During ISMB, thanks to Shirley Wu (FF announcement), there was an improvised BoF (Birds of a Feather) session on web tools for scientists. Given that the meeting was not really announced we were not really expecting a full room. I would say that we had around 20 to 30 people that sayed at least for a while. We talked in general about tools that are useful in science (things like online reference managers, pre-print archives, community wikis, FriendFeed, Second Life) and we also talked a bit about the culture of sharing and open science.
Curiosly, the most interesting discussion I had about open science was not at this BoF session but after it. In the following day the subject come up again in a conversation between me and tree other people (two PhD students and a PI from a different lab). I will not identify the people because I don't know if they would like that or not. The most striking thing for me about this conversation was the somewhat instinctive negative reaction against open science from the part of the two PhD students. After a long discussion they made a few interesting arguments that I will mention below but what was strange for me was that this is the first time I see someone react instinctively in a negative way against the concepts of open science.
One of the students in particular was arguing that the fact that scientists sharing their results online (prior to peer review) is not only silly on their part (the scooping argument) but it would be detrimental to science as a whole. The most concrete argument he offered was that seeing someone "stake claim" to a research problem might scare other people away from even trying to solve it. I would say that it would be better to have people collaborating on the same research problems instead of the current scenario where a lot of scientists waste years (of their time and resources) working in parallel without even knowing about it. He argues simply that some people might not want to collaborate at all and should be allowed to work in this way. I don't think scientists should be forced to put their work online before peer-review, I just happen to think that this would improve collaborations and decrease the current waste or resources.
The second argument against sharing of research ideas and results prior to peer review was more consensual. They all mention the problem of noise and how it is already difficult to find relevant results in the peer reviewed literature. They suggest that this problem would be further increased if more people were to share their ideas and results online. I fully agree that this is a problem but not related at all with open science. This is a sorting/filtering problem that is already important today with the large increase in journals and published articles. We do need better recommendation and filtering tools but sharing ideas and results in blogs/wikis/online project management tools is not going to seriously increase the noise since these are all very easily separated from peer-reviewed articles. No-one is forced to track shared projects, but if they are available it would make it that much easier to start a collaboration when and if it makes sense to do so. Are open source repositories detrimental to the software industry ?
It took around 3 years since people started discussing the idea of open science and open notebooks for these concepts to get some attention. It is inevitable (and healthy) that as more people are exposed to a meme that more counter-arguments emerge. I guess that a backlash only means that the meme is spreading.
Sunday, July 27, 2008
Some backlash on Open Science
Posted by Pedro Beltrão at 8:03 PM
Labels: open science
7 comments:
Pedro
Thanks for sharing. Interesting thoughts. I think it is important to keep choice open. The moment you start mandating, then you run into trouble. Dogma never helped anyone
Hmm, just briefly some unbalanced thoughts (I don't have time to offer more than the advocatus diaboli argument):
Open Science == Communism? I'm wondering if a competition of scientific theories is actually necessary to further science in a sound way. Just to draw the parallel, a lot of R&D in the private sector is done in parallel and in competition, with the result of increased productivity. On the other side, we've had things like Comecon and five-year plans to "order" the development and reduce competition, and the result was lower productivity.
Similarly, if I can get better results out of a topic than other groups, why should I join them and water down my results?
As I mentioned above I don't think anyone should be forced to change their practices. What I find strange is that I should not be allowed to do so if I wish. I don't think anyone can actually stop me from doing so :) but would that really hurt science if a significant number of people started posting their ideas and results online before peer-review ?
I think and hope that we might see hybrid approaches. Maybe my main line of research is still "behind the curtain", but side projects that have lower priority (and thus take longer time) could be put in the open to be finished in a collaborative way. Perhaps the open collaboration then boosts the side project in such a way that it becomes the most important one. :)
Of course there's no reason why you shouldn't be allowed to share your thoughts with others, although you might not get as much recognition as possible in the traditional way research is evaluated. (Or, maybe you get more and better papers out of it, and then you're better off either way.)
Michael, I would actually say the exact opposite. The argument for open science is really a market based argument where barriers to trade (cartels, subsidies, tariffs) reduce efficiency. Open approaches create a much more efficient 'market' which along with competition (its not going to go away) will drive science forward. Open practice doesn't rule out competition any more than the fact we can all see the web means google can't make money.
[tongue in cheek]In fact one could make an argument that the current system is more like communism. Resources (which we are told are enough to keep us all happy) are divided up by committees that are staffed by the same people who have control over career progression within the academies. The provision of resources is highly regulated and often subject to 'five year plans'. Communication is only allowed through very specific channels and the use of alternative means and styles of communication is labelled by the powers that be as 'unscientific'[/tongue in cheek]
The point about commercial research is a good one but I would point out that these companies are starting to realise that a lot of this is unsustainable economically so are starting to share precompetitive information.
Pedro - it is often surprising how negative some people can get, especially since we're not trying to mandate openness on anyone. But I think it will always be the case that new ideas will polarize. At least it gives us an opportunity to continue the discussion.
I very much agree with Michael that most of the activity we're going to see will be on small projects where people experiment with various flavors of Open Science. It is difficult for a researcher to get all of their existing collaborators to change the way they do science once a project has been started. One of the main benefits of this discussion in the blogosphere is that it allows for new collaborations to form between individuals who share a similar philosophy of openness.
The "increased noise" argument has been made time and time again in response to suggestions of preprint/gray literature sharing. Two articles that may be interesting, which describe objections to E-biomed (the NIH proposal from 1999) and the IEGs (another NIH project from 1966):
http://rkcsi.indiana.edu/archive/CSI/WP/wp01-03B.html
http://arxiv.org/html/physics/0102004v1
In regard to fostering collaborations, this recent exchange on Nature Precedings hopefully illustrates some of the potential of using these type of services: http://precedings.nature.com/documents/1697/version/1#comments
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