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Reinventing Discovery
Michael NielsenOpen Science Summit, July 2010
http://michaelnielsen.org/blog @michael_nielsen
open science
open dataopen process
open community
27 January 2009
Tim Gowers
mathematician at Cambridge
Fields medallist
attack a hardmathematical problem
completely in the open
comment section of his blog as the
medium of collaboration
anyone could comment
Polymath Project
density Hales-Jewett theorem
“love to solve”
XXX – rules of engagement (circle)
rules of collaboration
two broad themes
be polite
just a single idea in each comment
even if half-baked
discouraged from doingextensive work in private
Opened conversation up on Feb 1...
37 days
27 contributors
800 comments
170,000 words
“to normal research asdriving is to
pushing a car”
We had all the expertise to solve Gowers’s problem
latent
co-ordinated attention in a new way, activating latent expertise
restructured expert attention
expert attention is often the mostimportant scarce resource in
solving creative problems
By restructuring it we can amplify our collective intelligence...
... extendour problem-solving ability.
explosion in the rate ofscientific progress
Failing
Failed
Failed
FailedFailed
Failed
science comment sites?
Failed
scientific social networks?
“Facebook for scientists”
Failed
little incentive for scientists to contribute
why share knowledge on a science wiki when:
They’re not very goodIt might help your competitors
You won’t get any academic credit for it
When we share results in journalpapers, we give something up...
... but we get a reputational reward in return.
When we contribute to a science wiki or comment site or otherwise share ideas, data, & code, we give something up...
... and we don’t get enough reputational reward for it to be practical
New media have great potential...
...but unless there’s rewardfor contribution, the opportunity
cost leads people to do other things
What’s successful....
...projects such as the Polymath Project which have
conventional scientific ends (papers)
missing some big opportunities
How to move to a more open system?
Individually, it’s daunting to act
... benefits of open sciencecome from co-operation with others
we can’t individually cause mass co-operation
It’s like trying to change the sideof the road everyone drives on
by changing sides yourself
Sweden, 3 Sep 1967
A very similar situation aroseat the dawn of science...
“Exploitation of the mass medium [books]was more common among pseudoscientistsand quacks than among Latin-writing professional scientists, who often witheldtheir work from the press.”
- Elizabeth Eisenstein
restoring force on a spring is proportionalto extension
published in 1676 as an anagram: ceiiinossssttuurevealed in 1678 as the Latin ut tensio, sic vis
“as the extension, so the force”
Hooke’s Law
if someone else made the same discovery,
Hooke could reveal the anagram, and claim
priority, without having shared his initial discovery
Galileo, Huygens and Newton also employed anagrams
atcgataacgtt
discoveries were routinely kept secret
A secretive culture of discovery was a natural consequence of a society in which there was
often little personal gain in sharing discoveries.
The scientific advances in the time of Hooke and Newton motivated patrons such as the government to subsidize
science as a profession.
The public benefit was strongest if scientific discoveries were freely shared
It took several decades to achieve therequired social change...
... a scientific culture which rewards the sharing
of discoveries – in scientific journals! – with jobs and prestige for the discoverer.
a discovery not published in a scientific journal was not truly complete
MichaelFaraday
WilliamCrookes“Work. Finish. Publish.”
the first open science revolution
achieved by subsidizing scientists who published their
discoveries in journals.
That same subsidy now inhibitsthe adoption of more effective technologies...
...because it continues to incentivize scientists to
share discoveries in older media
One template for change
Create new ways of earning a reputation
preprints have begun to attainstatus as an end in themselves in physics
Preprints could be seen merely asa step toward “real” publication
that’s (slowly) changing
SPIRES keeps track of citations both between
arXiv preprints and regular journal articles
SPIRES makes it possible to demonstrate the impact of your work,
even if it’s not “published”
Many physicists now put evenunpublished preprints on their CVs
Make preprints citable, and the impact measurable
More open science
datacode
new types of reputation
questionsideas
small,but real
can lead to a more open scientific system
second open science revolution
Thankyouhttp://michaelnielsen.org/blog
@michael_nielsen
open science
open dataopen process
open community
cosmological census
recruiting online volunteers
classify galaxy images
spiral or elliptical?
humans still surpass the
best computers
More than 250,000 volunteers...
... have done more than 150 million
classifications of 930,000 galaxies
16 scientific papers
Hanny van Arkel
“What’s the blue stuff below?”
Hanny van Arkel
No-one knew
Hanny van Arkel
followup observations
Hanny van Arkel
quasar light mirror
Aida Berges
500 galaxies per week + forum posts+ participates in several side projects
From the DominicanRepublic, lives in
Puerto Rico
Aida Berges
“I went to Galaxy Zoo...and my life changed forever…
It was like coming home for me.”
From the DominicanRepublic, lives in
Puerto Rico
broadening who can be a scientist
Scientific community Society as a whole
open access
citizen science
Bridging institutions
science blogs
news sites
????
Online tools are institution-generating machines...
... change the relationship between science and society
open science
open dataopen process
open community
scaled up
scientific conversation
Polymath is a small part of a much bigger transformation
transformation in how discoveries are made
by new tools for sharing ideas and data on the network
Newton claimed to have invented
calculus in the 1660s and 1670s,
but didn’t publish until 1693