“Open source” is not a verb Nathan Yergler via John Wilbanks I often return to the question of what “Open” means and why it matters. Indeed the very first blog post I wrote focussed on questions of definition. Sometimes I return to it because people disagree with my perspective. Sometimes because someone approaches similar questions in a new or interesting way.

Ten years ago today, the Budapest Declaration was published. The declaration was the output of a meeting held some months earlier, largely through the efforts of Melissa Hagemann, that brought together key players from the, then nascent, Open Access movement. BioMedCentral had been publishing for a year or so, PLoS existed as an open letter, Creative Commons was still focussed on building a commons and hadn’t yet released its first licences.

The speaker had started the afternoon with a quote from Ian Rogers, ‘Losers wish for scarcity. Winners leverage scale.’ He went on to eloquently, if somewhat bluntly, make the case for exposing data and discuss the importance of making it available in a useable and re-useable form.