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A New Kind of Science Collaboration
Scientific American is running a major article on Science 2.0, or the use of Web 2.0 applications and techniques by scientists to collaborate and publish in new ways. "Under [the] radically transparent 'open notebook' approach, everything goes online: experimental protocols, successful outcomes, failed attempts, even discussions of papers being prepared for publication... The time stamps on every entry not only establish priority but allow anyone to track the contributions of every person, even in a large collaboration." One project profiled is MIT's OpenWetWare, launched in 2005. The wiki-based project now encompasses more than 6,100 Web pages edited by 3,000 registered users. Last year the NSF awarded OpenWetWare a 5-year grant to "transform the platform into a self-sustaining community independent of its current base at MIT... the grant will also support creation of a generic version of OpenWetWare that other research communities can use." The article also gives air time to Science 2.0 skeptics. "It's so antithetical to the way scientists are trained," one Duke University geneticist said, though he eventually became a convert.
Like what the internet was originally developed for by those physics chaps - before all the advertisers found out they could make money off it?
It's almost like going back in time to the future to go back in time.
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
No way I'm going to use that. Stealing data and claiming it to be yours is pretty common in the scientific world. I won't publish my data anywhere in any form but an article in a peer reviewed journal thank you. I worked hard to get my data and work out all the difficulties and I want the credit for it.
-- Cheers!
I love the idea of sharing information in this manner, but do we really have to call it Science 2.0? People might think that Science 1.0 was buggy.
... is as smart as all of us. I've seen it attributed to Vince Lombardi, an ancient Japanese proverb, and a few other sources but it's true.
I work for a Fortune 50 company that's doing the same kind of thing but writ large across the enterprise (not just in the science based portion of our business.)
It's in an embryonic state right now, and only time will tell if it works out - but the idea that resonated with me both with our knowledge sharing and with Science 2.0 was the idea that all of our collective expertise and knowledge can be brought to bear on a problem. If only we could rise above the competitiveness we could kick some serious ass in solving problems.
Ah well, it must be late. Time to stop dreaming of everyone singing "Kum Ba Yah." But maybe if a few more people read this... it might work...
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens.
Unless this funding model changes, the new openness will never happen.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
that peer-reviewed didn't just mean those that buy into scientific journals.
Citizens have produced some great scientific discoveries with little (or self) training. They should be treated as peers in the review process.
Finally, a start on reversing the trend of "commercializing" University research. The latter is an abhorrent practice, especially when funded by taxpayer money. One hopes this is just the beginning.
Who else looked at the title and went, "Oh God, Stephen Wolfram is involved, RUN LIKE HELL"?
Tomato wedge sperm darts that are Republican.
The whole point of "science" in the first place was that it only becomes science when observations are related and published in enough detail to allow for reproducible observations and experiments. Otherwise it doesn't matter. This is a natural progression of science using new technology, not some radical shift.
Except in so far as science is always in danger of drifting backwards towards alchemy and superstition and needs constant vigilance to keep it from becoming the domain of wizards and charlatans again.
It's clear that this is simply the next logic step in this discipline known as "Science". What a lot of people forget to understand about hardware technology and it's relationship to the Internet is that the Internet is simply allowing applications to develop very rapidly on a global level in any possible nook and cranny of human interaction on every level in anything. This will continue to accelerate as memory, cpu, space, and bandwidth capacities continue to double every 12-18 months with no real end in sight for at least one decade.
Thinking about how the Internet has changed the world in the past 15 years and how it will continue to do so in the next 50 years.
It's the natural tendency to use tools that speed up your work and therefore make you much more productive in your specific field. Naturally you gravitate towards things that help you stay at the top of the field.
It's like a great cultural revolution in every possible field every couple months/years as software gets better.
When the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.
Why is it a Wiki is the answer to everything? Why does a Wiki qualify as "Web 2.0" (what ever the hell that is).
It would seem to me that a researcher using a wiki could easily get lost in the endless back and forth bickering and sniping on the wiki. The research would be constantly diverted off topic, and and results obtained could never really be claimed as one's own.
Patent miners would arrived soon after any idea was discussed and you would have a hard time convincing a patent judge that a wiki which anyone can modify constitutes prior art.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Wolfram did not acknowledge almost any of the Scientists from whom he used the data for his book "A new kind of science" which was not new at all, books like that have been published since 1980s. Only in his book, he gave it a flashy title, and didn't give any of the Scientists from whom he stole the research articles, that was the only new thing about his book. He even stalled his grad student's dissertation nearly 4 years just so that he could be the first one to publish the law (that the grad student derived...) that bastard is a thief, if he has anything to do with "sharing publications and results online", no Scientist should be stupid enough to put his work within wolfram's grasp. That guys is a crackpot, and so are all his followers.
Precisely.
I assume the funding will also be equally shared among all the people documented to have contributed?
No, I didn't think so...
So much for Utopia.
The reason people withhold such information isn't that they are evil and trying to abuse their own work. It's that they know that others are happy to use up the value they've poured into the work and offer nothing in return.
As with free software and a lot of other such ideas, the problem isn't that this won't benefit a lot of people, the problem is that it's not looking out for the good people who have created the value. When the world is going out of its way to make sure researchers are well taken care of without the need for money, of course researchers will be happy to share this kind of thing without asking for recompense.
Making sure one has a way to pay one's own way in the world is not evil, it's pragmatically necessary and socially required. Charity is only possible when necessity is taken care of.
Kent M Pitman
Philosopher, Technologist, Writer
Although the Scientific community is thought of to be open by nature, some parts of it are extremely closed. Membership to certain groups, the journals that hog publication and distribution rights, and worst of all, the misrepresentation of research credit by professors (this is especially bad outside the USA).
Science 2.0 is a horrible name for something that has been bound to happen. If everyone blogs there is no hiding the truth. All of our observations can now be recorded and published without any sugar coating or room for manipulation, and this can be done for free. Add some portals (such as this MIT OpenWetWare specimen) and we have a self sustaining information machine that will have the latest dibs faster than anyone else directly from the source - much like, err, the internet.
So why the lag? I am guessing that we just had to wait for the internet generation to age and become professors. I do not credit Web 2.0 for any of this, and why you would call this Science 2.0 is beyond me. Maybe to impress the editor?
As a scientist, I have to say that this model is utterly beneficial. One of the greatest problems we run when trying to replicate experiments is that the dirty lab details are (intentionally or not) omitted from the fine print articles, making us lose quite a time figuring them out. Obviously it would disappear if such openness became the standard.
Although the idea of making science collaboratively is as old as science itself, it merits having a working model (just don't patent it!) and standing the principle quite out.
Oh and I *hate* this marketing way of naming everything like software versions.
entropy happens
...for people too lazy to read a scientific paper. And like other Wolfram ideas ignores existing precedent that a lot of clever organizational science exists now cf. the H. Genome Project. The scientific paper, in need of a little reform about credit, will prevail.
- students to apply such work to graduation requirements;
- postdocs to apply the work to faculty job applications;
- junior faculty to apply their contributions to tenure review;
then I think this could be a viable system. However, in academia, this is very unlikely for a very long time. It is amazing and wonderful that journals like PLoS are trending in that direction. And it is even better that MIT is pushing from the University side of the equation. But until Science 2.0 methods are explicitly taken into the incentive system of academic review, this type of approach is a non-starter for expensive, time consuming, experimental science. On the other hand, I could see this sort of approach being very useful for computational science. With much data already freely available, it is usually super quick to get certain types of data analyses done, though quality is frequently questionable. (Go to a journal club on a bioinformatics paper if you want hear academic work seriously shredded.) However, this kind of work responds rapidly to the sort of peer review described in TFA. So, perhaps science could start with the bioinformatics model and figure out how to meaningful track credit in that arena before applying the model to experimental work?I use OpenWetWare primarily to get protocols for experiments. It is quite handy as there are usually several protocols for doing the same thing or comments of how some people do step X or Y different. You can get a much faster overview of a method than the usual learn X only.. then much later you learn about Y and how it could have been a better way to do it.
No need to link to the Wikipedia article, already perused it. Why don't they just call it BBS 2008.26? I mean its the same damn thing.
I forgot, it won't make money if it doesn't have at least five buzz words behind it. Wasn't Web 2.0 originally a combination of Apache/MySQL/PHP? What happened to Java 11123.23423? Do I smell soap in the air????
And no offense, but doesn't the scientific community have Internet 2.0? Or is it Internet 2.dvds-tranfers-in-30-seconds-ha-we-do-it-in-ten-and-we've-been-talking-about-it-for-10-years-but-you'll-never-see-it-because-its-the-only-topic-we-have-for-conversation-while-trying-to-get-laid-next-pun-intended.36-12 stroke 9?
Hmm, just wondering.
I wonder what ever happened to it? The thing wearing that name now is OMNI without the scifi. I loved OMNI for what it was, and what it was was not Scientific American, and neither is this.
They can call it 2.0 all they want, but it's still the same web with the same handful of things people do, evolved to have more pretty widgets. Everything they mention here we did or could have done before, even pre-web.
I'm not buying it. I want my stuff peer reviewed, by qualified editors at the journals I submit to. I don't care what someone crawling in on a browser thinks. And I darn sure don't care what either of them thinks of it before I say it's ready to be looked at. Within my team, sure, we always have shared everything. At one time I was on a team using FIDOnet for communication and archiving. Same things being done, different ways to do it, and that's all just plain old history passing, not some revolutionary paradigm.
Oh, and before it was a "blog" it was a home page that someone didn't bother to break up into pieces and put onto other pages, as hyperlinking intended, and just kept adding on more and more stuff at the bottom. And we thought they were idiots.
So get your hands of my science, and stop sticking your silly little 2.0s all over it.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
I wonder if this could lead to a new model in science, a split, those who produce the data and those who digest it. To a small extent, this is already true in the HEP community. It could lead to an an exciting new era in research.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
Ask MIT's tech transfer office how many of their scientists working on commercial projects are posting their data on the OpenWetWare. I'll give you a hint it starts with a zero. You will never reverse the trend of commercialising University research. I'll tell you why. Research projects that are new and innovative, and have an immediate/significant effect on mankind always will have a commercial partner and become a commercial project. Commercial projects are funded by people who want a return on their investment, and therefore will not be prepared to disclose their data for peer review before they have filed their provisional patents. Universities want to be compensated for the provision of their facilities to conduct basic research. You want to take away their chance to make a dollar or two back for the millions they have spent on research that ends up providing no return? Based on the amount that I paid to go to college, I think that universities are doing a considerable amount of philanthropy. To all you scientists out there riding a white horse and slaying all of humanity's dragons, dont forget that you live in a capitalist system, the one that gives you enough free time to sit and blog and eat cheetos. MIT will be laughing when their new site gets enough hits from useless research projects to start making them a couple of bucks.
hmmmmm....interesting!!
Eclipse PDE and Me
ROLLOUT of the FULLY ROBOTIC WAGELESS ECONOMY where
no one works for anyone else since all work is done
by real robots instead of humans who were born to play all day.
http://roboeco.com/collaborate
The Future is already here, just unevenly distributed... THE ROBOTIC WAGELESS ECONOMY NOW! http://RoboEco.com/slash
Science 1.0:
Scientists, caught in the battle between funding and truth, and with insufficient oversight, sometimes find themselves tempted to manipulate experimental outcomes.
Science 2.0:
Ceiling Cat iz in ur lab, watching ur experimentz!
Too bad I don't see and computing (computer science or engineering) colleagues on the list of groups. We need real reform in our industry.
I pretty much gave up on academia in the computing field after becoming disgusted at what I saw in graduate school. We are by far the most unscientific engineering discipline around and it's costing us.
Encouraging release and discussion of negative results is by far the most useful thing this collaborative effort will bring. I can't tell you how many times I talked to students who all looked at the same thing and all concluded it didn't work. Researchers waste many hours rediscovering failures that other groups may have encountered years prior. But our ridiculous notion that any paper that doesn't show a 10% improvement is unpublishable means that this information never gets exchanged.
The other big failure in our field is the absolutely unreproduceable nature of results. So many assumptions go unstated in papers that it is impossible to recreate the experiment. Believe me, I've tried multiple times. I have yet to read a software engineering paper and try to implement the idea where I did not have some major question about how the thing is supposed to work.
Part of the problem is that the peer reviewers of these papers are not professors but rather their students. This has pluses and minuses. The students are often closer to the actual work than the professors and can have insights the professor will not. On the other hand, their relative lack of experience means that they aren't necessarily thinking about reproduceability or making sure all details are fully disclosed. The "peer" in "peer review" should include people at all levels in the discipline.
We need comprehensive reform in the computer science and engineering field. I would start with the following:
I'm sure there are more things to be done. I'd publish a paper about this but I can't prove a 10% improvement to the process.
80% of the posts are still going to be geeks shouting "First!"
I've had it up to HERE with two point oh. Enough already.
There is also a difference between commercializing publicly funded and publicly available information, and the relatively recent trend of patenting or otherwise "privatizing" the results of publicly-funded research so that only a few profit from the investments of many. The latter is more what I was referring to, and as far as I am concerned it is criminal.
I never wrote anything of the sort. Please read the rest of this thread.
What I was referring to was the destructive effects of the University and Small Business Patent Procedures Act, otherwise known as the Bayh-Dole Act, and trends that seem to follow it.
As I mentioned elsewhere in this thread, I have no problem with successful commercialization of publicly-funded information that is also publicly available. What I have a problem with is the "privatization" of research results that were paid for largely by tax money. It does NOT benefit society to have large corporations walk away with most of the gain from deals on patents and the like, when a large part of the research behind it was paid for by taxpayers... UNLESS they are competing for that profit along with everyone else with equal access to the relevant PUBLICLY FUNDED research.
Information that was paid for by the public belongs to the public (except in the rare cases of genuine national security concerns). Private interests, whether that means patents by professors and corporations or other "privatization" of publicly funded work, should not only NOT be sanctioned, it should carry a criminal penalty. While I support good pay for educators, if college or University professors want to get rich quick, then they should not be in the education business anyway. This is a serious mismatch.
IF, on the other hand, a commercial interest sees fit to, and finds a way to, profit from the PUBLICLY AVAILABLE INFORMATION resulting from publicly-funded University research, then more power to them. They are truly on the ball.
You say that the other system will not go away, but you forget (or perhaps did not know) that it worked the way I describe for a very long time, and that worked just fine. And in the process it benefitted taxpayers and society in general a lot better than the modern system since the Bayh-Dole Act.
If the current system (which from a societal standpoint is highly dysfunctional) remains, then society will find a way around it and leave it in the dust. It would not be the first time.