A New Kind of Science Collaboration 96
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.
Re:Credit (Score:5, Insightful)
Needs Funding 2.0 to make it work (Score:2, Insightful)
Unless this funding model changes, the new openness will never happen.
It's about time.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Citizens have produced some great scientific discoveries with little (or self) training. They should be treated as peers in the review process.
THIS IS TREMENDOUS!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Credit (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Isn't it just.... (Score:2, Insightful)
Science back to its roots (Score:3, Insightful)
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... (Score:3, Insightful)
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.... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Share and share alike (Score:5, Insightful)
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:When the only tool you have is a hammer.... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:When the only tool you have is a hammer.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:THIS IS TREMENDOUS!!! (Score:1, Insightful)
Airtime for Skeptics (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Credit (Score:4, Insightful)
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:Credit (Score:3, Insightful)
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 of the easiest ways to defend against plagiarism, and some people actually do that.
Anyway, I think this is a great idea.
Re:It's about time.. (Score:1, Insightful)
For example, unless you know about dynamical systems, optimisation, discontinuous ODEs, functional analysis and operator theory, you simply won't be able to review my thirty page math paper on the use of sub-gradients in discontinuous differential equations for control systems. It will be completely foreign to you. If I had to write it so you would be able to understand it, it would be the size of a book.
Re:None of us... (Score:2, Insightful)