In the wake of my post yesterday on the sudden surge of the open-science movement, I thought a primer on the subject would be useful for those lacking time to read my feature about why so many scientists want to ditch the traditional academic research and publishing model for something more open and decentralized. I started to write a primer — then realized that this short TED talk from Michael Nielsen would serve beautifully. Nielsen does brilliant work on quantum computation, a subject I find daunting (in fact, I don’t even know what it is), but he’s utterly clear and accessible in this story about the promise of the huge gains to be made from open science. He brings the same lucidity to his book Reinventing Discovery, which is a smart and inspiring longer read on the subject.