Era of scientific secrecy nears its end

Just a few decades ago, as a scientist, here is how you did your work: You toiled in obscurity and relative solitude.

It could take years to generate results, and scientists tended to guard their data and findings prior to publication in a journal, possibly giving out only minimal details on what exactly they were researching.

Results became legitimate and credit was given to scientists once their results were published as a paper in a "peer-reviewed" journal — one for which the work is evaluated by experts in the field as acceptable or unacceptable for print. Often papers were sent back for rewrites or clarification, and publication can occur months after submission. This system still is in place for many scientists.

However, today, more and more scientists, as well as researchers in the humanities, operate like transparent, networked cyborgs.

Background research is mostly done online, not in the library. Some data and preliminary research might be posted online via a blog or open notebook. Early write-ups of the work might be announced to the public, or at least discussed online with peers. And these early write-ups might also be posted to an online publication that is not peer-reviewed in the strict sense.

With supercomputers and sequencers processing data at warp speed, along with online Web tools for analyzing data and posting early results, the pace of research, from lab bench to established finding, has accelerated (and the public tends to learn about findings faster).

"In areas like my own subfields of theoretical physics," said MIT physicist David Kaiser, "the only constraint [on how rapidly one generates research papers] is, 'Did you have more coffee that day?' We aren't usually held up trying to get an instrument to work, or slogging through complicated data analysis."

Most people think faster is better, but there are other issues.

Is it a good thing?
There is "no question" that all efforts to make science more open are positive for the progress of science, says open science proponent and chemist Jean-Claude Bradley at Drexel University in Philadelphia, who posts his lab notebook online and started a blog in 2005 called UsefulChemistry where he and his colleagues regularly discuss chemistry problems as well as Web 2.0 tools and the technical and philosophical issues they raise.

His online notebook and blog definitely make it easier to communicate with colleagues, he said. Such sharing also makes it easier for others to "replicate" scientists' work — try it themselves and convince themselves that you are right. And this replication issue is one of the principles behind scientific research. Anyone who has written down a recipe for a friend knows that we all tend to spell things out more clearly when sharing them than we would if we were just taking notes for ourselves in our own shorthand.

Open science also has the potential to prevent discrimination in access to information. Arxiv, the site for posting pre-print physics papers, was started in 1991 by Cornell physicist Paul Ginsparg, then at Los Alamos National Laboratory, to help provide equal access to prepublication information to graduate students, postdocs and researchers in developing countries.

And Neylon, the biochemist from England, said: "One of the things that is really clear about making this available is that the person whose access you are really enabling is your own." Wherever he is worldwide, if he can sit at a personal computer with Internet access, he can pull up his notebook.

And open science benefits the public, Bradley said. He tries to keep his posts fairly accessible (although this is not the case for all open notebooks and open science blogs).

"There is a lot of potential for the public to understand how science actually progresses — it is messy and painstaking, and most experiments either fail or provide ambiguous results," Bradley said. "On the blog, I try to report our progress in a way that other scientists, but also to a large extent the public, should be able to understand."

Also, open notebooks could yield important contributions from non-scientists or experts in other fields, Neylon said.

"It's not clear to me that professional scientists or people in academic institutions have a monopoly on good ideas ," he said. "There are very smart people outside of academia, for example hobbyists or people in industry who could contribute, and having more contributors can only help. The same applies to interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary approaches."

So far, there are only a handful of scientists who post their complete notebooks online, but dozens of others post some, but not all, of their notebook pages. Perhaps this is due to the dreaded scoop.

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