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.

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.

Needs Funding 2.0 to make it work

[EmbeddedJanitor]

Science has always had jealousy and competition for funding etc, but that is far more prevalent than it ever was. Most research establishments are funded by people with a vested interest. That prevents free thinking science. Can't publish stuff that might offend the funders. Can't do research that offends them.

Unless this funding model changes, the new openness will never happen.

It's about time..

[gQuigs]

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.

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

[LingNoi]

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:Isn't it just....

[regularstranger]

You speak as if scientists stopped using the Internet when advertisers started using it. Have something against advertisers? I do, but I doubt that scientists' use of the internet was influenced much by the availability of advertisements and teenage myspace accounts.

Science back to its roots

[bigpat]

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...

[DigitalisAkujin]

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....

[icebike]

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.

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:When the only tool you have is a hammer....

[Cap'n Refsmmat]

I think you hit the nail on the head there. Although I think part of the point of collaborative editing is that one individual can't claim all of the results. That's part of the deal.

Re:When the only tool you have is a hammer....

[TooMuchToDo]

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

Re:THIS IS TREMENDOUS!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a difference between commercializing the results of scientific research and commercializing the process of scientific research.

Airtime for Skeptics

[caino]

Ask MIT's tech transfer office how many of their scientists working on commercial projects are posting their data on the OpenWetWare. I'll give you a hint it starts with a zero. You will never reverse the trend of commercialising University research. I'll tell you why. Research projects that are new and innovative, and have an immediate/significant effect on mankind always will have a commercial partner and become a commercial project. Commercial projects are funded by people who want a return on their investment, and therefore will not be prepared to disclose their data for peer review before they have filed their provisional patents. Universities want to be compensated for the provision of their facilities to conduct basic research. You want to take away their chance to make a dollar or two back for the millions they have spent on research that ends up providing no return? Based on the amount that I paid to go to college, I think that universities are doing a considerable amount of philanthropy. To all you scientists out there riding a white horse and slaying all of humanity's dragons, dont forget that you live in a capitalist system, the one that gives you enough free time to sit and blog and eat cheetos. MIT will be laughing when their new site gets enough hits from useless research projects to start making them a couple of bucks.

Re:Credit

[John Newman]

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:Credit

[cp.tar]

""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.

Re:It's about time..

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not always going to be appropriate. Papers should be reviewed by people who have some understanding of the subject matter.
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...

[PachmanP]

None of us is as smart as all of us... And nothing is dumber than a crowd or more dangerous than a mob! Yay for platitudes!