As far as I know Daniel Mietchen does the very best work to bridge Wikimedia sites and freely licensed Open Access research (previous motivated link), making both much more valuable. Others doing or to do comparable or better work: I’m sorry I don’t yet know of it, and I thank you.

Mietchen has grander ideas for making research inputs, outputs, and collaboration more open and…collaborative. I wrote about his Encyclopedia of Original Research proposal (sadly unfunded as yet) a couple years ago.

Now as part of the Knight News Challenge he has a proposal for opening up research proposals:

Ideas are drivers of change, in research as much as in society at large. Current research practice is to hide ideas as long as possible and to reveal them only in formal publications that “count” in research evaluation contexts. We want to change that.

Many ideas are lost in the current closed system, and so are opportunities to collaborate and improve those few that are actually being worked on. We propose to elaborate mechanisms that would allow a transition from the current secretive model to one in which sharing research ideas is the default and seen as an invitation for collaboration, for accelerating and improving research rather than as a breach of private property.

The brief proposal is packed with ideas for making that happen (I made some small suggestions in the comments, but everything good was latent or implied before). One conceptual thing I like about the proposal is that it sets up a commons-based information revelation regime; the case for intellectual property as a revelation regime may seem quaint, but there’s nothing like a wildly better commons-based system to finally demolish that notion.

It appears there are 11 days left in the public feedback stage of the Knight News Challenge. I encourage you to read the proposal, post feedback, and applaud.

Update 20140409: I’m now an officious collaborator on this proposal. Hopefully that strengthens (commitment) rather than weakens (conflict) my endorsement of the proposal.