'Wikinomics' Sheds More Light on Open Source

And now for some interesting quotes from Wikinomics, How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything by Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams. Heady stuff, but the Disease Management Care Blog agrees that health services researchers will eventually discover they can reach a wider audience by bypassing the traditional peer-review journals. The trick is to harness the mass collaborative potential already evident in other business models. Once that tipping point is reached, one click of the mouse on an author's wiki/blog interpretation of an open source database will beat 5 prestigious publications interpreting a closed data base. As mentioned previously in this blog, the disease management industry could lead the way.

'...the new Web will forever change the way scientists publish, manage data and collaborate across institutional boundaries. The walls dividing institutions will crumble and open scientific networks will emerge in their place. All of the world's scientific data and research will at last be available to every single researcher - gratis - without prejudice or burden.'

'Unrealistic you say? No really when you consider that conventional scientific publishing is both slow and expensive.... Traditional journals aggregate academic papers by subject and deploy highly structured systems... Each paper is peer reviewed by two or more experts, and can go through numerous revisions before it is accepted... Frustrated authors can find their cutting edge discoveries less cutting edge after a lumbering review process has delayed final publications by up to a year.'

'Rapid iterative and open access publishing will engage a much greater proportion of the scientific community in the peer review process. Results will be vetted by hundreds of participants on the fly, not by a handful of anonymous referees, up to a year later.'