Era of scientific secrecy nears its end

Hossenfelder, the conference organizer, says she knows of several examples in which scientists have had an idea for something, talked about it openly and then somebody else has published the fleshed-out idea first without giving any credit beyond an acknowledgment to the original idea-holder. Acknowledgments don't advance careers.

However there are solutions to this, she said. For instance, the prominent scientific journal Nature encourages authors to include brief summaries of which author contributed what to a project.

Some say that online posts provide a time-stamped record of when an experiment was documented. Those stamps can easily be arbitrarily altered after the fact, but it might also be possible to "lock" posts at a certain date after which they could not be changed without some sign-off permission to break the lock, Hossenfelder said.

Neylon says the total scientific openness is freeing on a personal level:

"In the biological sciences you spend a lot of time worrying, 'Is someone going to beat me to this? Am I going to get scooped? How are we going to get this grant?' — all things that lead you to being scared to talk to people about what you're doing. I have found a lot of that dropping away. So one of the main personal benefits of simply making everything available is that you know it's available, so you stop worrying about it (who can see it). Not having that worry, 'Am I giving the game away?' is actually a tremendous relief."

Fear of losing peer review
Another drawback of open science can be that results go public before they should. In science, experimental results are frequently proven wrong by subsequent work. Yet even peer review cannot ensure against this, nor can it prevent outright fraud, as proven by a 2005 case involving a South Korean scientist who claimed to have achieved the first cloning of a human embryo. A later examination of his work showed he had fabricated his results.

"Like in the case of scientific fraud, if you talk to people in biomedicine, they are really concerned about peer review because it is one of the few ways they have to stop fraud. In fact most fraud cases come from biomedicine," said Harvard University historian of science Mario Biagioli.

Peer review started in the 17th century as a variation of the censorship practices attached to books and newssheets publishing, Biagioli has written. Nowadays, many fields of science and communicators of it (including journalists) rely on peer review as a generic stamp of approval.

"The social system of science has become so complicated, unregulated and dispersed in terms of geography and disciplines, so peer review has been elevated to a principle that unifies a fragmented field," Biagioli said.

Trends in the strength of peer review tend to zig and zag throughout history, and even today, says MIT's Kaiser, who also is an historian of science. The premier physics journal Physical Review only started requiring peer review for every submission in the late 1950s, he said.

And today, Arxiv, one of the most frequently cited examples of open science, has no peer review for individual papers, but it has begun to add in some constraints on allowable authors. The site used to allow anyone with email addresses associated with academic institutions to post their papers. Now, authors of research papers who post in Arxiv are vetted before they can post for the first time. In some ways, things are tightening up when it comes to openness in physics, Kaiser said. In any case, the function of print journals, in physics at least, is changing.

"Ease of sharing everything prior to peer review is flourishing, and in my opinion very few physicists are reading journals for information these days," Kaiser said. "Journals have largely lost their information function."

Now they are used for promotions and prestige in physics — for helping to build careers but not necessarily for getting ideas into circulation. "Now we can give away most of our physics results for free," Kaiser said. "No one is going to care if I post some obscure model of cosmology on this Web site."

But that is just physics. In biomedicine today, he said, the terrain is totally different, primarily because of complex intellectual property considerations and potential conflicts of interest among researchers funded by drug companies, as well as concerns over patient safety and privacy.

For the good of truth, humanity, economies?
Another argument in favor of open science is sort of a big picture issue for humanity, scientific truth and economies, Neylon said.

"Making things more open leads to more innovation and more economic activity, and so the technology that underlies the Web makes it possible to share in a way that was never really possible before, while at same time it also means that kinds of models and results generated are much more rich," he said.

This is the open source approach to software development, as opposed to commercial closed source approaches, Neylon said. The internals are protected by developers and lawyers, but the platform is available for the public to build on in very creative ways.

"Science was always about mashing up, taking one result and applying it to your [work] in a different way," Neylon said. "The question is 'Can we make that as effective as samples data and analysis as it does for a map and set of addresses for a coffee shop?' That is the vision."

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