Page:The digital public domain.pdf/160



Science Commons, a project of Creative Commons (CC), works to encourage the sharing of scientific and academic knowledge. This chapter will look at the technology and infrastructure designed and used at Science Commons to better share knowledge, an approach contextualised here as “building the research Web”, in the hope of utilising the power of current Internet technologies to accelerate scientific research. There are three main tenets to consider: open access to the content; access to the physical research materials; and an open source knowledge management system.

This approach requires redesigning information that is already digital into a format that works better for research. This process needs structure, standardised agreements, access to the content and data, metadata that dictates under what terms information is available, common naming systems, and links to repositories, to name just a few. Only then can one start to bring the efficiencies commonly associated with the Internet and a network approach to the world of scientific research.


 * 1. The problem

Printing, delivery and research are rapidly moving into the digital domain. Even with this shift in processes, however, scientific research still largely deals with “paper metaphor”—the idea that knowledge is transmitted by