SSRN -- the social science paper repository -- is being acquired by Elsevier. SSRN has always been a for-profit entity and so it shouldn't be a surprise that this has happened. Put simply, there is a commercial rationale to this especially given that it is hard for smaller scale entities -- and SSRN despite its … Continue reading Et tu SSRN?
Last year we listed research projects that were completed under this research program. Here are the projects completed for 2015: Neil Thompson, Arvids Ziedonis and David Mowery, "University Licensing and the Flow of Knowledge" As university involvement in technology transfer and entrepreneurship has increased, concerns over the patenting and licensing of scientific discoveries have grown. … Continue reading Completed Research Projects (2015)
Last week, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation went far further than any other organization in mandating open access. From January of next year, all research funded by the Foundation will have to be made available and free online -- including appropriate metadata to make the research searchable. While others, such as the Wellcome Trust … Continue reading The Gates Foundation’s open access move ignores a better way to open knowledge
Some years ago, what is now called Zooniverse, had the great idea to involve the crowd in assisting in scientific endeavours. It started with the classification of galaxies before moving on to other topics such as the classification of cyclones, the identification of Antarctic penguins and coding weather from shipping logs. This was pure science … Continue reading The NYT turns to Crowd Science
Last year, our first round of research projects was funded and many have been completed. I thought it would be useful to provide links to the finished papers. Kevin Boudreau and Karim Lakhani, "How Disclosure Policies Impact Search in Open Innovation" Most of society’s innovation systems–academic science, the patent system, open source, etc.–are “open” in … Continue reading Completed Research Projects (2014)
An interesting new book has just been released that deals with one famous episode of the difficulty of assigning scientific credit in economics. Finding Equilibrium by Till Duppe and E. Roy Weintraub deals with the allocation of scientific credit over the proof of the existence of a general equilibrium in a competitive economy. Ken Arrow … Continue reading Scientific credit in economics
I gave a short talk at the NBER Session celebrating their 20,000 working paper. I called for open access. Peer Review, Publication and the Diffusion of Economic Knowledge - Joshua Gans from NBER on Vimeo.
From The Verge: Despite the prestige that comes with research being published in peer-reviewed journals like Nature, recent investigation into published studies have found many to be irreproducible or flat-out wrong. Indeed, one groundbreaking stem cell study was recently called into question after researchers were unable to replicate its conclusions, while 120 computer-generated papers were … Continue reading New lab to study bad science
Sadao Nagaoka and Hideo Owan have a new paper entitled "Author ordering in scientific research: Evidence from a scientist survey in the US and Japan." This was one of the papers funded last year. Here is the abstract: This paper examines what drives author ordering in scientific research. We first discuss a theoretical framework for the … Continue reading New paper on author recognition and name ordering
There are two broad funding opportunities in 2014 from the Research Program on the Economics of Knowledge Contribution and Distribution funded by the Sloan Foundation (see contributioneconomy.net for more details). First, there are research grants available. The Research Program on the Economics of Knowledge Contribution and Distribution funded by the Sloan Foundation is looking for proposals for research related to the following topics: * The impact of open … Continue reading Funding Opportunities
Contribution Economy 