Discussion 1: Access to Research and Education

SJ Klein, One Laptop per Child

• First Presenter, SJ Klein, OLPC
  • Working toward free content for the laptop and beyond...

Steve Foerster, WikiEducator

John Wilbanks, Science Commons

• The visible arm of culture is the remix, and this is really good. However, there are unintended consequences of incompatible licensing--these produce negative network effects down the road.

• In science, IP is not an issue--this physical stuff needs to move around just like papers do – moving knowledge around as fast as possible is the real issue.

• we need to take the charge and demand that universities have open repositories, that professors and students share-we need to ask these questions to our faculty

• we are seeing a completely open access knowledge management system being built before our eyes in the life sciences

• when someone does get it right—technically, socially – we need to be able to have the correct tools set up to support it!

• wilkin – without a patent, there will be no drug
• put the knowledge & data together to share so we can make the research cheaper and get drugs out faster – patents don't get in the way of research

• patents may extract poisonous rents, but are often not the main concern--pharmaceutical companies need to jack up the price of the patents to make up for all the drugs that they've missed on – the real problem is in the data sharing for the testing

• rio framework for open science – on icommons website
• berlin declaration on open access
• Budapest declaration on open access

• ask questions!
• ask professors why their papers are not online