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.
Isn't it just.... (Score:4, Interesting)
It's almost like going back in time to the future to go back in time.
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Re:Isn't it just.... (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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Same difference. They moved from a company that made a reasonable profit publishing a few hardcopy journals to a company that functions as the gatekeeper to a much larger body of knowledge— where they really contribute very little any more, especially in comparison to their decreased costs. There are certainly less expensive ways to implement a referee model.
If you want to control scientific research, a good place to start would be to get a seat on the board of Elsevier.
My experience with this com
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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.
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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 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.)
I concur with you the hard sell: scientists wo
Re:Share and share alike (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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.
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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.
No it wouldn't. The default state of things is that every contributor holds copyright, if copyright applies at all, to his contributions.
Plus, GPL type of licensing would actually be a very sensible strategy for a project, precisely because it facilitates derivative works as long as they are themselves published under the GPL. However, you wouldn't want to use GPL for such endeavour, you'd better go for a non-NC creative commons license, that is, one that explicitly permits profits to be made from the wor
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can you imagine all the particle accelerators built suddenly merged into one?
Can you imagine how compromised into uselessness the one would be?
that and the money wont go to some rich prick who will spend it on cars he never drives
I would rather some rich prick get to not drive 10 farraris, so I can have the opportunity to drive a BMW instead of a yugo or whatever the "people's car" would be.
so yeah, go back to Soviet Russia where capitalism complains about you.
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Parent post confuses those who do research with those who charge money for the results. When you spend several hundred dollars for a subscription to an online journal, most of the money goes to Elsevier or another "publisher". Very little goes to the researchers who wrote the papers. In fact, they may well be paying for the opportunity to let Elsevier make money off of their work. This has become the driving force behind the shape of today's refereed journals, but that shape is far different from what a ref
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Credit (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Credit (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Credit (Score:4, Insightful)
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However, if the scientist is to publish A->B on a wiki, theres no stopping someone else stepping in and figuring out ->C->D. Whether this is better or not is debatable, but the point is scientist of the peer review paper is better off in terms of recognition.
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I think the benefits to science itself outweigh the personal objections in this case. Attribution is important, but we shouldn't allow it to interfere with progress.
The quicker others find out C->D, the quicker they can find out D->E->F and get on to F->G. In other words, it would make science move faster.
That might be the death of the traditional scientific paper... but I think it would lead to a more effective system. What we would instead have are communities where individual authors post
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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 (Score:5, Informative)
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 (Score:4, Interesting)
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).
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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).
I agree that there might be societal benefits from the second mathematician publicizing the work. However, this does not absolve him of the responsibility to acknowledge that the work is not his own, and to cite the first mathematician where appropriate. To do otherwise deprives the first mathematician of the recognition he deserves, and gives society an incorrect picture of the second mathematician's abilities.
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Firstly, I personally also agree that the second mathematician is not absolved from citing the first one even if society as a whole benefits from his transgression.
Secondly, I'd like to emphasize the other issue from my first post, which is that there is quite a bit of politics behind the supposedly objective scientific process. From another academic, I've heard stories of current biological research which didn't get published
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].
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"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."
Perhaps good examples how things are wrong. What great discovery is waiting on just some little tidbit of data being seen in a different light by someone other than the one who gather
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""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 of the easiest ways to defend against plagiarism, and some people actually do that.
Anyway, I think this is a great idea.
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What great discovery is waiting on just some little tidbit of data being seen in a different light by someone other than the one who gathered it.
Probably many great discoveries are waiting here, but also many many false positives. Peer review is a way to try to increase the signal to noise ratio in the scientific world, which is low enough as it is. Take that away and you'll maybe get a bit more useful stuff coming through, but you'll never be able to find it amongst all the crap.
People complain at the moment about the conflicting messages coming out of science. When the media can get their hands on anything any student or scientist wants to
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No way I'm going to use that. Stealing data and claiming it to be yours is pretty common in the scientific world. 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.
By "your data", you mean that all expenses of your research were covered by you? Including Salary/Stipend and Field/Lab work?
You see, if you have public funding, maybe the public should be aware that you are calling something payed with all our taxes as "yours".
Regards,
A PhD student funded with public money
PS - I know the this practice of appropriation of common goods is pervasive in science, I am not targeting you as an individual, but the majority science community which has the view of "my data, my prop
Science 2.0? (Score:2, Funny)
Needs Funding 2.0 to make it work (Score:2, Insightful)
Unless this funding model changes, the new openness will never happen.
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None of us... (Score:2)
I work for a Fortune 50 company that's doing the same kind of thing but writ large across the enterprise (not just in the science based portion of our business.)
It's in an embryonic state right now, and only time will tell if it works out - but the idea that resonated with me both with our knowledge sharing and with Science 2.0 was the idea that all of our collective e
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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.
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forums were opened to all comers?
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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 trained observer -- ie, one of the researcher's peers -- goes over the work and fails to find any mistakes, that can be taken as a decent indication that the work is of high quality.
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Yes, I am an English Major, too. I don't buy into post******ist theory, though...
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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 wou
THIS IS TREMENDOUS!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
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I agree with the other replyer, AND... (Score:2)
Airtime for Skeptics (Score:2, Insightful)
You misunderstood me (Score:2)
What I was referring to was the destructive effects of the University and Small Business Patent Procedures Act, otherwise known as the Bayh-Dole Act, and trends that seem to follow it.
As I mentioned elsewhere in this thread, I have no problem with successful commercialization of publicly-funded information that is also publicly available. What I have a problem with is the "privatization" of research results that were paid for larg
Let's have a poll (Score:4, Funny)
A new kind of science (Score:1)
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I heard Scientific American has dropped Bjorn Lomberg from its Friends List and made all future issues Friends Only too.
God help us all. I used to love reading my Dad's collection of back issues of SciAm from the 60's when I was a kid.
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.
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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.
Why would there be much or any? A wiki != wikipedia.
The research would be constantly diverted off topic, and and results obtained could never really be claimed as one's own.
Wikis work well when half the participants don't have the intelligence and social skills of a retarded goldfish.
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.
Why exactly? Wikis have history and if thats no less reliable than most other ways of storing information. Actually since it's in the public view and likely has many copies it's a better way of claiming prior art than most other methods. A bunch of old files on a floppy in the back of a drawer aren't going to beat it.
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Horrible name for a natural evolution. (Score:2)
Science 2.0 is a horrible name for something that has been bound to happen. If everyone blogs there is no hiding the truth. All of our observations can now be recorded and published without any sugar
The Cathedral And The Bazaar, anyone? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Re:The Cathedral And The Bazaar, anyone? (Score:4, Interesting)
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 (Score:5, Interesting)
- 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?Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
I think there is already significant incentive for young scientists to publici
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I have a great deal of respect for this approach to science, but interestingly not for any of the reasons you cite.
I believe that broadening collaboration (expanding collective knowledge) and rapid development (increasing the "effective population size" of a meme pool to use a popgen analogy) are much more compelling arguments for adopting this type of science than are problems publicizing work. If the "Science 2.0" becomes the norm, it is anybody's guess if the signal (work of students wanting their sci
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I believe that broadening collaboration (expanding collective knowledge) and rapid development (increasing the "effective population size" of a meme pool to use a popgen analogy) are much more compelling arguments for adopting this type of science than are problems publicizing work.
Couldn't agree more. I was just pointing out that there is incentive already for scientists to start doing this now, instead of waiting for big changes in how the reward system works.
I also think that any work worth doing is worth rewarding and/or scooping. Just because a young scientist may not have a thesis or project "worthy" of publishing in Science or Nature, doesn't mean other scientists in similar situations wouldn't be interested in reading that work or getting credit for it. A publication in a medium to low impact factor journal can count towards graduation in most places, and therefore is VERY valuable to an individual student.
I think the bars for work being valuable to an individual student and work being so good that someone else is going to secretly steal it, race you to the results, and publish first (e.g. "scoop you") are dramatically different. I'm not arguing that work that's not published in the tabloids isn't good work / valuable -- im j
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It just struck me that Google's page-ranking system might have some applicability to this problem. Not that I am claiming to know the details of their ranking system, but one could e
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Someone else sees the data, and because they are coming to it fresh, not so close to the data, and not exhausted by hard work (unlike you...), they instantly see something that you haven't yet seen.
Note that this is definitely better for the world... but who gets the credit? The accolades? The grants? The promotions?
And who gets the feeling of discovering something?
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Users of Consortium data, whether members of the Consortium or not, should be aware of the publication status of the data they use and treat them accordingly. For example, all investigators, including other Consortium members, should obtain the consent of the data producers before using unpublished data in their individual publications.
Any data collected by an ENCODE member lab, must be placed online immediately after verification. The verification step is usually an experimental replication, so the raw data goes into databases well before publication. By convention, the producers of the data have the first shot at publishing.
OpenWetWare (Score:3, Informative)
I remember SciAm (Score:2)
They can call it 2.0 all they want, but it's still the same web with the same handful of things people do, evolved to have more pretty widgets. Everything they mention here we did or could have done before, even pre-web.
I'm not buying it. I want my stuff peer reviewed, by qualified editors at the journals I submit to. I d
A new model (Score:3, Interesting)
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Open Wet Ware (Score:1)
It's About Time! (Score:1)
Too bad I don't see and computing (computer science or engineering) colleagues on the list of groups. We need real reform in our industry.
I pretty much gave up on academia in the computing field after becoming disgusted at what I saw in graduate school. We are by far the most unscientific engineering discipline around and it's costing us.
Encouraging release and discussion of negative results is by far the most useful thing this collaborative effort will bring. I can't tell you how many times I talked
I've Had It up to HERE (Score:1)