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

Isn't it just....

[Fluffeh]

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.

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.

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.

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.

Re:Share and share alike

[NetSettler]

Well, wouldn't the information on a scientific wiki/collaboration be covered under a GPL? That would prevent someone from using your contributions for profit.

Copyright protects the form of an expression, not the content of the expression. You can't copyright an idea or a fact. You can only copyright the words you used to express it.

If you have a brilliant idea, patenting can get you some rights, but patenting rewards the first to submit an application. You could propose that the global science/wiki-thing should be the patent office, and propose that the first to edit an idea in would always get the money. But the next day the wiki would be full of random junk put there by speculators, and you'd be sued for removing a single word of it. So since it wouldn't work for this to be the patent office, you'd either still have the patent office (and someone watching for edits would be submitting patent applications) or else you'd have to get rid of patents as an obsolete thing--eliminating another source of funding.

By the way, I absolutely don't believe the goal should be to keep people from profiting. I'm totally for the idea of profit. I just think that the people who contribute the work must be among those who profit!

Even if copyright would work for this, the GPL is a terrible model. In practice, you're forbidden from charging if you built your work on anyone else's--and it's just plain too administratively complicated to actually pay all those underlying people. So everyone throws up their hands and just gives it all away and that's that. I'm not saying it's impossible to make money under GPL, I'm just saying I doubt any claim that the contributors will be routinely well taken care of.

I don't want Scientists to have to have jobs as cooks, janitors, etc. just to earn a living wage. I want them to spend as much of their time doing what they do best, and I want us to reward them for it directly, not make them have to spend their free time (or even their full time) chasing money so they can squeeze in a little time doing Science if there's any time left at the end of chasing money.

Nor do I think it would be good for them to resort to "applied science" for their money. Science and its applications are different things. Basic research is not the same as product development, and the two should not be confused.

I don't even think it would be bad to have a few millionaire scientists. Money runs the world, and no amount of giving stuff away will fix that. The people who are a threat to Science have plenty of money; if Science doesn't find ways to enrich some of its own, it won't have the power to hold the forces of anti-Science at bay.

Thorough analysis of a page can clearly show who did what. A scientist may have made only one edit, but that edit may have been the missing component of a crucial piece of research. The records would clearly show this (as anyone who has ever checked through the backlogs of a wiki article can attest to).

True. But no one would care. Once the information was out, people would argue it wasn't valuable, or that it was obvious. Or that they were about to come out with the same thing. People pay for what is scarce, and the moment you publish something world-wide, it is not scarce.

I'm not saying I want scientific research to be scarce. I'm saying I want scientists not to be scarce. And asking them to give up any financial incentive for doing their work doesn't sound like a recipe for motivating people to contribute to science.

If you're imagining a promise up-front that you'd be paid if you just contributed something, even something "important", I'd like to see the wording of that promise before I'd bother to discuss it, because I doubt any such promise is forthcoming.

The Cathedral And The Bazaar, anyone?

[iris-n]

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.

Tradeoffs

[LwPhD]

As a professional academic scientist who does both experimental and computational projects, I think there is a very good argument that for many types of science, this sort of approach will fail miserably, even after the technology to take care of it is completely mature. For example, take a genomics project of moderate complexity and moderately broad interest. Such a project may not be SO important or SO interesting or SO difficult as to require an entire consortium of scientists to complete. However, it may be sufficiently complex that it will require coordinated experiments that will cost into the 10s of thousands of dollars and require more than a man year of work to complete. In such cases, it is almost always best for a single lab to do all experiments (for quality control reasons). If a lab were to complete all experiments at great expensive (for a regular lab), why would they then give up that data immediately for others to work on? Sure, it would be quicker, and more insights would come faster. But to be perfectly honest, this would probably decrease the ability for that lab to promote its members by getting priority with good publications. Currently (at least in genomics) there is no way to reward a scientist through contribution to the community in this way. Now, if a way to award credit for this type of work were to be created that allowed:

• 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?