Reinventing Discovery_ The New Era of Networked Science - Michael Nielsen [109]
Above all, be generous in giving other scientists credit when they share their scientific knowledge in new ways. Find ways to cite the ideas and data and code they share online. Encourage them to promote their open work, to highlight it on their curriculum vitae and on their grant applications, and to find ways of demonstrating its impact. This is the way to get new citation-measurement-reward cycles going. Of course, you will at times encounter colleagues with old-fashioned scientific values, people who are dismissive of new ways of sharing ge, and who think that the only measure of success for scientists is how many papers they’ve published in high-profile journals such as Nature. Talk with those people about the value of new ways of sharing knowledge, and of the courage it takes for scientists, especially young scientists, to work in the open. Sharing ideas and code and data openly, online, is every bit as important as publishing papers, and it is only old-fashioned values that say otherwise.
If you’re a scientist who is also a programmer, you have a special role to play, an opportunity to build the new tools that redefine how science is done. Be bold in experimenting with new ideas: this is the golden age of scientific software. But also be bold in asserting the value of your work. Today, your work is likely to be undervalued by old-fashioned colleagues, not because of malice, but because of a lack of understanding. Explain to other scientists how they should cite your work. Work in cahoots with your scientist programmer friends to establish shared norms for citation, and for sharing of code. And then work together to gradually ratchet up the pressure on other scientists to follow those norms. Don’t just promote your own work, but also insist more broadly on the value of code as a scientific contribution in its own right, every bit as valuable as more traditional forms.
What if you work at a grant agency? Talk to people in the scientific communities you serve, and ask what knowledge is currently locked up inside scientists’ heads and laboratories. What tools would be most effective for sharing that knowledge? Is there an opportunity to develop policies on open access, open data, and open code? How can we go beyond today’s open access and open data policies? Can we use examples such as the arXiv and SPIRES as models to help create new norms for citation and new tools for measurement, and so expand science’s reputation economy? More generally, if you’re involved in government or in the policy-making process, then you can help by getting involved, by lobbying for open access and open data, and more generally by raising awareness of the issue of open science.
And what can you do if you are not a scientist, don’t work for a grant agency, and don’t work in policy, but are a citizen with an interest in science and human welfare? Talk with your friends and acquaintances who are scientists. Ask them what they’re doing to make their data open. Ask them what they do to share their ideas publicly and rapidly. Ask them how they share their code. For open science to succeed, what’s needed is a change in the values of the scientific community. If all scientists believe wholeheartedly in the value of working in the open, online, then change will come. This is fundamentally a problem of changing hearts and minds. There is no stronger force for achieving such a change than raising public awareness, so that everyone in our society understands the tremendous value of open science, and understands that achieving open science is one of the great challenges of our age. If every scientist in the world is being asked by their friends and family what they’re doing to make science more open, then change will come. If every grant agent and every leader at our universities is being asked by their friends and family what they’re doing to make science more open, then change will come. And if