The Science Collaboration Framework (SCF) is a software toolkit to establish web-based virtual team organizations for researchers in biomedicine. It enables researchers to publish and discuss on-line content such as articles, news, and perspectives, and to provide shared semantic context for this content using established scientific vocabularies and automated text mining.

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Access to scholarly information in the disciplines of education and medicine occurred primarily through the simultaneous development of two bibliographic databases. The Education Resource Information Center (ERIC) originated as a resource designed to be comprehensive in its inclusion of peer-reviewed and unpublished literature for the entire education community. MEDLINE began as a resource of selective materials for physicians and researchers. Today, ERIC includes selected peer-reviewed literature directed primarily to researchers and practitioners, although others use the database, while MEDLINE is a vast information system serving all health professionals and consumers. This literature analysis of their policy history shows important differences in their evolution.

"Hi, welcome to my Blog. I’m Simon Coles, co-founder and CTO of Amphora Research Systems, and this is just a simple blog of stuff related to Electronic Lab Notebooks and anything else that comes to mind. I’ve been doing ELNs for over 13 years now, and have experience of a wide variety of ELN implementations, so I hope there will be something here for everyone."

So how do you deal with competitors, people who want you to fail, in an open, transparent, and collaborative system

# We should create an open central repository location at which authors can release software and documentation. # Software release should be an integral and funded part of projects. # Software release should become an integral part of the publication process. # The barriers to publication of methods and descriptive papers should be lower. # Programming, statistics and data analysis should be an integral part of the curriculum. # There should be more opportunities to fund grass-roots software projects of use to the wider community. # We should develop institutional support for science programs that attract and support talented scientists who generate software for public release.

Experimental processes in the life sciences are becoming increasingly complex. As a result, recording, archiving and sharing descriptions of these processes and of the results of experiments is becoming ever more challenging. However, validation of results, sharing of best practice and integrated analysis all require systematic description of experiments at carefully determined levels of detail. The present paper discusses issues associated with the management of experimental data in the life sciences, including: the different tasks that experimental data and metadata can support, the role of standards in informing data sharing and archiving, and the development of effective databases and tools, building on these standards.

Topics covered include: * What is Web 2.0? * Web 1.0 and scholarly communication * Web 2.0 and Open Access * Blogs * Social bookmarking * Social networking * Podcasts * Wikis * Data * Peer review * Reasons for lack of uptake to date

OPENNESS For all innovation efforts, there are quite important issues concerning openness, and the hazards of enclosures of science and the hoarding of knowledge. A number of academics writers, patent professionals and R&D experts have called attention to the potential risks that innovation inducement prizes might lead to less sharing of knowledge, as people position themselves to win prizes. But this risk should be seen in a broader context. It is also often pointed out that patents can discourage upstream research and downstream product development. Government grant programs that encourage the privatisation of publicly funded R&D (like the US Bayh-Dole Act) can also move things in the wrong direction. It turns out this whole important topic is complicated. One area to pay attention to are the “Bayh-Dole” issues relating to prizes. In many of the US government funded prizes, and in the early X-prize designs, all of the intellectual property rights go to the recipient of the prizes. In some non-medical cases in the US, the government is barred from asking for licenses to use the inventions that win the prizes — an even worse outcome than for patents developed under federal grants, which are subject to (rarely used [fn1]) royalty free government licenses, and march-in and access requirements. So one debate is about obtaining the right bundle of rights in patents or data from prize winners, and managing also the disclosures. After a series of workshops on medical innovation inducement prizes, proposals also emerged to include new “open source dividends,” which involve sharing of prize money to entities that openly share access to knowledge, materials and technology. The open source dividends were modeled in several of the 2008 Bolivia Barbados prize proposals, and have unfortunately been ignored by some of those who have commented on those proposals. There are also much more transformation proposals for funding open source medicine, including the proposals to introduce “competitive intermediaries” that have as t