[BOAI] Introducing Sci-Mate

[Peter Suber]

[Forwarding from Christopher Dyer.  --Peter Suber.]


Scientists should benefit when their knowledge is openly applied and 
developed by other members of the research and development industry. 
However, in practice researchers generally fail to realise these benefits, 
and so focus their efforts on publishing information in exclusive journals 
and patenting otherwise valuable technology. The Sci-Mate is an entirely 
new approach that uses Web 2.0 software to ensure that researchers benefit 
from the broader application and ongoing development of their ideas.

Because publication is so important to researchers, the Sci-Mate contains 
software that makes it relatively easy for scientists to collaboratively 
assemble high impact publications. Open access wiki software allows 
individual researchers to place highly specialised knowledge into a 
pre-existing context in such a way so as to increase the value of both 
their contribution and the value of the pre-existing information. With 
academics in mind, the "Wiki-Mate" records authorship, assigns copyright, 
defines licenses, manages editing, and includes custom software for an 
interactive peer-review process. This pre-publishing environment will be 
further streamlined to include one-click submission of peer-reviewed 
articles for open access or 'traditional' publication when an appropriate 
publishing partner/solution is identified. The benefits for the researcher 
are to increase the number and impact of their publications, while 
decreasing the amount of time and effort otherwise required to prepare low 
impact articles on isolated results. Meanwhile, such knowledge is made 
instantly available in a format that is more accessible to the broader 
community.

A separate tool, based on similar principles, allows researchers to 
exchange any item of interest to researchers through software a bit like 
eBay (but without auctions and a necessary commercial focus). Unlike in the 
materials and methods section of most results focused publications, the 
full potential of the underlying technology can be described along with the 
conditions under which supply will be considered. This provides open access 
to many valuable research tools, such as antibodies, plasmids, hardware, 
assay services, etc, that would otherwise be ignored by other developers 
desperately seeking such solutions. Once listed on the site, the software 
then makes it very easy (compared to 1-to-1 emails) for owners to answer 
questions, evaluate requests and safely distribute material towards 
productive collaborations. To protect IP following exchange, the software 
provides extensive records, reports and data-flows to researchers, 
administrative staff and other controlling interests without any additional 
work for the researcher. This dramatically simplifies the distribution of 
even commercial items to other researchers, and technology transfer to 
industry. The same software can be used to list jobs, courses, grants, 
seminars, conferences and other matters of interest to the research 
community, which can be easily sorted and searched by interested users.

In addition to these major tools, co-operation is further facilitated by a 
discussion forum and networking tools, and space is provided for software 
developers to embed additional services of value to the research community.

The Sci-Mate is a community project that is intended to be owned, 
controlled and administrated by its members according to the social and 
democratic principles of Web 2.0.

Dr Christopher Dyer
Peterstaler Strasse 200,
69118 Heidelberg, Germany
Ph: +49 6221 139569
Mob: +49 173 8969 382
Email: Dyer at sci-mate.org
URL: http://www.sci-mate.org/wiki/index.php/About_Sci-Mate
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/pipermail/boai-forum/attachments/20090430/58e70c37/attachment.html