Experiments in scientific sharing contd: Biotorrents

"Personally, I am not sure if Biotorrents is going to end up being used extensively. I hope so. I think it is a great idea of Morgan's. But more importantly, I believe it represents something we need more and more of in the "Open Science" movement. We need experimentation with all sorts of methods for improving sharing. The sharing of large electronic files, such as datasets of some kind (e.g., sequences, pictures, mass spec results, etc) are rapidly becoming a major complication in scientific research. If one publishes a paper on whatever, or even before one publishes a paper, sharing the data associated with the work is not always simple. Biotorrents could help in this in that sharing files via BitTorrent is very simple and easy...."