Compared to the secretive anagrams of Galileo’s time, our scientific journal system is truly open science. But Michael Nielsen thinks it’s outdated, that we can do better. Now with online tools, there’s an amazing opportunity to scale up, exchange ideas faster and get to more meaningful discoveries quicker. Read his book: Reinventing Discovery: the New Era of Networked Science (Princeton 2012) or listen to his short interview with Ira Flatow (Jan. 27, Talk of the Nation on NPR) for a quick idea of how.
According to Nielsen, before the scientific journal system, scientists like Galileo, Newton, Huygens, and Hooke were all sending each other indecipherable anagrams. These were scrambled results, meant to document their discoveries without giving them away. If another scientist discovered the same thing independently, the anagram made it possible to secure their claim on the finding by just unscrambling the anagram. Transitioning from this secretive anagram system to the more open, revolutionary scientific journal system we have today met with resistance. Two centuries later, Michael Faraday said that scientific success comes like this: “Work. Finish. Publish.” Things haven’t changed since then.
Nielsen likens today’s resistance to online tools by scientists to the days of the anagram. The analogy may sound critical of our current scientific culture, but he’s also saying that like Galileo and his peers, we’re ready for revolutionary change. It’s already happening, and Nielsen’s book is rich with beautiful and surprising examples: the Polymath Project, Foldit, Galaxy Zoo, arXiv and SPIRES, to name just a few.
The world’s information is waking up. And that change gives us the opportunity to restructure the way scientists think and work, and so to extend humanity’s problem-solving ability. We are reinventing discovery, and the result will be a new era of networked science that speeds up discovery, not in one small corner of science, but across all of science. (p.207)
Nielsen challenges his scientist readers to try open science by uploading old data online and encouraging people to use it. He says to try blogging or contributing to somebody’s open science project or wiki. All these things will eventually legitimize the new tools if scientists are using them. He suggests that people lobby politicians and grant agencies for open science and he has many more ideas. Do you think he's right about our journal system? Do you think scientists are slower to pick up new, on-line tools than other people? Why or why not? Take a step into the new paradigm and post a comment!