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underlying the problem of switching sides of the road and the problem of open science—both today and in the seventeenth century—is that the interests of individuals aren’t naturally aligned with the collective group interest. Someone who believes “everyone should do this” e.g., open science or switching sides of the road, doesn’t necessarily also believe “I should do this, even if no one else does.” Social scientists call problems like this collective action problems. The trick to solving collective action problems is to figure out ways of aligning individual interest with the collective interest. In the case of Sweden’s switch to the right, the solution was to use the government’s legitimacy—expressed, in part, through the force of law—to compel people to switch. One day it was in people’s individual best interest to drive on the left, while the next day it was in their interest to drive on the right. Similarly, the genius of the first open science revolution was to align individual and collective interest by rewarding scientists for sharing their discoveries in scientific journals. The problem today is that while it’s now in the collective interest for scientists to adopt new technologies, their individual interests remain aligned with journal publication. We need to bring the individual interest back into alignment with the collective interest.

The good news is that a lot is known about how to solve collective action problems. Writing in the 1960s, the political economist Mancur Olson analyzed what n thled the “logic of collective action,” trying to understand the conditions under which individuals in a group will work together in their collective interest, and those under which they will not. In the 1990s, the political economist Elinor Ostrom substantially deepened Olson’s analysis for a particular type of collective action, namely, how groups can work together to manage resources that they hold in common, such as water and forests. The books Olson and Ostrom wrote describing their work are among the most frequently cited books ever in the social sciences, and the work has been so influential that Ostrom was awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics.

I mention this work as an antidote to pessimism about open science. Some very clever people have spent a great deal of time investigating real-world examples where collective action problems have been solved, and have thought hard about how the strategies used in those examples can be generalized to solve other collective action problems. What Olson, Ostrom, and their colleagues have shown is that while solving collective action problems is difficult, it’s not impossible. Before we give up on open science, we should draw on these ideas. We’ll now look at two strategies that can be used to shift the culture of science. Neither strategy is a quick fix, but with enough imagination and determination these strategies can make science far more open. Although my account is based on the work of Olson and Ostrom and their successors, I won’t make the connections explicitly, since this isn’t a textbook on political economy. If you’re interested in exploring the connections further, please see “Selected Sources and Suggestions for Further Reading,” beginning on page 217.

Compelling Open Science

Earlier in this book we discussed the open access policies that some scientific grant agencies are introducing, in order to make the results of scientific research broadly available. Recall, for example, that the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) now requires scientists to make their papers openly accessible within 12 months of publication. Scientists who don’t agree to this condition must look elsewhere for funding. It’s a policy of compulsion, similar to the strategy used by the Swedish government to switch sides of the road. In this way, powerful organizations such as governments and grant agencies can cause everyone in a community to simultaneously change their behavior.

Following on from their open access policies, several grant agencies now require scientists to openly