The following guest post is from Joseph Jackson, one of the main organisers behind the Open Science Summit.

Dear Champions of Open Science,

Please join us in gathering stakeholders seeking to liberate our scientific and technological commons to enable a new era of decentralized, distributed innovation.

• http://opensciencesummit.com/

While there are many great organizations and talented people thinking about these problems, the discussion is usually spread out across email lists, blogs, friend feed, etc. Experts in one domain (Open Data, Open Access publishing) are not always engaged with those working on policy issues in another (patent reform, funding mechanisms to incentivize openness). To remedy this, I ambitiously (perhaps too ambitiously) decided to attempt to bring everyone together in an event that I hope will help build cohesion between the many groups and individuals striving to transform science.

Over two and a half days, from July 29-31st at Berkeley, we will consider the major challenges and policy questions that must be addressed to successfully update the institutions, practices, and worldviews that comprise our global scientific governance system. Topics include personal genomics, gene patents, open data, the future of scientific publication, peer review, and reputation, citizen science in biology, and many more. We ask you to join us in imagining a new paradigm, one in which a virtuous circle of mutually reinforcing shifts toward transparency and collaboration could unleash hitherto untapped reserves of human ingenuity. It will take tremendous coordinated effort to achieve this vision.

This event is for everyone who cares deeply about making science work more effectively to benefit all humanity. There is a distinct focus on biology and life sciences at the conference because these fields are experiencing rapid change and are essential to our health, environment, and food security. In future years we will try to include greater coverage from other disciplines, for example the exciting “collective science” data sharing efforts emerging in astronomy, math, and physics (arxiv.org being a leading example of open science principles in action).

We ask you to help us in making this first conference a success so that we can build to the next one.

Thank you,

Joseph and OSS volunteers.

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