Era of scientific secrecy nears its end

By Robin Lloyd

Senior Editor

updated 4:00 p.m. ET Sept. 2, 2008

Secrecy and competition to achieve breakthroughs have been part of scientific culture for centuries, but the latest Internet advances are forcing a tortured openness throughout the halls of science and raising questions about how research will be done in the future.

The openness at the technological and cultural heart of the Internet is fast becoming an irreplaceable tool for many scientists, especially biologists, chemists and physicists — allowing them to forgo the long wait to publish in a print journal and instead to blog about early findings and even post their data and lab notes online. The result: Science is moving way faster and more people are part of the dialogue.

But no one agrees yet on whether this extreme sharing among scientists and even the public is ultimately good for science or undermining it.

"It scares people," says biochemist Cameron Neylon, an open science advocate who works at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in England and posts all his experiments in an online "open notebook."

"People are very frightened about being that open," Neylon told LiveScience. "This is not really the way current academic culture is built and we are trying to change it. So that makes some people uncomfortable."

Open science
The open science approach forces researchers to grapple with the question of whether they can still get sufficient credit for their ideas, said physicist Sabine Hossenfelder, co-organizer of a conference on the topic set to begin Sept. 8 at the Perimeter Institute in Ontario, Canada.

"In some areas, credit is mainly appreciation by peers (think mathematics and theoretical physics)," she said. "In other areas, money is a factor. That might be through patents or simply because some ideas can be used to make money directly. Consider if you would have a great model to predict the quirks of the world's economy — would you go and publish it?"

Open science is a shorthand for technological tools, many of which are Web-based, that help scientists communicate about their findings. At its most radical, the ethos could be described as "no insider information." Information available to researchers, as far as possible, is made available to absolutely everyone.

Beyond e-mail, teleconferencing and search engines, there are many examples:

• Blogs where scientists can correspond casually about their work long before it is published in a journal; social networks that are scientist friendly such as Laboratree and Ologeez
• GoogleDocs and wikis which make it easy for people to collaborate via the Web on single documents; a site called Connotea that allows scientists to share bookmarks for research papers
• Sites such as Arxiv, where physicists post their "pre-print" research papers before they are published in a print journal
• OpenWetWare which allows scientists to post and share new innovations in lab techniques
• The Journal of Visualized Experiments, an open-access site where you can see videos of how research teams do their work; GenBank, an online searchable database for DNA sequences
• Science Commons, a non-profit project at MIT to make research more efficient via the Web, such as enabling easy online ordering of lab materials referenced in journal articles;
• Online open-access (and free) journals like Public Library of Science
• Open-source software that can often be downloaded free off Web sites

The upshot: Science is no longer under lock and key, trickling out as it used to at the discretion of laconic professors and tense PR offices. For some scientists, secrets no longer serve them. But not everyone agrees.

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