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

[regularstranger]

But you probably acquire quite a bit of data that doesn't get used for your peer-reviewed articles (maybe you got results that don't seem interesting). Would you consider putting that data on these websites so that other people could at least verify your "non-interesting" results, or know not to bother with the experiment? Even if you don't find a use for it, somebody somewhere might.

THIS IS TREMENDOUS!!!

[Jane Q. Public]

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.

Share and share alike

[NetSettler]

Like what the internet was originally developed for by those physics chaps - before all the advertisers found out they could make money off it?

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.