Michael Nielsen, Information Awakening, Nature Physics, April 2009. Accessible only to subscribers, at least at least so far. (Thanks to Garrett Eastman.)
...Stepping back, what tools like blogs, open notebooks and their descendants make possible is access to new sources of information, and to new conversation. The net result is a restructuring of expert attention. This is important because expert attention is the ultimate scarce resource in scientific research, and the more efficiently it can be allocated, the faster science can progress.
How many times have you been obstructed in your research, for example, by the need to prove or disprove a small result that is a little outside your core expertise, and so would take you days or weeks, but which you know, with certainty, the right person could resolve in minutes, if only you knew who that person was, and could easily get their attention? This may sound like a fantasy, but this is exactly what happens in open-source software projects: their discussion forums often have a constant flow of messages posing what seem like tough problems, but quite commonly someone with a great comparative advantage quickly posts a clever way to solve the problem....
Galileo could not imagine a world in which it made sense for him to freely share a discovery like the rings of Saturn, rather than hoarding it for himself. Certainly, he couldn’t share the discovery in a journal article — the journal system was not invented until more than 20 years after Galileo died. Even then, journals took decades to establish themselves as a legitimate means of sharing scientific discoveries, and many early scientists looked upon journals with some suspicion.
The parallel to the suspicion many scientists have of online media today is striking....
When historians look back at the early part of the twenty-first century, they will also see several major changes. Many believe that one of those changes will be related to the sustainability of how humans live on this planet. But I think there are at least two other major historical changes. The first is the fact that this is the time in history when the world’s information is being transformed from an inert, passive, widely separated state, and put into a single, unified, active system that can make connections and bring that information alive. The world’s information is waking up. The second of those changes, closely related to the first, is that we are going to change the way scientists work — we are going to change the way scientists share information and how expert attention is allocated, developing new methods for connecting people, for organizing people, for leveraging people’s skills. They will be redirected, organized and amplified. The result will speed up the rate at which discoveries are made, not in one small corner of science, but across all of science.
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.
