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.

Isn't it just....

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.

Share and share alike

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:

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.

Thorough analysis of a page can clearly show who did what. A scientist may have made only one ed

Re:Share and share alike

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.

Re:Isn't it just....

The initial direction of HTTP and the WWW was to promote freely available access to scientific papers.

Then something very unexpected and very strange happened. Elsevier and its ilk arose out of the brew. Now scientific papers are accessible only to those with institutions that can afford to pay the gatekeepers.

For want of an understanding of the denizens that lurk in markets, scientists have lost the way to realize their dream for the WWW.

It would appear that scientific training, with its emphasis on demonstrable truths, is of little benefit when dealing with adversaries that are comfortable with using smokes and mirrors as weapons.

It's about time..

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.

Re:

No, they shouldn't. That's not to say they have nothing to contribute; obviously they do.

If an untrained observer finds a mistake in the work, then that's useful. If an untrained observer fails to find any mistakes, that says nothing. If a suitably tr

THIS IS TREMENDOUS!!!

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.

Let's have a poll

Who else looked at the title and went, "Oh God, Stephen Wolfram is involved, RUN LIKE HELL"?

Science back to its roots

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.

Clear to me...

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....

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.

Re:

Wiki is the hammer used on everything because many believe open collaboration is the key to the success of many different projects and ideas.

The Cathedral And The Bazaar, anyone?

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.

Re:The Cathedral And The Bazaar, anyone?

That's intentional for a variety of reasons.

1) Journal articles are generally supposed to be concise explanations of your research findings. Not a thorough documentation of your lab procedures. I agree that most papers should go into more depth than they actually do, although omitting a detailed explanation of your experimental procedures is perfectly acceptable because:

2) Eliminating the nitty-gritty details forces you to create your own experimental procedure to verify the results. This greatly helps when attempting to find/isolate flaws in the original researcher's findings that may be due to faults in his procedures. A decent paper should at the very least provide a "roadmap" for repeating the experiment.

3) If this all fails, phone up the original author of the paper, and tell him that you're having trouble repeating 'X' part of his experiment. More likely than not, he'll be flattered that you've taken an interest in his research, and will be happy to assist you, as external verification will greatly increase his reputation and validity of the paper. Conversely, he really doesn't want somebody to publish a paper stating that his findings were not reproducible.

Tradeoffs

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?

OpenWetWare

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.

A new model

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.

Re:Credit

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.

Re:Credit

Sounds to me like the opposite is true, because everything is timestamped it's very easy to tell and claim that the work is yours.

Re:

What nonsense, they'd have to describe how they got to B in the first place at which point you could see that they've taken your work.

The "old" system is just as bad for theft anyway so it can't get any worse. You make it sound like the end of the world.

Re:Credit

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.

Re:Credit

Reality is a little more complex than that. Even though the following story doesn't match the scenario which you are talking about, where someone steals the current work of an active academic, I think it brings up other issues which you ignore.

I know of a case where a Russian mathematician published an original result in Russian but then left academia and his result got little publicity, except in Russia. Many years later, a German mathematician (who is known to be able to read Russian) "rediscovered" and republished the first mathematician's work without giving him credit (obviously, since the second mathematician really did not add anything of significance, and in fact, didn't even change the original notation much). The mathematical discovery in question has therefore become much more well-known in the mathematics world (since the second mathematician is in academia, so he is constantly lecturing about it in conferences, and such).

The first mathematician (disclaimer: I know him personally and heard the story from him) is of course very upset about all of this, but claims to actually have very little recourse, because he is no longer an academic, and therefore has practically zero political power in the academic circles involved. He still has a few friends here and there, and found out about the story from one of them.

Now from the point of view of kiddie good/evil, it's clear that the second mathematician has sided with the "dark side" (if we believe the first mathematician's opinion, that the second one is merely stealing his results). But from a different point of view, by stealing the first mathematician's work and publicizing it (as his own) he may be doing society a favor by enabling a possibly significant result to gain more recognition (i.e., that might be worth more to society than the damage caused to society by the second mathematician getting more grant money, etc., than he actually deserves).

Re:Credit

hat'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.

This sounds like a good way to get hosed out of any credit for developing an interesting idea. The way the process works now in biology is that you first have the flash of an unexpected result or an interesting insight. You then spend weeks to months hashing out the significance of this new idea and planning experiments to flesh it out. Those experiments then take months to years to complete. Somewhere in the middle of those months to years, you realize that the idea will work out, and that completing the line of inquiry will land you in a prominent journal or propel your career. You then spend further months to years actually getting the first chunk of data into a journal. (This for a successful idea - of course, the idea can fail at any juncture.)

Today, your risk of being scooped is mostly towards the end of this process, after the idea has cleared most doubt and after the experiments are sufficiently advanced for you to begin presenting the data at conferences and submitting it to journals. You can build up a two-three year head start in blood, sweat and tears (i.e. painfully worked out protocols and accumulated materials) that make it difficult for all but the largest labs to catch up, should they so desire.

In this transparent world, your idea would be out there from day #1. At the latest, from the first experiments. At that point you have no lead and no investment, and *anyone* can swoop in and develop your idea faster than you can. When it comes down to a race, he with the most postdocs wins, and that's not you. Sure, you can try to take credit for the flash of insight. But who is the community (and the tenure board) going to reward - the guy who claimed to think of it first (maybe everyone else had already thought of it, but deemed it too trivial to comment on...) or the guy who does the actual work to *prove* it? Under the current model you have few good recourses for complaint, but under this model you'll never have standing to complain in the first place.

The traditional model of lab-secret research is the worst possible model except all others that have been proposed. It's the only way for the "little guy with a big idea" to make way in the world without bringing research to a grinding halt with something like patents [shudder].

Re:

""It's so antithetical to the way scientists are trained," one Duke University geneticist said, though he eventually became a convert." "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."

Intriguing.

I live and study in Croatia, where it is not that uncommon that a professor takes his student's work, puts his name on it and doesn't even credit the student for any work whatsoever. Publishing whatever you've done on the internet seems one o