Reinventing Discovery_ The New Era of Networked Science - Michael Nielsen [97]
In an ideal world, we’d achieve a kind of extreme openness. That means expressing all our scientific knowledge in forms that are not just human-readable, but also machine-readable, as part of a data web, so computers can help us find meaning in our collective knowledge. It means opening the scientific community up to the rest of society, in a two-way exchange of information and ideas. It means an ethic of sharing, in which all information of scientific value is put on the network. And it means allowing more creative reuse and modification of existing work. Such extreme openness is the ultimate expression of the idea that others should be able to build upon and extend the work of individual scientists, perhaps in ways they themselves would never have conceived. In practice, there will need to be some limits—think of concerns such as patient confidentiality in medical research—and we’ll discuss those limits in the next chapter. But even within those limits, the openness I am advocating would be a giant cultural shift in how science is done, a second open science revolution extending and completing the first open science revolution, of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the next chapter, we’ll discuss how this more open culture can be achieved.
An Aside on Commercialization and Secrecy in Science
In this chapter, we’ve seen how scientists’ strong commitment to papers as the ultimate expression of scientific discovery is inhibiting new and better ways of doing science. But for some scientists there’s an additional inhibition, and that’s a need for secrecy because they’re pursuing patents and commercial spin-offs from their work. As an example, from 2001 to 2003 I was part of a large research center working on quantum computing. Although the center was a long way from producing a commercial product, the center’s leaders hoped that one day there would be such spin-offs. When scientists attended research seminars at the center, they were (for a while) asked to sign nondisclosure agreements promising not to talk with other people about the content of the seminars. Many scientists at the center meticulously documented their work in notebooks where each page was dated and signed by center officials, to help establish priority in the event of later patent applications. Such secretiveness may help lead to commercial success. But it’s impossible for such a culture to coexist with the open collaborative atmosphere that is seen in, for example, the Polymath Project, or that is required for wiki-, ato succeed.
Such commercially driven secrecy is relatively new in our universities, where most basic research is done. Indeed, until quite recently, universities focused most of their scientific research effort on basic research without immediate commercial application. This has changed over the past few decades, in large part because of a piece of legislation called the Bayh-Dole Act, passed by the US Congress in 1980. What Bayh-Dole did was to give US universities (rather than the government, as was formerly the case) ownership of patents and other intellectual property produced with the aid of government grants. After Bayh-Dole passed, many universities began to broaden their focus beyond basic research, supporting more applied research in the hope of making money from commercial spin-offs. Simultaneously, and for the same reason, there was also an increase in patents related to the basic research conducted at universities. Many other countries have followed the US