This document discusses the potential for more open and collaborative approaches to science. It describes examples like the Polymath Project, where mathematicians collaboratively solved a problem online in a transparent way. It argues that while open science has benefits, the current incentive structure rewards secrecy and individual credit over collaboration. New forms of reputation and impact measurement online, like preprint citations, could help drive a "second open science revolution" with more data, code, ideas and questions shared openly.
51. why share knowledge on a science wiki when: They’re not very good It might help your competitors You won’t get any academic credit for it
52. When we share results in journal papers, we give something up... ... but we get a reputational reward in return.
53. When we contribute to a science wiki or comment site or otherwise share ideas, data, & code, we give something up... ... and we don’t get enough reputational reward for it to be practical
54. New media have great potential... ...but unless there’s reward for contribution, the opportunity cost leads people to do other things
63. A very similar situation arose at the dawn of science...
64. “Exploitation of the mass medium [books] was more common among pseudoscientists and quacks than among Latin-writing professional scientists, who often witheld their work from the press.” - Elizabeth Eisenstein
65. Hooke’s Law restoring force on a spring is proportional to extension published in 1676 as an anagram: ceiiinossssttuu revealed in 1678 as the Latin uttensio, sic vis “as the extension, so the force”
66. if someone else made the same discovery, Hooke could reveal the anagram, and claim priority, without having shared his initial discovery
69. discoveries were routinely kept secret A secretive culture of discovery was a natural consequence of a society in which there was often little personal gain in sharing discoveries.
70. The scientific advances in the time of Hooke and Newton motivated patrons such as the government to subsidize science as a profession.
71. The public benefit was strongest if scientific discoveries were freely shared
72. It took several decades to achieve the required social change... ... a scientific culture which rewards the sharing of discoveries – in scientific journals! – with jobs and prestige for the discoverer.
73. a discovery not published in a scientific journal was not truly complete
77. That same subsidy now inhibits the adoption of more effective technologies... ...because it continues to incentivize scientists to share discoveries in older media
105. Aida Berges From the Dominican Republic, lives in Puerto Rico 500 galaxies per week + forum posts + participates in several side projects
106. Aida Berges From the Dominican Republic, lives in Puerto Rico “I went to Galaxy Zoo... and my life changed forever… It was like coming home for me.”
108. Society as a whole Bridging institutions Scientific community citizen science open access science blogs news sites ???? Online tools are institution-generating machines... ... change the relationship between science and society
113. by new tools for sharing ideas and data on the network
114. Newton claimed to have invented calculus in the 1660s and 1670s, but didn’t publish until 1693
Editor's Notes
It’s a great pleasure to be here today, to talk about the splendid opportunity open science gives us to accelerate scientific discovery.
I find it helpful to divide my thinking about open science up in three ways: open data, open collaborative processes, and open community.In the talks today we’ve already heard quite a bit about one of these, open data, and so I won’t say much about it in my talk. Instead, I’ll start my talk with a discussion of open process, and how it can accelerate scientific discovery.
So that anyone in the world could comment, and perhaps help solve the problem.In the event, the project spread beyond Gowers blog...
... also to the blog of another leading mathematician, Terence Tao, of UCLA, another Fields medallist.It also spread to a very active wiki.
By restructuring expert attention we can amplify our collective intelligence, and extend our problem-solving ability.I’ve focused on the Polymath Project, but it’s just one example of many.Another example, also from mathematics is the...
... MathOverflow site.It’s a question and answer site where mathematicians can ask difficult, research-level questions.Many of the participants in the Polymath Project take part, as do other leading professional mathematicians.They get dozens of questions each day. More than 90% of the questions are adequately solved, sometimes within minutes.Although the site is less than a year old, some of the results are already being included in published papers.It’s another example of a restructuring of expert attention, in this case a kind of market in expert attention.A similar question and answer site has recently been set up for bionformatics...
... called BioStar. It’s even newer, but is already attracting substantial traffic, and a lot of happy customers.Okay, so that’s a bit about some of the exciting things that are happening in open process.What about....
It’s like trying to change the side of the road everyone drives on by changing side yourself.It just won’t work.Instead, you need something else to happen, such as the government imposed change that took place in Sweden in...
... 1967. Even then it caused some problems.
I find it helpful to divide my thinking about open science up in three ways: open data, open collaborative processes, and open community.In the talks today we’ve already heard quite a bit about one of these, open data, and so I won’t say much about it in my talk. Instead, I’ll start my talk with a discussion of open process, and how it can accelerate scientific discovery.
This kind of citizen science is just one example of how online tools can be used to create new types of bridging institutions.Other examples include open access, as discussed before, and science blogging.They also include news sites such as Slashdot and Reddit, which, although it’s tempting to be snide about them, do in a fundamental way change the way their readers relate to the news.The real question, of course, is how these institutions can grow and become more powerful, and what new kinds of bridging institutions we can create?Online tools are institution-generating machines, with the potential to change the relationship between science and society.
So with these three opportunities – open data, open process, and open community – an optimist might conclude that we’d see an...
