results, the other negative. Our goal is to foster epidemics of new knowledge....
You might ask "Why is the math of disease related to the math of knowledge diffusion?" It is because neither involves considerations of conservation of mass. This makes disease and knowledge diffusion unlike many other kinds of diffusion that obey laws of conservation of mass. Consider, for example, diffusion of pollution. If pollution diffuses from point A to point B, point A now has less of it. But if knowledge diffuses from person X to person Y, person X still has what he started with....
PS: Also see our past posts on OSTI's research on knowledge diffusion.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 3/07/2009 03:32:00 PM.
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.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
