Astronaut Edwin Aldrin walks on lunar surface near leg of Lunar Module. Credit: Neil Armstrong/NASA, (1969) in the public domain.

It’s July 20, 1969.  Along with 600 million people, nine-year-old Chris Hadfield is glued to his television—watching intently as American astronaut Neil Armstrong glides down the ladder of the Lunar Module, and in one swift pounce, touches the dust of a familiar yet alien world. His words forever immortalized, “That’s one small step for man,…

The JOGL team by Thomas Landrain (CC BY).

Thousands of strangers working together, almost entirely online, to effectively solve an urgent, global challenge is remarkable—and it’s happening, right now. Recently, we published a post titled, “Open-Source Medical Hardware: What You Should Know and What You Can Do” examining the collaborative efforts by volunteer groups, universities, and research centers to solve the medical supply…

Momentum continues to swell in support of the Open COVID Pledge, with the announcement today by Amazon, Facebook, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, IBM, Microsoft, and Sandia National Laboratories, that they are pledging their patents to the public to freely use in support of solving the COVID-19 pandemic. Following in the footsteps of Intel, Fabricatorz Foundation, and…

"The Chancellor Rishi Sunak visits a coronavirus testing laboratory in Leeds," by HM Treasury, licensed CC BY-NC-SA.

In response to the global health emergency caused by COVID-19, we’ve seen an array of organizations, publications, and governments make COVID-19 related research open access. For example, the U.S. National Library of Medicine recently released the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset (CORD-19)—a machine-readable coronavirus literature collection with over 29,000 articles available for text and data mining…

  While the EU copyright reform teeters on the edge of turning into a complete disaster, last week the European Commission published a proposal for a revision of the Directive on the reuse of public sector information (PSI Directive), and a recommendation on access to and preservation of scientific information. Both of these documents are…

On April 22, 2017 (Earth Day) tens of thousands of people will join the March for Science and stand together “to acknowledge and voice the critical role that science plays in each of our lives.” Marches will take place in Washington, D.C. and over 500 other cities. The mission of the March for Science is…

In March we hosted the second Institute for Open Leadership. In our summary of the event we mentioned that the Institute fellows would be taking turns to write about their open policy projects. This week’s post is from Alessandro Sarretta from the Institute of Marine Sciences (ISMAR), part of the Italian National Research Council. 2016…

ATLAS experiment detector under construction in October 2004 in its experimental pit; the current status of construction can be seen on the CERN website.[1] Note the people in the background, for comparison. Nikolai Schwerg CC BY-SA 3.0

At ATLAS, data sharing and an open, innovative approach to information collaboration has become a fundamental part of this important scientific community.

Scientist Erin McKiernan practices Open Science with a capital “O.” She is a researcher, an advocate for scientific diversity, and an educator on a mission to make science more inclusive and supportive.

Graphical recording created at the Cancer Moonshot Summit on June 29, 2016. (Credit: StephScribes/White House Cancer Moonshot Task Force.)

Today Vice President Biden announced a comprehensive plan for his Cancer Moonshot initiative, which seeks to achieve a decade’s worth of progress on cancer research in five years.