In this video, which describes the Science Commons Scolar’s Copyright Project.

(the video is located here) http://sciencecommons.org/projects/publishing/

We quote.

“…modern technologies give us a way to go forward….this is the type of sentence you see in the life sciences. Its very complex and its very detailed.

What you will notice is that it does not have links….here is what happens if you add links to it.

What you see is it would be very powerful if we could add links. it would be good to link to other papers, or even better to link to the underlying databases. Unfortunately the copyright software makes it illegal to do this.

…are we going watch literature like TV, passively, human readable, or whether we are going to do something meaningful with the literature. Whether we are going to index it in some way, take it out of the paper containers and all computers to help us answer questions.” – Science Commons

Our Interpretation

This brings up an excellent point about how being able to manipulate data allows original thinking and analysis to take place, rather than simply having all the analysis distilled for us by “experts.” Having raw data in simple formats like CSV actually available is one of the areas that needs improvement as too much data is locked up, even public record data. Secondly, the analytical tools need to be there. Tools like DabbleDB, which allow for the importation of CSV files as well as the active receipt of RSS feeds are an important part of this capability. Excel is great for analysis, however, it is not integrated with the web, and is not sufficiently automated. (Furthermore, keeping tabular data in Excel format is a dead end, lets not confuse the data with the temporary technology.) We need automated data management systems (both personal, government and corporate) that can apply computer power not just in storing, organizing and formating, but also in automated receiving, querying and distributing raw data.