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system for papers that they view it as a natural law, and forget that it’s socially constructed. It’s an agreement. And because it’s a social agreement, that agreement can be changed. All that’s needed for open science to succeed is for the sharing of scientific knowledge in new media to carry the same kind of cachet that papers do today. At that point the reputational reward of sharing knowledge in new ways will exceed the benefits of keeping that knowledge hidden. Now, at this point skeptics will sometimes say, “But no one will ever take ideas shared on a blog [or wiki, etc.] seriously!” This may be true right now—although even that is changing—but over the long run, the view is myopic and ignores the lessons of the first open science revolution. We have a real chance to drive the same kind of transition that Henry Oldenburg and his colleagues caused in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, incentivizing scientists to share their scientific knowledge using the most powerful tools available today. We can bring the interests of individual scientists back into alignment with the collective interest of the scientific community and the public as a whole: driving science forward as fast as possible.

Limits to Openness

What limits should be imposed on openness in science? Although it’s broadly true that, as I said earler, information not on the network can’t do any good, some limits are necessary. Some of these limits are obvious: doctors can’t share patient records willy-nilly, security experts can’t share information that compromises security, and so on. Of course, there are already many measures in place to prevent disclosure of information when it would violate expectations of privacy, ethics, safety, and legality. But there are more subtle concerns about openness that also need to be considered.

Might openness overwhelm scientists? One of the great mathematicians of all time, Alexander Grothendieck, believes that it was his capacity to be alone that was the wellspring of his creativity. In autobiographical notes, he says that he found true creativity as a consequence of being willing to “reach out in my own way to the things I wished to learn, rather than relying on the notions of the consensus, overt or tacit, coming from a more or less extended clan of which I found myself a member.” Grothendieck is not alone in this belief. Ideas that require careful nurturing may wither and die if they are modified prematurely in response to others’ opinions. Perhaps if we move to a more open, collaborative culture, we risk giving up the independence of mind necessary for the highest forms of creativity. Will fewer people attempt bold work that does not fit within the shared praxis of an existing scientific community, but which instead aims to define a new praxis?

There’s a general problem here that goes beyond Grothendieck’s desire for solitude, or romantic notions of lone geniuses redefining fields. It’s the problem, which we discussed at the end of chapter 3, that scientists only have limited time, and this imposes constraints on how they work with others. Should they collaborate a little, a lot, or not at all? If they choose to collaborate, with whom should they work? No matter how much they enjoy collaboration, their attention doesn’t scale infinitely, and so must be managed carefully. Sometimes the resolution of the problem is, as for Grothendieck, to seek solitude. But for scientists who choose to collaborate, the problem manifests in other ways. In the Polymath Project, for example, a small number of contributions came from people without the mathematical background to make significant progress on the problem. Those people were outside the praxis shared by most Polymath participants. Although their contributions were well intentioned, they were of little help. Fortunately, there were few low-quality contributions, and they were easily ignored. But if there had been more, they would have significantly taxed the attention of other Polymath participants. Similar problems can be caused by cranks, trolls, and spammers,