Reinventing Discovery_ The New Era of Networked Science - Michael Nielsen [92]
What caused this change from a closed, secretive culture of discovery to the modern culture of science, where scientists are eager to publish their best results as quickly as possible? What happened is that the great scientific advances in the seventeenth century motivated wealthy patrons to begin subsidizing science as a profession. This motivation came in part from the public benefit delivered by scientific discoveries, and also in part from the prestige conferred on leaders (such as the Medici) by association with such discoveries. Both motives were best served if discoveries were widely shared through a medium such as the scientific journal. As a result, patrons demanded a shift toward a scientific culture in which it is the sharing of discoveries that is rewarded with jobs and prestige for the discoverer. This transformation was just beginning in the time of Galileo, but two centuries after Galileo’s death the culture had changed so much that when the great nineteenth-century physicist Michael Faraday was asked the secret of his success, he replied that it could be summed up in three words: “Work. Finish. Publish.” By that time a discovery not published in a scientific journal was not truly complete.
The transformation from a closed, secretive culture of discovery to the more open culture of modern science was one of the most momentous events in history. It resulted in the widespread adoption and growth of the scientific journal system. That system, modest at first, has blossomed into a rich body of shared knowledge for our civilization, a collective long-term memory that is the basis for much of human progress. This system for sharing knowledge has worked tremendously well, and has changed only slowly over the past 300 years.
Today, as we’ve seen, online tools present a new opportunity, an opportunity to create a collective short-term working memory, a conversational commons for the rapid collaborative development of ideas. At the same time, these tools give us an opportunity to greatly extend and enrich our collective long-term memory. These are tremendously exciting and promising opportunities. We’ve already seen how open data from projects such as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey is laying the groundwork for a data web that will change the way we explain the world. And we’ve seen how projects such as Galaxy Zoo, Foldit, and the arXiv are changing the relationship between science and society. But although such examples are encouraging, they fall far short of the potential of networked science. There’s a fundamental bottleneck that must be overcome for that potential to be realized. We glimpsed that bottleneck earlier, in the reluctance shown by some scientists to share their data, and in the early lack of interest scientists showed in Wikipedia. Unfortunately, these are not isolated examples, but rather are symptomatic of a more deeply rooted resistance many scientists have to working online. This resistance is holding science back in much the same way that the secretive culture of discovery inhibited science in the seventeenth century. To understand the nature of that resistance, let’s take a closer look at some promising-but-failed examples of online tools for scientists.
Science Wikis
Although scientists were reluctant to contribute to Wikipedia in its early days, as Wikipedia has grown, it has inspired several scientists to introduce wikis focused on scientific discovery. An example of such a project