Reinventing Discovery - Michael Nielsen [99]
A typical experience is that of my colleague and former student Tobias Osborne, now of the University of Hannover in Germany. Eager to try out open science, for six months Osborne carried out much of his research on quantum computing in the open, on a blog. He wrote many thoughtful posts, full of insightful ideas, and his blog attracted a following in the quantum computing community, with more than 50 regular readers. Unfortunately, few of those readers were willing to provide much feedback on Osborne’s posts, or to share their own ideas. And without a community of engaged colleagues, it was a lot of effort to work in the open, for only a small return. Osborne ultimately concluded that open science won’t succeed because it “would require most scientists to simultaneously and completely change their behaviour.” Experiences such as this make open science seem like a hopeless cause.
Although it’s true that it will be difficult to move toward open science through direct action by individual scientists, that doesn’t mean other approaches can’t succeed. Our society has solved many problems analogous to the open science problem, problems where direct individual action doesn’t work, and benefits only come if many people in a large group simultaneously adopt a new way of doing things. An example is the problem of which side of the road to drive on. If you live in a country where people drive on the left, you can’t one day start a movement to drive on the right merely by swapping the side you personally drive on. But that doesn’t mean it’s not possible for everyone to switch simultaneously. That’s exactly what happened in Sweden on September 3, 1967, at 5 am. There were good reasons for the Swedes to switch: the people in neighboring countries already drove on the right, and in addition, most vehicles in Sweden were already left-hand drive, making driving on the right actually safer. But, as with open science, the mere fact that driving on the right would be better wasn’t enough to cause a change through direct action by individuals. Instead, it required an extended campaign by the government, and a change in the law.
Changing sides of the road seems far removed from changing the culture of science. But, in fact, the first open science revolution required a similar type of collective action. We’ve seen how seventeenth century scientists often kept their results to themselves—unless you count sending anagrams as sharing! When the scientific journal system was first introduced, many scientists were suspicious, unwilling to share their results with others in a new medium. While individual scientists could see that science as a whole would progress more quickly if all scientists shared news of their discoveries freely, that didn’t mean it was in their individual best interest to publish in the journals. This posed a problem for the editors of early journals, people such as Henry Oldenburg, who founded the world’s first scientific journal, the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, in 1665. Oldenburg’s biographer, Mary Boas Hall, tells of how Oldenburg would write to the scientists of the day and “beg for information,” sometimes writing simultaneously to two competing scientists on the grounds that it would be “best to tell A what B was doing and vice versa, in the hope of stimulating both men to more work and more openness.” In this way, Oldenburg provoked some of the most eminent scientists of his day, including Newton, Huygens, and Hooke, to publish in the Philosophical Transactions. The need for such subterfuge ceased only after decades of work by Oldenburg and others to change the culture of science.
The common pattern