Reinventing Discovery_ The New Era of Networked Science - Michael Nielsen [127]
p 196: Regarding the development of new tools for the construction of knowledge, I’ve placed most of the onus on scientists to build these tools. You might object that developing such tools is the job of academic libraries and scientific publishers. However, there are many reasons to think that the right place for such tools to originate is with scientists themselves. Consider, for example, that nearly all the examples I’ve described in this book — from the Polymath Project to GenBank to the arXiv — were created by scientists. Libraries and scientific publishers are not, for the most part, set up to work on such risky and radical innovations. Instead, they’re oriented toward steady improvements to existing ways of doing things. While the libraries and publishers employ many talented people, when those people try to develop radically new tools they often find themselves battling tremendous institutional inertia. As a result, the best place for new tools to originate is with scientists themselves. I believe the appropriate role for libraries and publishers is later, as partners who can help sustain and further develop the most successful tools. This is exactly what has happened with projects such as the arXiv and GenBank, which were started by scientists, but whose growth and further development came through partnerships with the Cornell University Library and the US National Library of Medicine, respectively.
p 196: Continuing the theme of the last note, you might also wonder if developing new software tools might not be a job for a centralized agency. This has been tried in biology, for example, where many software tools are developed at the US’s National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), itself a part of the US National Library of Medicine. The NCBI is responsible for running GenBank and has also helped pioneer or support many other important online biological databases. But while the NCBI provides a valuable service, it also centralizes innovation, and drives out potential competitors, who cannot hope to compete with the deep pockets of the NCBI. Over the long run, I believe that science needs a more decentralized approach to innovation.
p 196: On the limits to mering science, see [154].
p 198: On expectations about privacy, ethics, safety and legality, those expectations will, of course, evolve. Sites such as Patients Like Me (http://patientslikeme.com) ask medical patients to voluntarily share their medical information, and many patients have done so, in part so that the information can be used for research purposes.
p 198: The Grothendieck quote is from [85]. See also the discussion in chapter 18 of [200], where I learned of this quote.
p 198: The problem of managing attention in collaboration has been studied experimentally in [76]. Their results are consistent with the analysis here, and show that group problem solving may actually become less effective if everyone communicates with everyone else.
p 200: An account of the Trenberth email, together with a link to the (apparently genuine) original email, may be found in [44]. Trenberth’s original paper [225] is quite readable.
p 201: On the management of the Kepler data, see [91, 166]. For the February 2011 announcement of Earth-size planets, see [129]. Note that in September 2010 another team independently announced [232] finding an Earth-like planet, around the star Gliese 581. This discovery has since been contested [110].
p 201: Dorigo’s announcement that he was hearing rumors that the Higgs particle had been discovered is in [54], and his retraction is in [55]. Coverage in the mainstream media includes [47, 41].
p 202: A discussion of the history of the classification of the finite simple groups is given in [201]. The current status of the classification is discussed in [5].
p 203 How can other scientists verify and reproduce the results from such experiments?: See, e.g., [205], and references therein.
p 203: On “science beyond individual understanding,” see [155].
p 203 Worldwide, our governments