This section should cover both scientific concepts about P2P (network theory and such), but also the use of P2P practices within the field of science.

Ported so far are three first columns of the Encyclopedia and the Resources section.

Introduction

1. Can Open Source Licences be used in Science?
2. The Value of Openness in Scientific Problem Solving. By Karim R. Lakhani et al.
3. A Primer on Open Access, Peer Review and the Scientific Publishing Business Steven Harnad.

Short Citations

On the relativity of the role of experts

We will always have experts in various fields, but to limit contributions to knowledge as a whole to experts only is to deprive all of humanity of its enormous potential for distributed intelligence.

- M. Guedon [1]

Long Citations

On the need for distributed intelligence to tackle global problems

"(have) we now hit a point where scientific problems are so complex that one person alone can’t solve them? It would certainly seem that way. The problems science is pursuing today—issues like global warming and genomic mapping—demand a distributed approach across disciplines. But currently, journal articles, data, research, materials and so on are stopped by contracts and copyrights at such a rate that it’s become nearly impossible to pull them together."

- John Wilbanks [2]

On the benefits of open sharing in science

"The most rapid advances in science come with open sharing of information, and collaboration. That is how the world's scientists accomplished the mapping of the human genome in a matter of years. If traditional publishing practices had been followed instead of open sharing, it seems likely that mapping the human genome would have taken decades, if not centuries."

- Heather Morrison [3]

"Just as the Enlightenment ushered in a new organizational model of knowledge creation, the same technological and demographic forces that are turning the Web into a massive collaborative work space are helping to transform the realm of science into an increasingly open and collaborative endeavor. Yes, the Web was, in fact, invented as a way for scientists to share information. But advances in storage, bandwidth, software, and computing power are pushing collaboration to the next level. Call it Science 2.0."

- Business Week [4]

Towards a science of relationships

"It is impossible to deny that science has made great progress by taking things apart. However, what is left out of this approach is the problem of understanding relationships between the parts.

Indeed, the importance of this understanding should be self-apparent. If all systems around us were made of the same elementary particles, and their relationships were irrelevant, then all systems would be identical. Obviously, this is not the case. Our quest to understand the parts becomes so detailed that we forget what we were trying to understand at the start. Moreover the strategy of looking at parts may blind us to the way properties of a system arise from the relationships between the components. This reflects itself in what we think about in general. More specifically, it affects how we approach problem solving when we try to solve problems in society. Indeed one of the main difficulties in solving problems is that we think the problem resides in the parts themselves, when, in actuality, it is to be found in the interactions between the parts. As a result, many crucial questions can only be addressed by thinking carefully about connections in a system as a whole."

- Yaneer Bar-Yam [5]

How open source biology and horizontal gene transfer will replace Darwinian speciation and evolution

"[We can speculate about] a golden age... when horizontal gene transfer was universal and separate species did not yet exist. Life was then a community of cells of various kinds, sharing their genetic information... Evolution could be rapid... But then, one evil day, a cell resembling a primitive bacterium happened to find itself one jump ahead of its neighbors in efficiency. That cell, anticipating Bill Gates by three billion years, separated itself from the community and refused to share... [But] now, as Homo sapiens domesticates the new biotechnology, we are reviving the ancient... practice of horizontal gene transfer, moving genes easily from microbes to plants and animals, blurring the boundaries between species. We are moving rapidly into the post-Darwinian era, when... the rules of Open Source sharing will be extended from the exchange of software to the exchange of genes. Then the evolution of life will once again be communal, as it was in the good old days before separate species and intellectual property were invented." (http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/06/30/1927205)

Source: New York Review of Books, The Future of Biotech. Freeman Dyson. URL = http://www.nybooks.com/articles/20370

Key Resources

Open Access for the Developing World

Articles

1. What is Free Science?. Christopher Kelty.
2. Promoting Public Good Uses of Scientific Data (J. H. Reichman & Paul Uhlir)

Blogs

The Synergy blog of Peter Corning.

Conferences

1. The Living Knowledge conferences focus on participatory science modes of research.
2. Open Access in Scholarly Publishing
3. Cyberinfrastructure for Collaboration and Innovation. Papers by First Monday.