Internet Evolution - Cloud Clan Editor's Blog - Clouds for Scientific Research Spark Debate

... “Growing momentum behind scientific collaboration and the use of cloud services for research has fostered a backlash by companies threatened by the trend while exposing fundamental obstacles to online collaboration. Let's start with the argument over Web access to information. As pointed out by Internet Evolution contributor George Taylor in his blog today, there's a movement under way to revise the age-old presentation of research results online. Traditionally, those results have appeared in papers gated by service providers demanding expensive subscriptions. As George notes, scientists and other interested parties are protesting that research results should be provided free, especially since the projects that yielded those results are often publicly funded... Hand-in-glove with the issue of open access to scientific results is the issue of collaborative, cloud-based scientific facilities. After all, if one wants to keep data under expensive lock and key, it follows that there will be resistance to services that open up the research to wider participation and even to crowdsourcing...”