Sci21 Speaker Dr. Siouxsie Wiles, Auckland University of Technology, New ZealandPicture this. You commission me to draw your portrait and send me a photo to work from. When you and your friends ask to see the finished portrait, I tell you I gave it away to someone else, and paid them several thousand dollars to take it, because it was in colour. When you ask them to see your portrait, they charge you and each of your friends $30 to look at it for 24 hours. And when someone else asks me to see the photo I worked from to check how good a likeness the portrait is, I tell them they can only see one corner of the photo. Or maybe I decide not to let them see it all, in case they want to draw a portrait of you too. Ridiculous as this scenario sounds, it’s a fairly accurate description of a lot of publicly-funded biomedical science. In her Sci21 webcast, Siouxsie describes how the internet age is challenging this outdated model and calls for scientists and the public to fight for a publi
