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.

Comments

Re:Credit

[quanticle]

That's exactly the sort of thing this new openness initiative is trying to prevent. Currently, while your paper is waiting in the publication queue, your data is at risk for being used without credit. If you confront the other person, it turns into a he-said, she-said dispute, as neither side has the evidence needed to prove plagiarism, rather than independent discovery. With an initiative like this, you can get your data and experimental procedure out there earlier in the process, making it much clearer that you were the first to discover or research in the area that you're working on.

I guess the best analogy I can make is the distinction between patents and trade secrets. With patents you publish early and notify the world that you're investigating a certain area. In return, the world recognizes that any other discoveries made in this area can be conceivably based of your original research and that you should be compensated. This is similar to putting up your experiments on the OpenWetWare site. You're announcing to everyone what you're working on, and potentially giving away your ideas, but, if you're the first, you can establish your primacy much more easily later on.

The traditional model of keeping research secret until publication is like the trade-secret model of intellectual property protection. You get a lot more control over who sees your data and experimental method, but, if someone unsavory makes off with said data, you have far fewer options for censuring them.