Reinventing Discovery - Michael Nielsen [103]
How can we expand science’s reputation economy in this way? Let’s look at an example where such an expansion is beginning to happen today. It’s a story that involves both the arXiv—the service we saw earlier that makes the latest results of physics available for free download—and another service for physicists called SPIRES. The arXiv and SPIRES are together creating incentives for physicists to share knowledge in new ways. To explain what’s going on, I first need to explain what SPIRES does. Suppose that, for some reason, you’re very interested in finding out what impact Stephen Hawking’s latest arXiv preprint is having on other scientists’ work. SPIRES can help by telling you which arXiv preprints and published journal papers are citing Hawking’s preprint. SPIRES might tell you, for example, that not a single preprint or paper has yet cited Hawking’s latest. Or maybe you’ll find that it’s spurred many other physicists to work on related ideas. SPIRES can also give you the big picture of how often Hawking’s (or any other physicist’s) preprints and papers have been cited in aggregate, and who is citing them. This makes SPIRES a tremendously useful tool for evaluating candidates for scientific jobs. When physics hiring committees meet to evaluate candidates in the areas that SPIRES covers (particle physics and some related areas), it’s not unusual for everyone in the meeting to have their laptops out, comparing SPIRES citation records.
What’s all this got to do with openness and new incentives to share knowledge? Well, a couple of decades ago, preprints were viewed by most physicists as mere stepping-stones along the road to conventional journal publication. They weren’t valued as ends in themselves. To build your career, you needed a record of high-quality journal papers. Today, because of the arXiv and SPIRES, preprints have some status as ends in themselves. It’s not uncommon for physicists to, for example, list preprints that have not yet been published in a journal on their curriculum vitae. And if a physicist discovers someone else working on a project that competes with one of their own projects, they may rush to get their preprint out first. Preprints don’t yet have as high a status as journal articles, but a preprint with hundreds of SPIRES citations can still carry quite a punch, career-wise. By providing a way of demonstrating the scientific value and impact of a preprint, SPIRES and the arXiv have created a real incentive for physicists to produce preprints, an incentive that’s separate from the usual incentive to write papers.
I’ve got to admit that as cultural changes go, this one’s pretty small. The move to a preprint culture in physics does speed up the sharing of scientific knowledge, and makes that knowledge more broadly accessible. But it’s not nearly as big a change as replacing anagrams by scientific journals! Still, we should pay attention to the story of the arXiv and SPIRES, because it shows that it really is possible to create new incentives for scientists to share knowledge. What’s more, this happened without any compulsion by a central agency. Once SPIRES enabled the impact of preprints to be measured, the new incentive emerged naturally as individual physicists started using the SPIRES citation reports. In science, as in so many parts of life, what gets measured is what gets rewarded, and what gets rewarded is what gets done.
Could a similar strategy be used to incentivize scientists to share other types of scientific knowledge? Let’s think, for example, about incentives to share data. Suppose that, as has happened with preprints in physics, scientists began to regularly cite other people’s data in their own scientific papers. This is already starting to happen, and will happen more as open data policies become more common. And suppose someone sets up a citation