I spent two days this week visiting Peter Murray-Rust and others at the Unilever Centre for Molecular Informatics at Cambridge. There was a lot of useful discussion and I learned an awful lot that requires more thinking and will no doubt result in further posts. In this one I want to relay a conversation we had over lunch with Peter, Jim Downing, Nico Adams, Nick Day and Rufus Pollock that seemed extremely productive.

The issue of licensing arrangements and best practice for making data available has been brewing for some time but has just recently come to a head. John Wilbanks and Science Commons have a reasonably well established line that they have been developing for some time. Michael Nielsen has a recent blog post and Rufus Pollock, of the Open Knowledge Foundation, has also just synthesised his thoughts in response into a blog essay.