Open the Door to Open Science

"Open science is the idea that scientific knowledge of all kinds should be openly shared as early as is practical in the discovery process."

Michael Nielsen, a quantum physicist and a science writer

By its formal definition, an open science is the movement to make scientific research, data and dissemination accessible to all levels of an inquiring society, amateur or professional. It encompasses practices such as publishing open research, campaigning for open access, encouraging scientists to practice open notebook science, and generally making it easier to publish and communicate scientific knowledge.

Before our modern time and the usual collaboration among scientists it was very common that many great minds such as Hooke, Newton, Leonardo and Galileo were very secretive about their discoveries. They published their work as an anagram, which prevent others to see their work. This was meant to buy them time in which they could build upon the discovery. We could say they did not support the idea of an open science (1, 2).

If we think about this for a moment we may even salute to that kind of discovery process but where would our society stand today if most of researchers would resort to that kind of scientific approach? We would never be able to achieve important milestones in our human history such as building the International Space Station, sequencing the 3 billion DNA base pair of the Human Genome Project or preventing the spread of AIDS.

"The Polymath Project is one of the best examples of how and why open science works" explains Michael Nielsen. "Tim Gowers, a Fields medalist, posted a famous mathematical problem on his blog, an open invitation to anyone interested to try their hand at solving it. For the first 70 hours, nothing happened. Then a math professor left a comment, quickly followed by a high school teacher, another Fields medalist and so on. In the span of 37 days, over 800 comments collectively solved the problem." This collaboration among mathematicians resulted in a new answer to a difficult problem and since then the Polymath Project has grown to describe a particular process of using an online collaboration to solve any math problem (2).

There are many other examples where data sharing is accepted but so much knowledge is still being locked up. Most researchers keep their data and ideas secret to ensure they are the first to file the patent and first to publish, since the majority of journals wish to consider only work that has not been published elsewhere (3). While this makes sense, a much bigger problem is that negative results are rarely being published but are extremely valuable to other researchers so that they do not repeat the same mistakes. I believe that at least negative results should be shared openly and researchers who would share them, would get the scientific recognition comparable to the one received from regular publications.

Participation in open science communities increases the visibility of each individual researcher. This leads to new collaborations and speeds up the conduct of a new research. It also helps researchers to build a strong case of their work, since they can learn from others' mistakes and implement ideas from diverse contributors.

So open the door to Open Science!

By Blazka Orel, Msc

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