Open Access News

... Let me show you an example of a blog. It’s a blog called What’s New, run by UCLA mathematician Terence Tao. Tao, as many of you are probably aware, is a Fields-Medal winning mathematician. He’s known for solving many important mathematical problems, but is perhaps best known as the co-discover of the Green-Tao theorem, which proved the existence of arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions of primes.

... To understand how valuable Tao’s blog is, let’s look at [an] example post, about the Navier-Stokes equations. ...

The post is filled to the brim with clever perspective, insightful observations, ideas, and so on. It’s like having a chat with a top-notch mathematician, who has thought deeply about the Navier-Stokes problem, and who is willingly sharing their best thinking with you.

Following the post, there are 89 comments. Many of the comments are from well-known professional mathematicians, people like Greg Kuperberg, Nets Katz, and Gil Kalai. They bat the ideas in Tao’s post backwards and forwards, throwing in new insights and ideas of their own. It spawned posts on other mathematical blogs, where the conversation continued. ...

Many of the best blog posts contain material that could not easily be published in a conventional way: small, striking insights, or perhaps general thoughts on [an] approach to a problem. These are the kinds of ideas that may be too small or incomplete to be published, but which often contain the seed of later progress. ...

I’ve started this talk by discussing blogs because they are familiar to most people. But ideas about doing science in the open, online, have been developed far more systematically by people who are explicitly doing open notebook science. People such as Garrett Lisi are using mathematical wikis to develop their thinking online; Garrett has referred to the site as “my brain online”. People such as chemists Jean-Claude Bradley and Cameron Neylon are doing experiments in the open, immediately posting their results for all to see. They’re developing ideas like lab equipment that posts data in real time, posting data in formats that are machine-readable, enabling data mining, automated inference, and other additional services.

Stepping back, what tools like blogs, open notebooks and their descendants enable is filtered access to new sources of information, and to new conversation. The net result is a restructuring of expert attention. This is important because expert attention is the ultimate scarce resource in scientific research, and the more efficiently it can be allocated, the faster science can progress. ...

These new forms of contribution - blogs, wikis, online markets and so forth - might sound wonderful, but you might reasonably ask whether they are a distraction from the real business of doing science? Should you blog, as a young postdoc trying to build up a career, rather than writing papers? Should you contribute to Wikipedia, as a young Assistant Professor, when you could be writing grants instead? Crucially, why would you share ideas in the manner of open notebook science, when other people might build on your ideas, maybe publishing papers on the subjects you’re investigating, but without properly giving you credit?

In the short term, these are all important questions. But I think a lot of insight into these questions can be obtained by thinking first of the long run.

At the beginnning of the 17th century, Galileo Galilei constructed the first astronomical telescope, looked up at the sky, and turned his new instrument to Saturn. He saw, for the first time in human history, Saturn’s astonishing rings. Did he share this remarkable discovery with the rest of the world? He did not, for at the time that kind of sharing of scientific discovery was unimaginable. Instead, he announced his discovery by sending a letter to Kepler and several other early scientists, containing a latin anagram, “smaismrmilmepoetaleumibunenugttauiras”. When unscrambled this may be translated, roughly, as “I have discovered Saturn three-formed”. The reason Galileo announced his discovery in this way was so that he could establish priority, should anyone after him see the rings, while avoiding revealing the discovery.

Galileo could not imagine a world in which it made sense for him to freely share a discovery like the rings of Saturn, rather than hoarding it for himself. Certainly, he couldn’t share the discovery in a journal article, for the journal system was not invented until more than 20 years after Galileo died. Even then, journals took decades to establish themselves as a legitimate means of sharing scientific discoveries, and many early scientists looked upon journals with some suspicion. The parallel to the suspicion many scientists have of online media today is striking.

Think of all the knowledge we have, which we do not share. Theorists hoard clever observations and questions, little insights which might one day mature into a full-fledged paper. Entirely understandably, we hoard those insights against that day, doling them out only to trusted friends and close colleagues. Experimentalists hoard data; computational scientists hoard code. Most scientists, like Galileo, can’t conceive of a world in which it makes sense to share all that information, in which sharing information on blogs, wikis, and their descendents is viewed as being (potentially, at least) an important contribution to science. ...

[W]e are going to change the way scientists work; we are going to change the way scientists share information; we are going to change the way expert attention itself is allocated, developing new methods for connecting people, for organizing people, for leveraging people’s skills. They will be redirected, organized, and amplified. The result will speed up the rate at which discoveries are made, not in one small corner of science, but across all of science. ...