How will an open-access system improve scientific research?
The question is, 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. The estimated utility half-life of a scientific paper is 15 years, but the copyright lasts until 70 years after the author’s death. It’s hard to get data sets shared, and the basic elements of the commercial Web (like eBay, Amazon and Google) function poorly, if at all, inside the sciences. The knowledge simply isn’t moving as easily as it should, and transactions are slow on a good day, non-existent on a bad one. Why the focus on neuroscience? It started for historical reasons-our initial funder was a Huntington’s disea
