OpenWetWare:Seminar Series
Seminar Series on Open Science
Purpose
The OpenWetWare Seminar Series on Open Science is dedicated to bringing in speakers to talk about how open communities, practices, and technologies affect the culture and progress of science.
Next Seminar
John Wilbanks, Executive Director of Science Commons
1pm, Friday March 24, 2006
MIT Stata Center, 32-155
Talk Overiew
This talk will lay out the basic intersections of property rights - copyrights, patents, and contracts - with scientific research. The talk will also examine how approaches inspired by the Free Software movement might help create a "research commons" of freely usable tools, papers and data. Specific case studies in biological materials transfer and text mining of gene interaction networks will be presented for discussion.
Biography
From the Berkman Center biography
John Wilbanks is currently the Executive Director of Science Commons.
John was the Berkman Center's first Assistant Director (from the fall of 1998 to the summer of 2000) and led efforts in Internet-mediated learning and software development. He was also actively involved in the Berkman Center's work on ICANN (staffing the first eight ICANN meetings). While at the Berkman Center, John founded and served as President & Chief Executive Officer of Incellico, Inc., a semantic database company focused on the pharmaceutical industry (Incellico was acquired in the summer of 2003). John has also served as a Fellow at the World Wide Web Consortium on Semantic Web for Life Sciences.
Prior to joining the Berkman Center, John was a research analyst and network engineer for fonix, a company specializing in human-computer interaction products. From 1994-1997, he worked in politics in Washington, DC, serving on the legislative staff of U.S. Congressman Fortney Stark (CA-13) and as a grassroots coordinator and fundraiser for the American Physical Therapy Association. John attended Tulane University, receiving a bachelor's degree in philosophy in 1994, with a year's study at the Sorbonne in Paris.
