Reinventing Discovery - Michael Nielsen [98]
This commercially driven secrecy is a big cultural shift in our universities. Historically, before Bayh-Dole and similar legislation, the results of basic science were usually (eventually) openly disclosed, in the form of papers, in the belief that an improved understanding of how the world works would benefit everyone over the long run. For instance, basic research on electricity and magnetism was the foundation for inventions such as motors and electric lighting and radio and television. Basic research on quantum mechanics was crucial for the semiconductor industry. It’s the familiar idea that a rising tide floats all boats. And so there was a fairly clean split in our innovation system. On one side was the basic research system, whose ultimate results were shared publicly as research papers, on the grounds that over the long term everyone would gain. On the other side was privately funded applied research that aimed at short-term product development, and that was often carried out in secret. Bayh-Dole has begun to break this division down, and today governments and grant agencies increasingly see the pursuit of patents and other intellectual property as a major reason to support basic research.
This change is a genuine impediment to the open sharing necessary for networked science to thrive. However, we should keep the size and scope of this impediment in proper perspective. While writing this book, I sometimes spoke with people who assumed that commercially driven secrecy is the single biggest obstacle to open science. That is incorrect. In large parts of basic science, scientists’ concerns about commercialization are decidedly secondary compared to their relentless focus on conventional publication. Commercialization and patent rights are welcome if they come, but career success comes by earning the esteem of peers through publication. This is most evident in job applications: scientists often list a few patents or spin-offs resulting from their work, but the emphasis is on papers, papers, papers, and grants, grants, grants. This is true in large parts of physics and astronomy, in mathematics, in substantial parts of chemistry, biology, and in many other fields of science. In these fields, the immediate obstacle to open science isn’t commercialization, it’s a culture that only values and rewards the sharing of scientific knowledge in the form of papers.
In a few areas of basic science, commercially driven secrecy is paramount. This is true in some of the early-stage work that may lead to later drug development, for instance. In such fields, science will likely remain a closed, secretive affair. And there is a much larger gray area in basic science where concerns about commercial secrecy are a factor, but not always a dominant factor. The real problem is scientific work that could in principle be open, but where unfounded hopes of later patents impede open science. Over the long run, there is a conversation to be had about the role of intellectual property in basic science. But the foundation for open science, the place where we should start, is with a change in the culture of science so that it doesn’t just value and reward the writing of papers, but also new ways of sharing. That’s the most crucial problem, and it’s to that problem we now turn.
CHAPTER 9
The Open Science Imperative
Imagine you’re a working scientist who believes wholeheartedly that open science will bring enormous benefits to science and to our society. You understand that changing the deeply entrenched culture of science will be difficult, but decide nonetheless to go all out sharing your ideas and data online, contributing to new tools such as science wikis and user-contributed comment sites, and