Reinventing Discovery_ The New Era of Networked Science - Michael Nielsen [108]
Won’t increasing the scale of science make it harder to verify scientific discoveries? As open science enables us to scale up the process of discovery, the nature of scientific evidence will change, and become more complex. In the case of some discoveries, understanding the evidence in detail may be beyond the ability of any single person. An early example of this occurred in 1983, when mathematicians announced the solution of an important mathematical problem, known as the classification of the finite simple groups. The proof took nearly 30 years to complete, from 1955 to 1983, and involved 100 mathematicians writing approximately 500 journal articles. Many minor gaps were subsequently found in the proof, and at least one serious gap, which has now been resolved (we hope!) by a two-volume, 1,200-page supplement to the proof. In the 1980s, it was unusual for a scientific discovery to have evidence of such complexity. Today it is becoming common. To pick just serce of complexity, consider that modern experiments in many scientific fields are increasingly likely to use hundreds of thousands or even millions of lines of computer code. It’s nearly impossible to eliminate all the bugs from such code. How can we be sure the results output by that code are valid? How can other scientists verify and reproduce the results from such experiments? Furthermore, the situation is getting more challenging, as our computational systems become more complex. Single software programs are increasingly being replaced by software ecologies, complex networks of interacting programs, sometimes maintained by many people across many locations. How can we guarantee that such software ecologies will produce reliable and reproducible results? These and other similar concerns affect discoveries ranging from particle physics to climate science, biology to astronomy. It’s a kind of science beyond individual understanding. As this new scale of evidence becomes the norm, our standards of evidence will need to evolve. I’m optimistic, though, that we’ll rise to the challenge, using our amplified collective intelligence not only to make new discoveries, but also to develop improved methods for testing and validating those discoveries.
Practical Steps toward Open Science
What practical steps can we take toward open science? Worldwide, our governments spend more than 100 billion dollars each year on basic research. That’s our money, and we should demand a change to a more open scientific culture. I believe that publicly funded science should be open science. Let’s look at some practical steps that everyone, from working scientists to members of the general public, can take toward this end.
What can you do if you’re a scientist? Try out open science! Upload some of your old data and old code, online. Document it, encourage other people to use it, and make sure you tell them how you’d like to be cited. Try out blogging. Push your comfort zone—try using your blog to develop some of those ideas you’ve had in the back of your head for years, but never quite got around to pursuing. You’ve little to lose, and working in the open may breathe new life into your ideas. If that’s too much time commitment, try making a few small contributions to others’ open science projects—say, making a comment on a science blog, or a contribution to a wiki. Those contributions may be small, but your scientific colleagues will notice, and it will help legitimize the new tools in the scientific community. And you may find it more rewarding than you think. If you’re adventurous, try pushing the boundaries. Ask yourself if you can pioneer a new way of doing science, as the Polymath Project, Foldit, and Galaxy Zoo have done. What can you conjure with imagination and determination? Even if your ventures in open science aren’t successful,