Reinventing Discovery - Michael Nielsen [83]
By changing our society’s institutions, we can dramatically change the role of science in society, and perhaps address some of our society’s most significant problems. To do this will require the imagination and will to invent new institutional mechanisms that could address problems such as the vaccine problem or the problem of science in democracy. It may seem unrealistic to change our institutions in this way. Most of the time institutions change only very slowly. But, today isn’t most of the time. Online tools are institution-generating machines. Examples such as Galaxy Zoo, Wikipedia, and Linux demonstrate how much easier it has become to create new institutions, and even to create radically new types of institution. At the same time, online tools are transforming existing institutions in our society—consider the collapse of traditional music and newspaper companies over the past ten years, and the gradual rise of new models in their place. And so we’re at a very interesting point in history, one where it’s become far easier to create new institutions and to reinvent existing institutions. This doesn’t mean that we can easily solve problems such as the vaccine problem. What it does mean is that we have an opportunity to reimagine and to some extent recreate the role of science in society. We’re already beginning to see this happening, with citizen science projects such as Galaxy Zoo and Foldit showing how online tools can be used to change something very fundamental: who can be a scientist. In the remainder of this chapter, we’ll explore other ways online tools change the role of science in society, including ways they improve public access both to the results of science, and to scientists themselves.
Open Access
Imagine you’re a woman who has gone to the doctor for a regular mammogram screening, and your doctor has come back with surprising and terrible news: you have early-stage breast cancer. Shocked, you go home, and begin planning your attack on the disease. You decide that the first thing to do is to become better informed. You read around online, and discover a great deal of useful information from sites such as the cancer.gov site run by the US National Cancer Institute. But after a while, all the introductory information you find on the web becomes repetitive. You want more up-to-date knowledge on the most promising current research. A friend mentions that Google has a special search engine—called Google Scholar—which will help you search the scientific literature for the best and latest papers on breast cancer. You go to the site, search on “breast cancer,” and discover umpteen-thousands of papers. Excellent! Even better, Google Scholar orders the results according to Google’s best guess as to their importance. You go to download the paper Google ranks as the top result, and discover that you need to pay 50 dollars for the download. “Never mind,” you think, “I’ll come back to that paper later. But when you look at the second paper, you discover it costs 15 dollars to download. Onto the third paper, and that publisher wants to charge you, too, but is coy about the price, asking you to register on their site first. As you continue paging through the results, the pattern of fees continues, and your initial elation turns to angry disbelief. “Surely,” you reason, “with tens of billions of dollars of taxpayer money spent each year on scientific research, we should at least be able to read the results of that research?!Ý Now, breast cancer is a serious disease and you’re tempted to swallow your anger and pay the fees. But there are thousands of papers. There’s no way you can afford to pay for even a tiny fraction of them.
Traditional scientific publishing is based on a pay-for-access model. In many ways it works much like the magazine business, and there’s less difference than you might think between a leading science journal such as Physical