4 ms·

I was hoping that this article would restrain itself to arguing for open, publicly-readable journals. Baby steps, folks. Gotta walk before you run and all that.

I was hoping that this article would restrain itself to arguing for open, publicly-readable journals. Baby steps, folks. Gotta walk before you run and all that. Mandating open journals is practical. Convincing the current community of, say, biologists to share their raw data is not. I don't think molecular biologists would literally poison each other rather than divulge their sequence data prior to its publication in a major journal, but they'd consider it. The system of funding and promotion is going to have to undergo a very big shift before this dream comes to life. (Although I suspect it will come to life, eventually.)

hugh3 15y ago
Biggest factor left out: laziness. I have no philosophical objection to sharing all my raw data just on the offchance somebody wants to look through terabytes of wavefunction data. But it'd take time and effort to organise it all. It's enough trouble for me just to get the relevant and important bits ready for publication, I don't want to sort through all my raw data as well.
- zerostar07 15y ago
  Lazyness because there is no incentive. Again, the open source analogy comes handy: I usually write hugely embarrassing code for my projects, but if i had to open source it, not only would i write better, i might actually discover errors hitherto undetected. Equivalently, people would triple-check their data to avoid being embarrassed. That would also signal a shift from the "publish or perish" madness to "just publish good", which is huge.
- michael_nielsen 15y ago
  This factor is not left out, it's at the core of the article: "Even if you personally think it would be far better for science as a whole if you carefully curated and shared your data online, that is time away from your "real" work of writing papers. Except in a few fields, sharing data is not something your peers will give you credit for doing." There is no question that in most (not all) fields it is not yet in an individual scientist's best interest to spend a lot of time systematically sharing data. The question is: might it sometimes be in the community's best interest? This argument played out, for example, with the human genome in the 1990s, where many scientists were initially reluctant to share data (little individual reward for the time and effort). Ultimately, grant agencies required very early-stage sharing, something almost everyone would agree has benefited science as a whole. The point of the article is that there needs to be a change to bring individual incentives for this kind of systematic sharing into alignment with the community's best interest.
- TheEzEzz 15y ago
  That's what grad students are for.
zerostar07 15y ago
Maybe it won't change at all in the end. The situation is not much different than, say, commercial software: You don't expect paid programmers to release their code in the open as long as they can take advantage of it for making money, but when that stops, they do. Similarly, researchers will use it for funding, promotions, prestige etc. However, the problem with academics is that even "archived" science remains closed, not just the papers, but also the raw data. So it would be a big step forward regardless. We need a worldwide repository for scientific exchange. The web is ready with open arms, but researchers are not.
forcefsck 15y ago
OP posted this article with a title emphasizing Publicly funded science. There is no excuse for not sharing data acquired with the help of public funds.
- nialo 15y ago
  The point isn't whether there's an excuse or not. It's just that in practice it is better tactics to try for just open journals first. This isn't a moral argument, it's a pragmatic one.
  - forcefsck 15y ago
    I thought the main issue of the article was that scientists don't bother making the raw data accessible, not just where they publish their papers.
michael_nielsen 15y ago
The open access to publication argument already has nearly unstoppable momentum. In 2008 the NIH --- by far the world's largest funding agency, with a $30+ billion dollar a year budget --- adopted a policy requiring that all NIH-funded research be made openly accessible within 12 months of publication. See, e.g.: http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/nihfaq.htm http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/nihfaq.htm Similar policies have been enacted by all 7 of the Research Councils in the UK. And there are many more such policies in place at institutions all over the world, including Harvard, MIT, Princeton, and many others. A treasure trove of information about open access is Peter Suber's website. See, for example, his timeline: http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/timeline.htm http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/timeline.htm The timeline stops in 2008 (he changed jobs), but if you look at progress up to that point, it's clear that this has enormous and rapidly increasing buy-in at grant agencies, libraries (who are the main "customer" for journals, in that they pay) and major universities. It will be very difficult for other parties to stop this change, provided people continue to work for it. At this point, momentum is starting to build for more open data, and also for other kinds of systematic online sharing of research information. Why not give researchers an incentive to (say) upload online videos showing how certain lab experiments are done? At least in some labs there's stuff that's very difficult to describe in a paper, but easy to show in a video. And so this would be very valuable. (There are initiatives underway to do this, e.g.: http://www.jove.com/ http://www.jove.com/ ) I entirely agree with your final point - "The system of funding and promotion is going to have to undergo a very big shift before this dream comes to life". There's enough traction now within universities to start to have this discussion. Certainly, some senior scientists are dismissive; but many are extremely interested, and engaged.

hugh3 15y ago

Biggest factor left out: laziness. I have no philosophical objection to sharing all my raw data just on the offchance somebody wants to look through terabytes of wavefunction data. But it'd take time and effort to organise it all. It's enough trouble for me just to get the relevant and important bits ready for publication, I don't want to sort through all my raw data as well.

zerostar07 15y ago
Lazyness because there is no incentive. Again, the open source analogy comes handy: I usually write hugely embarrassing code for my projects, but if i had to open source it, not only would i write better, i might actually discover errors hitherto undetected. Equivalently, people would triple-check their data to avoid being embarrassed. That would also signal a shift from the "publish or perish" madness to "just publish good", which is huge.
michael_nielsen 15y ago
This factor is not left out, it's at the core of the article: "Even if you personally think it would be far better for science as a whole if you carefully curated and shared your data online, that is time away from your "real" work of writing papers. Except in a few fields, sharing data is not something your peers will give you credit for doing." There is no question that in most (not all) fields it is not yet in an individual scientist's best interest to spend a lot of time systematically sharing data. The question is: might it sometimes be in the community's best interest? This argument played out, for example, with the human genome in the 1990s, where many scientists were initially reluctant to share data (little individual reward for the time and effort). Ultimately, grant agencies required very early-stage sharing, something almost everyone would agree has benefited science as a whole. The point of the article is that there needs to be a change to bring individual incentives for this kind of systematic sharing into alignment with the community's best interest.
TheEzEzz 15y ago
That's what grad students are for.

zerostar07 15y ago

Maybe it won't change at all in the end. The situation is not much different than, say, commercial software: You don't expect paid programmers to release their code in the open as long as they can take advantage of it for making money, but when that stops, they do. Similarly, researchers will use it for funding, promotions, prestige etc. However, the problem with academics is that even "archived" science remains closed, not just the papers, but also the raw data. So it would be a big step forward regardless. We need a worldwide repository for scientific exchange. The web is ready with open arms, but researchers are not.

forcefsck 15y ago

OP posted this article with a title emphasizing Publicly funded science. There is no excuse for not sharing data acquired with the help of public funds.

nialo 15y ago
The point isn't whether there's an excuse or not. It's just that in practice it is better tactics to try for just open journals first. This isn't a moral argument, it's a pragmatic one.
- forcefsck 15y ago
  I thought the main issue of the article was that scientists don't bother making the raw data accessible, not just where they publish their papers.

michael_nielsen 15y ago

The open access to publication argument already has nearly unstoppable momentum. In 2008 the NIH --- by far the world's largest funding agency, with a $30+ billion dollar a year budget --- adopted a policy requiring that all NIH-funded research be made openly accessible within 12 months of publication. See, e.g.: http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/nihfaq.htm http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/nihfaq.htm Similar policies have been enacted by all 7 of the Research Councils in the UK. And there are many more such policies in place at institutions all over the world, including Harvard, MIT, Princeton, and many others. A treasure trove of information about open access is Peter Suber's website. See, for example, his timeline: http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/timeline.htm http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/timeline.htm The timeline stops in 2008 (he changed jobs), but if you look at progress up to that point, it's clear that this has enormous and rapidly increasing buy-in at grant agencies, libraries (who are the main "customer" for journals, in that they pay) and major universities. It will be very difficult for other parties to stop this change, provided people continue to work for it. At this point, momentum is starting to build for more open data, and also for other kinds of systematic online sharing of research information. Why not give researchers an incentive to (say) upload online videos showing how certain lab experiments are done? At least in some labs there's stuff that's very difficult to describe in a paper, but easy to show in a video. And so this would be very valuable. (There are initiatives underway to do this, e.g.: http://www.jove.com/ http://www.jove.com/ ) I entirely agree with your final point - "The system of funding and promotion is going to have to undergo a very big shift before this dream comes to life". There's enough traction now within universities to start to have this discussion. Certainly, some senior scientists are dismissive; but many are extremely interested, and engaged.