Science Commons
Peter Murray-Rust posts on the SPARC-OpenData mailing list about a Commons for Science Conference (Oct. 3/4 in DC). The meeting is invitation-only but the papers are online (see here) and there should be public reports. The meeting underlines the importance of Open Data. There's a brief abstract below.
"The sciences depend on access to and use of factual data. Powered by
developments in electronic storage and computational capability,
scientific inquiry today is becoming more data-intensive in almost
every discipline. Whether the field is meteorology, genomics,
medicine, ecology, or high-energy physics, modern research depends on
the availability of multiple databases, drawn from multiple public
and private sources; and the ability of those diverse databases to be
searched, recombined, and processed."