Open Access News

Michael Nielsen, Doing science in the open, PhysicsWorld, May 1, 2009.  Excerpt:

In your high-school science classes you almost certainly learned Hooke’s law, relating a spring’s length to how hard you pull on it. What your high-school science teacher probably did not tell you is that when Robert Hooke discovered his law in 1676, he published it as an anagram, “ceiiinossssttuv”, which he revealed two years later as the Latin “ut tensio, sic vis”, meaning “as the extension, so the force”. This ensured that if someone else made the same discovery, then Hooke could reveal the anagram and claim priority, thus buying time in which he alone could build upon the discovery....

Imagine modern biology if the human genome had been announced as an anagram, or if publication had been delayed 30 years....

This cultural transition [to public sharing of scientific results] was just beginning in the time of Hooke and Newton, but a little over a century later the great physicist Michael Faraday could advise a younger colleague to “Work. Finish. Publish”. The culture of science had changed so that a discovery not published in a scientific journal was not truly complete....

From the outside, scientists currently appear puzzlingly slow to adopt many online tools. As we will see, this is a consequence of some major barriers deeply embedded within the culture of science. Changing this culture will only be achieved with great effort, but I believe that the process of scientific discovery — how we do science — will change more over the next two decades than in the past 300 years....

The adoption of the journal system was achieved by subsidizing scientists who published their discoveries in journals. This same subsidy now inhibits the adoption of more effective technologies, because it continues to incentivize scientists to share their work in conventional journals and not in more modern media.

We should aim to create an open scientific culture where as much information as possible is moved out of people’s heads and labs, onto the network and into tools that can help us structure and filter the information. This means everything — data, scientific opinions, questions, ideas, folk knowledge, workflows and everything else....

Ideally, we will achieve a kind of extreme openness: making many more types of content available than just scientific papers; allowing creative reuse and modification of existing work through more open licensing and community norms; making all information not just human readable but also machine readable; providing open interfaces to enable the building of additional services on top of the scientific literature, and possibly even multiple layers of increasingly powerful services. Such extreme openness is the ultimate expression of the idea that others may build upon and extend the work of individual scientists in ways that they themselves would never have conceived.

To create an open scientific culture that embraces new online tools, two challenging tasks must be achieved: first, build superb online tools; and second, cause the cultural changes necessary for those tools to be accepted. The necessity of accomplishing both these tasks is obvious, yet projects in online science often focus mostly on building tools, with cultural change an afterthought....

Rather than hoarding their questions and ideas, as scientists do for fear of being scooped, the [open source] programmers revel in swapping them. Some of the world’s best programmers hang out in these forums, swapping tips, answering questions and participating in the conversation....

Without...trust, there is no way that Alice will be willing to advertise her questions to the entire community. The danger of free riders who will take advantage for their own benefit (and to Alice’s detriment) is just too high.

In science, we are so used to this situation that we take it for granted. But let us compare it to the apparently very different problem of buying shoes. Alice walks into a shoe shop with some money. Alice wants shoes more than she wants to keep her money, while Bob the shop owner wants the money more than he wants the shoes. As a result, Bob hands over the shoes, Alice hands over the money, and everyone walks away happier after just 10 minutes. This rapid transaction takes place because there is a trust infrastructure of laws and enforcement in place that ensures that if either party cheats, then they are likely to be caught and punished.

If shoe shops operated like scientists trading ideas, first Alice and Bob would need to get to know one another, maybe go for a few beers in a nearby bar. Only then would Alice finally say “You know, I am looking for some shoes”. After a pause, and a few more beers, Bob would say “You know what, I just happen to have some shoes I am looking to sell”. Every working scientist recognizes this dance; I know scientists who worry less about selling their house than they do about exchanging scientific information....

Unfortunately, science currently lacks the trust infrastructure and incentives necessary for such free, unrestricted trade of questions and ideas.

An ideal collaboration market will enable just such an exchange of questions and ideas. It will include metrics of contribution so that participants can demonstrate the impact that their work is having. Contributions will be archived, time-stamped and signed, so it is clear who said what, and when. Combined with high-quality filtering and search tools, the result will be an open culture of trust that gives scientists a real incentive to outsource problems, and contribute in areas where they have a great comparative advantage. This will change science.

PS:  Also see Nielsen's blog version of this article from July 2008.