Reinventing Discovery_ The New Era of Networked Science - Michael Nielsen [116]
In addition to these individuals, there are many organizations working for open science. The Alliance for Taxpayer Access (http://www.taxpayeraccess.org/) has lobbied the US government for policies on open access to scientific papers and scientific data. For instance, it was in part through their lobbying that the NIH open access policy described in chapter 7 came about. Other organizations working toward open science include Science Commons (http://sciencecommon.sorg), which is part of the Creative Commons organization, and the Open Knowledge Foundation (http://okfn.org).
The challenge of creating a more open culture is not limited to science. It’s also being confronted in general culture. People such as Richard Stallman [202], Lawrence Lessig [122], and many others have described the benefits openness brings in a networked world. They’ve developed tools such as Creative Commons licensing (http://creativecommons.org) and “copyleft” licenses to help bring about a more open culture. My thinking has been especially strongly influenced by Lessig [122]. However, although open science has many parallels to the open culture movement, science faces a unique set of forces that inhibit open sharing. That means that tools such as Creative Commons licenses, which have been tremendously effective in moving to a more open culture, don’t directly address the principal underlying challenge in science: the fact that scientists are rewarded for publishing papers, and not for other ways of sharing knowledge. So although open science can learn a lot from the open culture movement, it also requires new thinking.
Notes
Some of the references that follow include webpag
es whose URLs may expire after this book is published. Such webpages should be recoverable using the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine (http://www.archive.org/web/web.php). Online sources are often written informally, and I’ve reproduced spelling and other errors verbatim when quoting such sources.
Chapter 1. Reinventing Discovery
p 1: Gowers proposed the Polymath Project in a posting to his blog [79]. For more on the Polymath Project, see [82].
p 2: Gowers’s announcement of the probable success of the first Polymath Project: [81].
p 2 The Polymath process was “to normal research as driving is to pushing a car”: [78].
p 3: The term collective intelligence was introduced by the philosopher Pierre Lévy [124]. A stimulating recent attempt to measure collective intelligence and to relate it to qualities of participants in the group is [243].
p 3 the process of science will . . . change more in the next twenty years than it has in the past 300 years: the author Kevin Kelly has made a similar claim in [108] (see also [109]): “There will be more change in the next 50 years of science than in the last 400 years.” There is some broad overlap in my reasoning and Kelly’s, e.g., we both emphasize the importance of collaboration and large-scale data collection. There are also some considerable differences in our reasoning, e.g., Kelly emphasizes changes such as triple-blind experiments, and more prizes in science, while I believe these will play a comparatively minor role in change, and that the following three areas are the most critical: (1) collective intelligence and data-driven science, and the way they change how science is done; (2) the changing relationship between science and society; and (3) the challenge of achieving a much more open scientific culture.
p 4: GenBank is at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/genbank/. The human genome is available at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/projects/genome/assembly/grc/human/index.shtml, and the haplotype map is available at http://hapmap.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/.