Reinventing Discovery On The Way To The Sage Congress

I’m in San Francisco for the Sage Commons Congress, and am excited to be able to contribute. I took a United flight, and there were no TVs. I was also surrounded by loud people, so couldn’t sleep. To salvage the 13 hours I read Michael Nielsen’s Reinventing Discovery, finally. It’s testament to the quality of the writing that I glided through it in one sitting (I did have a window seat). The book makes some wonderful points, and I’d recommend it to anyone. I wonder if Michael’s call to arms about the absurdity of the current model of scientific publishing was more scathing in earlier drafts, and that the original version might be accessible by giving Michael a beer. A few random things I enjoyed:

1) The optimism of our knowing about collective knowledge from Ostrom and others, and how that might allow us to progress to a change in the way science is done (from the top down, guided by informed decision making). I had previously written about the relevance of Ostrom to open science communities, in a brief post.