OpenWetWare:Seminar Series

Seminar Series on Open Science

Overview

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. This seminar series is made possible by the MIT iCampus Outreach Initiative.

Next Seminar

John Wilbanks, Executive Director of Science Commons

1pm, Friday March 24, 2006
MIT Stata Center, 32-155

Talk Overview

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

Adapted from the Science Commons biography

John Wilbanks is currently the Executive Director of Science Commons. Science Commons is an exploratory project to apply the philosophies and activities of Creative Commons in the realm of science. Their goal is to encourage stake-holders to create areas of free access and inquiry using standardized licenses and other means; a 'Science Commons' built out of voluntary private agreements.

John came to Creative Commons from a Fellowship at the World Wide Web Consortium in Semantic Web for Life Sciences. Previously, he founded and led to acquisition Incellico, a bioinformatics company that built semantic graph networks for use in pharmaceutical research & development. Before founding Incellico, John was the first Assistant Director at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. He was previously a legislative aide to U.S. Representative Fortney (Pete) Stark and a grassroots coordinator and fundraiser for the American Physical Therapy Association. John holds a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy from Tulane University and studied modern letters at the Universite de Paris IV (La Sorbonne). He serves on the Advisory Board of the U.S. National Library of Medicine's PubMed Central and the International Advisory Board of the Prix Ars Electronica's Digital Communities awards.