The Next Enlightenment: Sharing Science With the World | Mariette DiChristina

" ... Arpanet, created to foster science communication in the 1960s, set the foundation for today's Internet. The resulting networks today harness an awe-inspiring amount of human collaborative energy. Wikipedia itself, for instance, says that its 50 million registered users have written nearly 34 million freely available articles in 288 languages. MOOCs--massive open online courses--are bringing instruction to millions, whereas sites such as the recently launched UNESCO World Library of Science build community and engagement around free science learning resources. Citizen scientists now help the professionals conduct basic research by making observations or in other ways. More than one million volunteers, for instance, are working away on two dozen projects at The Zooniverse. Scientific American's own collaboration with The Zooniverse, Whale.FM, which lets you match up snippets of whale songs, in its first two months catalogued more than 100,000 such calls -- equal to a couple of years of work by lab researchers. Volunteers using the FoldIt protein-folding online game in three weeks solved a puzzle about an HIV enzyme[http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/foldit-gamers-solve-riddle/] that eluded researchers for years. Scholarly publishing of scientific research is changing as well. Starting in the 1990s, Open Access journals, made it possible for anyone to view published papers without a subscription fee. (Open-Access journals instead use processing fees from authors and their institutions.) The notion is so popular that some funders, recently the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation as well as the U.S. National Institutes of Health and others, are requiring Open Access as a condition of grants. Articles in some of the most prestigious and highly selective journals, however, remain behind subscription paywalls -- accessible only to members of the academic institutions and libraries that pay for them, or to those who can afford pricey single downloads. In the face of open research, journal publishers have come under fire for trying to limit access to paying customers. Meanwhile, because they need to share information to do their research jobs, scientists are often distributing those copyrighted articles among colleagues by email or file-sharing drop boxes anyway. Now the Nature Publishing Group (NPG, part of Macmillan Science & Education) -- publisher of the journal Nature as well as the magazine where I work, Scientific American -- is launching a grand experiment. NPG is first to enable free content sharing of subscription articles. Using a tool called ReadCube from sister company Digital Science [http://www.digital-science.com/], subscribers to nature.com will be able to share with colleagues full articles, along with personal annotations, from 49 owned journals ..."