I'm going to be talking about Open Science
today I would like to say by the way that

this has been organized by
the Georgia Tech library by the School of

Physical Sciences and so I thank you
very much for making this possible.

For me to come today one of the just
my neck heavy up before I get started.

I gave a presentation on a very
similar topic this morning.

Anybody who is present for that would
be a lot of overlap this afternoon.

So I won't be too.

Concerned if you decide that you have
other things that you wish to do.

OK Without further ado let me get into it.

Let me talk.

Briefly I just want to remind you of
some sort of miracles that we have.

Let me ask a couple questions actually
how many of you are grad students.

OK.

How many of you are undergraduates.

How many of you are from off campus.

Quite a few OK.

My understanding is that there's at
least one undergraduate class here

today is that correct.

It's a graduate.

OK All right.

Which class.

OK All right.

Excellent.

How many people here would describe
themselves as scientists in some

way shape or form.

Anybody care

to just call it say what it is
you do if you're not a scientist.

Come on that's a surprise to anybody else.

The librarian anybody else.

Just you that you had to say and
now I'm speaking with.

OK Could you say what you what you did.

You're not protect your
project manager in what area.

OK I'm right.

Just there.

You're a C.S. major OK.

Does anybody here contribute
to open source software.

Just a few.

How many of you are on Facebook.

OK A lot of rolled sort of
eyes asking this question and

does it have any people here.

Currently write a blog.

OK so a small number.

OK so I want to start by reminding you
of a couple things that we take for

granted but that are really kind
of miracles of modern society.

So the story of the first of these begins
on generally seventeenth two thousand and

one with a person who had just
left academia actually was

a philosophy graduate student named Larry
saying up to get involved with an online

encyclopedia project named new pedia.

And as a spinoff of this project
they decided to try something

a little bit unusual.

They would they would ask
users to contribute to a.

And Cyclopedia and they launched this
Wiki Pedia project almost as a joke or

kind of a side project and
this is the initial announcement.

It's got the U.R.L..

Humor me go there and add a little article
it will take all of five or ten minutes.

Larry.

And you can actually go back and well
you know we know we know what the first

repeated radicals look like
the article on Africa for example.

It's the very first contribution
stated Africa is a continent.

Which even correct.

It's pretty good.

And everybody knows have
this is a ten day at

most of us probably use Wikipedia at
least weekly if not more frequently.

There's more than three million articles
in the English language Wiki Pedia there's

more than seven million vehicles
altogether in more than three hundred

languages this is the Congo Pedia and
one of my favorite facts about Wikipedia

is that for a long time there was
actually a claim on Wikipedia which

was viewed as a bit because they
unfortunately by the community and the.

It's been discontinued.

Sadly another similar story

begins on August twenty sixth
nine hundred ninety one.

It's a very similar story and it starts
with a twenty one year old finish

shooting named Linus Torvalds who posted
this message very strikingly similar

message in many ways to a mailing list.

How everybody out there using Minix
which is a kind of operating system.

I'm doing a free operating system
just a hobby won't be big and

professional like the new three
eighty six eighty clones.

It's etc etc I'd like to know what
features most people would want any

suggestions are welcome but
I won't promise I'll implement them and

ultimately he actually decided that he
would accept code contributions as well.

And this worked rather better than he or

anybody else had anticipated today
in the Linux operating system.

Well I'll get to it I should
say you can get some idea of

just how much enthusiasm there was from
the fact that twelve minutes after this.

Somebody replied with the words.

Tell us more.

Right there was a lot of
sort of pent up interest and

of course today this is built into the
multi-billion dollar Linux industry and

people tend to think of Linux
as being something for geeks or

something which only hardcore
computer people use but

in fact every person in this room uses
it all the time they just may not

necessarily realize that it's used
when if you make a Google search.

Whenever you use Facebook.

In fact when if you use chances.

There's a reasonable chance that it
may be running your motorbike or

your washing machine or your television
set or whatever because it's involved in

all of these things so
every every day on average.

Four thousand three hundred lines
of code are added to the Linux

kernel by this sort of ad hoc
coalition which has grown up.

That's not really bad code that nobody
is going to be written in a real rush.

This is but what tested production quality
code which is actually going to ship

that's the net rate increase
that's per day per year per day.

So it's really as I said.

It's kind of a miracle and.

It's tempting to overlook how
surprising these facts are.

But you can get some idea of how
surprising they are from some comments

by two noted technological optimists
at about the time when the P.D.

It was getting started.

So the people I'm referring to.

Kevin Kelly who was the founding executive
editor of Wired magazine certainly

viewed by most people
as almost a wild eyed.

And Larry Page of Google.

Also another person who's a tremendous
enthusiasm for the potential

of technologies obviously and both of them
became aware of Wikipedia very early on

and they both had a very straightforward
opinion it would obviously fail because

nobody would want to contribute and
even if people wanted to contribute.

It would be overrun by people contributing
kind of very low quality content and

it would never survive one of the trolls.

So you know I think it's easy
today to take for granted.

But in fact even the most
enthusiastic people for

new technologies at the time
thought that it was surprising.

So what I want to talk about today is
whether or not similar sorts of principles

not the same but similar up can be
applied to solve scientific problems.

I'm going to start with
an example begins with this man.

Timothy galahs he's a mathematician
at Cambridge University so

recipient of the Fields Medal
which is perhaps the biggest

prize in mathematics kind of think of
it as the Nobel Prize in mathematics or

certainly one of the world's
leading mathematicians.

There was also a blog.

And this is his blog.

It's not that uncommon actually for senior
mathematicians to blog these days of

the forty two living fields medalists four
of them have started blogs and as perhaps

be fits bloggers two of them have since
abandon them but to continue to blog and

there are many senior mathematicians who
blog and in general of two thousand.

Knowing Gail as this very interesting post
with the title is massively collaborative

mathematics possible.

And so what he was proposing in
this post was to attack a difficult

unsolved mathematical problem a problem
which he said he would love to solve.

Completely in the open using his blog to
post his ideas and his partial progress.

And what's more he issued an open
invitation inviting anybody in the world

who thought they had an idea to contribute

to post that also in the comments
section of the blog.

And his hope was that by
combining the ideas of many minds.

It would be possible to make easy work
of this hard mathematical problem.

And he called this
experiment the Polymath.

Project.

I just want to mention very briefly
any method of any mathematicians here.

You know what I'm going to skip this it.

OK So let me tell you how how it went.

The way it went well
the first seven hours.

Nobody commented at all.

Was not going so well for
the first little bit and

then a mathematician at
the University of British Columbia.

Joseph solemn O.C..

Posted a nice little suggestion basically
for a variation on the original

problem which he thought might give some
insight but which was easier to attack and

then fifteen minutes after that a high
school teacher in fact from Arizona

named Jason Dyer posted a short comment
and three minutes after that Terence Tao

mathematician at U.C.L.A. actually also
fields medalist posted a suggestion and

things were really off and running at this
point over the next thirty seven days

twenty seven different people would
post eight hundred substantive

mathematical comments containing
one hundred seventy thousand words.

So I was following along actually right
from the start I didn't contribute

substantially I should
say to the mathematics.

It's not my field but
it was really interesting to watch

how ideas would be proposed
often in a very tentative or

half baked kind of a form and
then would be very.

Rapidly developed and

improved by other people sometimes
change sometimes discarded.

But sometimes leading
to genuine new inside.

They always describe the process as
being to normal research as driving is

to pushing a car.

At the end of a thirty seven
days he posted to his blog

to say that the problem had
most probably been solved.

They still had to go back and
check a whole lot of their reasoning

to make sure they hadn't made any mistakes
but ultimately it checked out and

they actually wrote two scientific
papers on the basis of this work.

I'm going to move away from
the slides just for a minute.

I just want to talk freely
about what this means and

about my talk more generally today.

Of course you know this is interesting
particularly maybe if you're

a mathematician they marry or as cowards.

But I think it suggests something
at least doesn't prove but

it suggests that maybe we
can use the Internet to

build tools online tools which
actually have the ability to

act as cognitive tools to amplify
our collective intelligence in some

sense in a way similar to the way
physical tools have been used for

millennia to amplify our physical strength
and if that's true then it's very

exciting because it means that potentially
we can actually accelerate the progress of

science more broadly not just for one
problem but across the process of science.

And that's what's got me interested and

that's to I guess really
why I got interested in

this area this is this possibility and
that's what I want to talk about today.

So I'm going to describe a second example.

Totally different.

That's the point here.

Which illustrates something kind of
similar it involves an organization called

the asset India Foundation.

So the story of acid India starts in
two thousand and three with a young

woman named need to just choose an
undergraduate at the University of Tucson.

A city or University of Arizona in Tucson.

She just finished her
undergraduate degree.

She went to work for
a year in India wished.

Worked with a not for

profit organization helping young
Indian women escape from prostitution.

And what she found there was very.

I guess disappointing and confronting for

her what she found was that
many of the young women.

Didn't have the skills necessary to
hold down a job outside of prostitution.

So she came back to the United States at
the end of the year and she decided to do

something about it she decided to
start this new organization the asset

India Foundation that would address
what she believed was the core problem.

By opening technology
training centers in India.

Training the young women in technology and

then helping them find placement with
some of India's big technology companies.

So eight years later and they've opened
five training centers in five large Indian

cities and they have hundreds of young
women have completed these courses and

they'd like to expand into
many of India's other cities.

There's a problem however which is much of
India doesn't have reliable electricity

and if you're trying to run.

Technology training centers obviously.

Well that's a problem.

And it causes many problems for them.

One of the difficulties
that they've had is in.

They want wireless routers to access
the Internet of obvious reasons and.

The challenge.

While.

They've tried to address this challenge
in a few ways in particular they looked

around for off the shelf commercial while
US routers which were solar powered.

And unfortunately they were not able
to find anything which was suitable for

their local needs.

So they still had this problem.

And ultimately they thought I have or
they're trying to solve the problem by

working with a company named innocent it
was anybody here familiar with innocent.

OK so if you.

So innocent.

Do we were based at a wall
from just outside Boston.

Very interesting company there but
like e Bay or Craigslist.

But instead of posting a description
of your old furniture or

your old car which you want to
sell you can post a description of

a scientific problem
that you'd like solved.

Most of the organizations doing this
company's lightly is perhaps the canonical

example it's actually a spinoff
of Eli Lilly video really and

similar companies will do this internal
problems that come up inside their

research progress process
which they which we solved.

And so
they post the problems here's an example.

It's a little bit unusual.

Actually I should probably replace
this with a better example.

It's to find a biomarker alias and

it has a one million dollar prize
that's what makes it a bit unusual.

Most of the prizes on the side are more
like forty thousand dollars fifty thousand

dollars that's kind of typical So you
come along you think you might have some

insight into the probe into the problem
you download a detailed description.

And you submit your solution and
you're eligible to win the prize.

So as it got together with the Rockefeller
Foundation who offered to put up a twenty

thousand dollar innocent of prize
to design a low cost solar powered

wireless router.

In a sin to broadcast it to the network
of soldiers all over the world.

They claim to have
several hundred thousand.

I don't know how many of those
are really active for this problem.

The relevant fact is that four
hundred people downloaded not

just the abstract of the short
description of the challenge but

actually the really detailed description
which had all of the ins and outs of it.

This indicates some serious level of
commitment twenty seven of those people

submitted solutions and the winner was
a thirty one year old software engineer

from Texas name Zachary Brown.

So Mr Brown had.

I guess really two properties
that were particularly important.

And relevant here.

First of all.

Apart from his day job as a software
engineer at home his big hobby

was building wireless radio networks
which he was using to try and

make contact with every
country in the world.

OK so that's fact.

Number one.

Fact number two is that he was also
actually it turns out a solar power freak.

He told me in email that he'd watched on

television as solar panels were installed
at Jimmy Carter's White House and

asked his parents what was going on and
he had been his word in thrall.

When he'd learned it was possible to take
sunlight and convert it into electricity.

So as the net old what he was doing.

Was he was actually working towards
powering his entire home office

including his wireless radio
networks using solar power.

So if you wanted to design a low
cost solar powered wireless router.

I think you know in all the world.

This was certainly one of or

he'd be on your short list
of people to be speaking to.

Without a doubt.

All innocent of did was they provided
a way of making the connection and

you see this in other innocent
of challenges as well.

You have this may be a request that
might involve some interesting

combination of talents and
then somebody so

flicks out of this giant very diverse
pool of expertise that they've assembled

who has just exactly the right combination
of talents to solve the problem.

And if you look in the archives
of the Polymath Project.

You don't see quite the same thing.

It's not as clear a cat but
certainly you'll frequently see people you

know make a little suggestion
I thought of this.

And then somebody else will say
that makes me think of this and

then somebody else will say all and
that seems to be relevant to this.

So you seeing all these different
diverse expertise is being combined

to stimulate one another.

That's what's in common.

To some extent between these two things
the way I like to say it is that what

the online tools are doing the way
they kind of getting the juice is

is they restructuring expert attention So

Zachary Brown is not sitting
there at home working on his.

Well as Radio Networks.

They have connected him to somebody
on the other side of the world.

So he can apply his expertise in
a much higher leverage way and

it is the same in the case of
the Polymath Project hard problem.

The expertise necessary to solve it

was already latent within the mathematical
community and what the tools did was they

allowed people to bring all this expertise
all these expert tension together

to make relatively easy work of
that had mathematical problems.

OK So there's a very optimistic point of
view that I've been promoting so far.

I mean I think these are great stories and

it's right to be optimistic but
I want to talk about some problems or

some challenges which are associated
with tools like this so

I'm going to talk about a slight name
to the quickie that was started in

August of two thousand and five by a grad
student at Caltech named John Stockton.

And it's a very nice idea quicky
is short for quantum wiki.

He worked on quantum computing in quantum
control the same kind of subjects as

as I do the same kind of
things as candid and.

Well he's idea was to do
kind of a Wikipedia but

much higher level much
more research oriented.

For people working as researchers
in the quantum computing field.

So the way I like to think about
it is he was aiming to build

almost a super textbook for the field
which would contain lots of information

about all the latest research results
big open problems people's ideas about

how to solve those problems information
about the detailed ins and outs of what

was going on in specific laboratories all
this kind of information or as the gulp.

And so I was I think it's a great idea.

I was present when it was announced
a workshop at Caltech in two thousand and

five it was very interesting to chat with
people what they thought about the idea.

I met some people who were just
outright hostile they said

What a stupid idea why would you ever
want to do that a fair number of.

People who kind of just shrug their
shoulders and couldn't have cared and

probably the largest group out there was
people who saw some potential who thought

gosh it would be great to
have a resource like that and

you could have a short little
conversation with them and so

you could use it to do what you could use
it to do that would be great if there was

a place where you could see videos of
lab procedures or things like that.

And then you'd say Well so
what are you going to do you know for

a what are you going to
planning to contribute.

No no no no no I don't have time to do it.

But gosh I hope somebody else will.

And of course if everybody's
having that same response.

You know what happened.

With the site failed.

I should say by the way it did not
fail because he had done a bad job.

All the initial conditions were
set up really quite well he

done a very nice job of
seeding it with material.

Yeah he did a lot of the market it.

He tried to twist arms mine
included had material.

Done a lot of things right.

It did not fail because
it was poorly executed.

I think it failed because of lack of
interest in actually making contributions

on the part of research is.

OK And unfortunately this is just
one I could repeat this story.

Dozens of times I'll just do it a few
times not Atlas as similar if not

theory which is filed for similar reasons
the string theory with a similar effort in

string theory which is filed the reasons
other set of ideas very similar

ideas is the idea of so-called scientific
social networks and what people often call

the Facebook scientist idea so the idea
being that you as a scientist connect to

other people other scientists with
similar sorts of research interests.

So you can share ideas share code
share data all these bits and

pieces that form the core of
a scientist working life and

that sounds like you
know sounds promising.

Surely we should be doing that and

lots of people have actually spent
enormous amounts of money developing.

In some cases very nice
sites that aim to do this.

This is just a short.

There are many more that.

In this and you create an account on such
a system you go there you log in and

you discover that their virtual ghost
towns there doesn't seem to be anybody

else there as far as I can tell at least
they've all failed and you look at some

of them and they'll say two hundred fifty
thousand experts active in the community.

If you can't read it.

That's what it says here.

What seems to be going on is that
actually in many cases they've gone to

a scientific society and I don't know that
that's the case for this particular one.

But certainly for some of these sites.

They've gone to a scientific society and
said we would like to purchase your

membership database take the membership
database and they run a little Perl

script over it and they order you generate
thousands and thousands of profiles.

So these are not real people.

It just goes to people.

OK I'm going to move away
from the slides again for

a bit you know what what's going on here.

Well certainly the scientists
in the room I think probably.

Is probably very obvious what's going on.

It's that it doesn't matter.

Hell good an idea.

You might think these things are in
principle I'm getting some people nodding

their heads here.

You might think the quickie is
the best idea since sliced bread or

that scientific social
networks where it's that.

It doesn't matter.

You know that from the point of
view of developing your career and

forgetting your next job.

Is is writing scientific papers and

getting grants and this does not leave you
a whole lot of time for contributing to

sites like the quicky no matter how good
an idea you might think it is in principle

just kind of the practical calculus of of
your career says well you shouldn't do it.

To be maybe put it in
slightly stack of terms.

You know imagine you're trading
off writing one mediocre

scientific paper that
nobody's going to read egg.

Inst spending the same time making a long
slew of really brilliant contributions

to the quicky.

And most people no mention
can probably knows

you know which of those is
going to go over better.

With your ten year committee or
with the person evaluating your brain or

with the person evaluating you for
you know a postdoc position or

whatever it is there's no competition
between these two things.

So even if you think that maybe you're
making these contributions to the quickie

is actually a more valuable
research contribution and

maybe maybe it truly is it doesn't matter.

It is simply not a practical thing for
you to be doing.

I've described this from the point of view
of a pretty ten year academic actually

many of the same pressures apply post
tenure if you want continued grant support

you have to buy into
the conventional system.

So you might say well how does the player
project in a Centive fit into this story

that they seem like they're somehow
avoided but actually they couldn't just

fall in they fit in perfectly with the
story the case of the Polymath Project.

Was actually quite a bit of
discussion up front of you know well

you know if we make any progress.

We're going to write some papers.

There's a discussion about authorship and

all these kinds of issues
even before they'd started.

Right.
So they were using a very unconventional

means.

To in some sense a conventional end.

Now put of scientific papers and they did
they published two papers and in a sense

of course appeals to an even more basic
human motivation is a cash prize.

So.

To some extent they reinforce the little
story I've been telling here.

And that's great.

I think those projects are wonderful.

But it does mean that
we're very constrained.

In terms of our ability to experiment
with these kinds of tools right.

Anything which doesn't
support that existing system.

If you know it's very
difficult to get it started.

Not impossible but difficult.

So I want to talk about
cases where in fact some.

In Has where the culture of science
has changed in some significant why so

that scientists start to share information
in new ways the first example.

Is in fact the Human Genome Project and
the biologists are here.

Wow.

OK.

That's so all of those scientists every
one of you is a physical scientist.

Well actually that's excuse me I'm sorry.

That's.

That's way too a simple word dichotomy.

OK.

The whole Right.

How many physical scientists are here.

How many computer scientists here.

How many other scientists can agree
I have not you just got it OK so

if you are right.

And no biologists.

OK.

Anybody familiar with
the Bermuda principles.

OK this is a.

I think really one of the most important.

Set of principles laid down in
the last twenty or so years.

Can can sense the human genome project.

So it's nearly nine hundred ninety S..

Every molecular biologist can see that.

The human genome is going to be
sequenced sooner or later by this point.

And there's a problem.

Very similar to the quicky
problem which is.

You can see that when
you take genome data.

It's it would be best for
humanity it would be best for biology.

If you upload this to one of the big
online databases something like

Gen Bank or

something like this and share it with the
world and share it with your colleagues.

But this doesn't help you
in your career path at all.

In fact all it does is help your
competitors had some level.

And so everybody was aware of this problem
and could see it was a big problem.

And there's a lot of discussion and
there's a long story but

sort of that the simplified
version of the story is that.

They decided to get together for
a meeting in the.

Muda.

Was the leaders from
the Human Genome Project.

Craig Venter who would later lead
a private effort to sequence the genome

representatives from the big funding
agencies they all got together they took

to the problem over and agreed that
although they did not wish to unilaterally

go ahead and share the genome data that
they were taking with everybody else.

If they could have a guarantee that

the else was hearing the data
they would be willing to do that.

And so they wrote the set of principles
which have come to be known as the Bermuda

principles and the commuter principle
state is first that if there's a C.

if you take in the lab a sequence of
more than one thousand to base pairs

then that data needs to be
publicly released to Gen Bank or

a similar site within twenty four hours.

And second that the data be
put into the public domain.

And this was not just people
sitting around having a nice chat

write these it wasn't just talk.

It had teeth and the reason it had teeth
was because actually the representatives

from the funding agencies went
back to the funding agencies and

they got it baked into
policy within twelve months.

So if you wanted to receive money to work

on human genome you needed to agree
to abide by these principles.

And that's essentially why now
you can take your i Phone and

go online and
download the human genome data.

Right.
So it's a very nice story.

Of course the human genome data
I mean as important as it is

is just a tiny tiny fraction of all
scientific knowledge even if you just look

at other types of genetic data the
situation is much much more complicated.

You know many many species of life.

There is no systematic agreement in
place to share genetic data influenza

A lot of partial sharing going on.

Still no universal kind of agreement.

You know the Spanish Flu killed fifty
million people in nineteen eighteen

having that data publicly available.

I think is really truly important here.

We are in two thousand and eleven.

It's not publicly available.

Bioinformatics of my acquaintance.

Who's done a lot for open science he does
a lot of open source work as well in

the software world came up to me after
a talk and he commented that he'd been

quote sitting on a genome for an entire
species of life for more than a year.

Because his collaborators has not yet

gotten around to to analyzing
it to publishing their analysis.

So it had just been sitting there in
his hard disk and undergoing data rot.

While they waited this is
a species that you've heard of.

By the way not a small thing
not a small thing at all.

And of course more generally if you look
at other types of scientific knowledge

scientists share a lot in in journals and
so on but there is so

much data and so much code as well as so
many sort of folk ideas.

Folk wisdom questions and so on.

That is still tied up inside scientists
heads on their hard disks and

inside their laboratories which
is not made available and yet

which would be really extremely valuable
and would help drive the whole process

of research forward but it is not in
the individual best interest to share.

Maybe in the communities best interest and
humanities best interest.

But that does not mean it is in
their individual best interest.

So how

do you cause the change to
happen how do you cause people

to start acting in the communities best
interests are not necessarily in what they

view as their own best interests wants to
change what their own best interest is.

And so.

This is actually happened once
before in the history of science.

It happened way back at
the dawn of modern science.

Really.

And I guess in the sixteen hundreds.

You get some idea of what went on for
a little story that involves Galileo.

So sixteen ten Galileo
takes his telescope in July

pointed at Saturn first
time that he done that.

And on the first night.

He see.

These that satin was not just a little
disk which is what he was expecting.

But actually it has two little bumps on
either side there's actually a drawing of

this still extant of what he saw.

And of course what he was seeing was
the first hint of the rings of Saturn he

couldn't make them out.

Clearly they had to wait for
Horton's some years later but

he could see this and he knew straight
away that he'd made a momentous discovery.

But he didn't announce it to the world.

He wrote a description down
in his private working notes

even scrambled the letters
into an anagram and

mailed it off to four of his
astronomer colleagues including Kepler.

And what this meant was that.

If Kepler later made the same discovery
Galileo could reveal the anagram and

claim the credit for the discovery.

But in the mean time he hadn't revealed
anything at all to his colleagues.

Right.

Buying him time to get further ahead.

Very sneaky trick.

And unfortunately.

This was not actually on
that uncommon at the time.

Leonardo did the same thing.

Newton did the same thing.

Did the same thing.

My favorite example is that
robot who did the same thing.

Many of you in high school
probably learned talks lore.

This was revealed as an anagram.

Initially.

Who books law is as the extension so
the force scrambled the letter.

So this was not uncommon at the time and

the way scientists think about it now it's
kind of the condensed version of history

is how we solved that problem with
the scientific journal system.

Right.

Well that one sentence actually
compresses an enormous social change away

from a culture in which scientists were
very reluctant to share any information or

they would only do so

under very special circumstances
to the modern culture of science

where it's expected that you do publish
at least in the conventional journals.

News of your discoveries.

So I just want to tell you give you some
examples of how difficult that was the.

The I'm going to quote from Mary Bell
was Hall who was the biographer of

Henry Oldenburg Oldenburg was the editor
of the world's first serious scientific

journal The Philosophical Transactions
of the Royal Society and he would go.

Would quote beg for information.

This.

Sometimes writing simultaneously to two
competing scientists on the grounds that

would be best to tell a what B.
was doing and vice versa.

In the hope of stimulating both men it
was made at the time to more work and

more openness.

This is how I was ginning up contributions
to his new Journal basically here.

He describes some examples
wish he would find two people

who are both working on
a very similar problem and

all the good sort of insinuate that
one of them was a further to this but

over here would insinuate that this
one over here was a little bit ahead

of where they really were at and so this
one would respond with a letter quickly

there too and they would sort of they
would disclose what they knew as a way of

proving that they were at that point and
then would write another letter going in

the other direction and by bouncing
backwards and forwards in this way.

We would cause.

Both men to more work and
more openness and he would publish

distillations of this these letters
in the Philosophical Transactions.

This is not somebody who was funny and
easy to get or

as easy as one would like to get news.

He's always a FISON star and she's one of
the great scholars of the printing press.

She's talking about the seventeenth
century talking about early modern science

fair comment is exploitation of the mass
medium books was more common among pseudo

scientists and quacks sounds like
Wiki is today than among Western

writing professional scientists who often
withhold their work from the press.

So this is two hundred twenty
years after Gutenberg and

this is not next week or next month.

It's saying that even at this point.

In Toy home.

Scientists systematic were systematically
unwilling to disclose their work

they were not interested really
in using the printing press.

I should say are over simplified I think
it's a good sort of fifty thousand

foot view of what was going on.

So it took a transition.

Of many decades until we moved
to the modern system where

the modern system is as a scientist the
way in which you get your your jobs and

your career sort of movement.

Is in fact to publish and

it's that record of published papers
which is used to make hiring decisions.

It was really are an example of
an open science revolution or

actually I should say before I move on.

And.

At Stanford University named Paul David
who's done a study of how this how this

happened and to condense his account which
is about one hundred twenty pages long.

Down to its funder pressure.

Or patron pressure.

Meaning that very often the patrons or

the funders of these scientists
had different incentives

to the scientists themselves and
they would put a lot of pressure on them.

To disclose their knowledge to give you an
example of this which is Galileo himself

in sixteen you know and he's a very first
big discovery before the rings of Saturn

and the very first discovery he made was
actually of the former INS of Jupiter or

what we call the Galilean Moons
today the big the big four moons.

This was an enormous
discovery at the time.

It was the first permanent change in
our understanding of the heavens.

Since ancient times made
famous all over Europe.

The reason it made him famous is because
he published a paper plate describing his

discovery.

And he did not just do this so forcefully.

As the set in the story
suggests he did it for

a very specific reason it was
that at the end of sixty nine.

He was not happy with his
current living circumstances.

He wrote to several potential patrons
including the many chiefs Emily

to say on the Medicis case he said.

If you agree to become my patrons.

I will publicly name
these moons after you.

And so just a few weeks I mean you hear
these intense negotiations that took just

a few weeks and he agreed and

very hastily and at considerable personal
expenses arranged for pamphlet to be

written and printed describing in
fact it was on the front page.

It talks about the moons.

And fortunately for them a D.T.

we now call him the girl lay
in millions but that's OK.

So it wasn't just making this
available in the public interest.

He was doing it because there
was something in it for him.

So the Mid-East his interest was in
having this information widely available.

Galileo's interest was
not necessarily there but

he wanted what the media had to offer.

It's quite a similar story in fact in
some ways to the story that I told about

the human genome right at the end
of the day the funding agencies

the people with the money actually
got together and said Well you know.

We're going to impose this on you.

All right let me.

Just look at the time for a moment.

OK.

All right just I guess
some broad takeaways.

According to the N.S.F. around the world
not just in the U.S. but around

the world the public spend something
like one hundred billion dollars U.S.

per year on basic science more or
less University.

Research and in my opinion at least
we meaning the public should really

be expecting scientists to be taking
full advantage of tools to speed up.

Scientific discovery to set a.

So to condense everything into a slogan

you're I believe at least that publicly
funded science should be open science.

Please all sorts of caviar to this believe
this in an unqualified fashion but

nonetheless I do think that we need
to move much more towards this kind

of a model of doing science in the open
with that I think I'll leave things there.

I do have many more slides on how to
achieve this transition and one hundred

but I think that actually rather
take questions from the audience and

maybe have a little bit of
a discussion about open science.

I think that would be would
be better at this point so

I thank you all very much for
your attention.

Into.

You mean lack of incentive to contribute.

Yes So a lot of people in thing.

Not surprisingly what
your background here so.

I guess there's a lot of people
in economics who are well off

who are interested in that that type
of question Why are people providing

a public good.

For their own.

You know that basically other people
are free riding on what they're providing

sure.

So.

And there's a whole research literature
on the question that you're asking.

The answer as far as the summary seems to
be it's very complicated different people.

So there have been surveys which have
been when done by several people

asking contributors.

Why do you work on this and
you don't get one inside.

What you get is a long list of
different types of answers and so

I can't summarize that easily.

For you.

An interesting fact of course.

Is that a lot of these people.

They're doing it as a hobby.

I mean that's obviously the generic case.

And a different sort of dynamic seems to
hold when people are doing something for

a hobby as opposed to when they're
doing it for a profession.

So you think about
something like the quickie

this is people who are spending all
this time writing scientific papers and

then they don't contribute to the quick
even if they think it's a great idea.

They're not making it into the hobby.

At some level it's a question of what do
they actually conceive in terms of their

self image.

As their job being is their
job part of their job

writing contributions on sites
like the quickie or not.

Well that's not part of their self image.

Whereas what's going on in the case of
Wiki Pedia is quite quite separate it's

not tied up with their
professional identity.

OK I'm not giving.

I'm not giving a very clear answer here.

I think the reason it's a difficult
question to answer is precisely because

the motivations are reported so for
ported motivations are actually so

complicated for why people contribute to.

Do it.

In the air and
that's not something I can easily address.

OK sorry that's not an idea.

Not a great answer.

It's a good question.

Like a great question.

So two things.

Very broadly speaking one I mentioned in
the talk which is funders can do a lot.

Certainly in terms of things like open
data mandates open code mandates.

You know if tomorrow.

Well to some extent this is starting
to happen for example those of you who

interact with a National Science
Foundation at all know that over the last

year or so the National Science Foundation
has started asking people to submit data

management planes with
their applications and.

At the moment that sounds
kind of toothless right.

Your plane can be you know I
have no plan to share my data.

But.

According to a spokesperson for the N.S.A.
If writing in nature actually earlier this

year this data management
plane is just phase one of

a plane from the N.S.A. to ultimately
make all of the data that they found

openly available in some way shape or
form and very sensibly taking this

rather slowly which is it's actually
very complicated to do data sharing.

Systematically certain types of data
data is perhaps a good example.

It's relatively straightforward to
share in certain other fields for

example atomic physics.

Well actually making sense of the data
can be phenomenally complicated and

involve all sorts of detail calibration
information and so on and so forth and

so it's not a straight forward
operation to go for to determine.

You know how that data should be shared.

Whether it should be shared.

Whether it's actually really
in the public's interest.

It's going to cost five times as
much to share the data as it did

to do the experiment then it's perhaps not
actually in the public's best interest to

that point and I think that's why
organizations like the N.S.A.

if are going slowly but I think there's
a lot of pressure from the N.S.A.

if and from many other organizations.

To move in that direction
the Welcome Trust in the U.K. has for

example mandated that I think
I think all of the data.

That they found needs to be made openly
available that's another great agency

that's well out ahead.

The second approach.

Has to do more with.

Creating incentives for
individual researchers so.

There are many ways that can be done.

Perhaps the simplest approach is to
look at creating tools that actually

measure nonstandard research contribution
so give an example that I've just very

recently become aware of in the last
couple of weeks which is Google scolar.

How many people are familiar
with Google Scholar.

Almost everybody.

OK So Google Scholar.

You know this great tool that lets
you find scientific papers and

reports citation data.

Or couple of interesting things one.

Some blog post to starting to
show up in Google Scholar.

Just very recently.

I'm told that you can add tags to your
blog I haven't checked this myself I'm

told you can add tags to your
blog that will actually result

in your blog posts being
included in Google Scholar and so

those sorts of things are going to start
to show up in the citation statistics and

I imagine because this is sort of
this is something that plugs in.

To the hiring process and
the career process

that actually this is this starts to
create something of an incentive for

scientists to contribute in
nonstandard ways that that's

that's one of many standard ways
you can do other similar things.

Springer for
example has just launched a journal called

Geico Science Guy science is
not about publishing papers.

It's about publishing data sets.

So you can start to build citations and
get an impact factor and

all these kinds of things
by just sharing a dataset.

It's creating an incentive in that kind of
a why small steps but I think significant.

It's a hard question.

OK let me add an extra group which she
did not name which is the librarians and

this is particularly significant
in this particular context.

So one form of open science

which I didn't really touch on is open
access your sort of alluding to it.

So there's these several organizations
central the Public Library of Science and

others which are moving to
a different model of publication.

Where in anybody in the world
can freely access papers

and instead the author is paying
a publication charge up front.

That's their business model.

And so
this kind of this big discussion going on.

I guess in that world in the scientific
publishing world now can they develop

sustainable business models
around open access publishing or

are they going to continue to charge.

Well I mean a very typical
instance of course is.

You know if you're not logged in through
the libraries through your campus access.

You might get charged twenty
thirty dollars for access to or

just a single scientific
article it's a ludicrous.

A ludicrous price off and so.

They what I think is very
interesting at the moment and

again this comes back to what funders
the doing the in age the U.S.

you know age in two thousand and
eight brought in the open access policy.

What this state is that if you
receive funding from the you know

age then I forget and actually I'm
sure somebody at the back knows.

When six or twelve months after
publication of your paper it needs to be

deposited in an openly
accessible on a card.

So in the next few years in Google you're
going to see a lot of these papers

start to show up.

So I think there's a lot
of momentum towards that.

Where the libraries come into that
is they're actually a big part of

the reason why they don't
know each policy came about.

They love being based in
based in libraries helped.

Get the enemy open access mandate past and

similar policies have come into place and
many great agencies all over the world.

So I think.

They typically want to stop.

Although most scientific papers are still
locked out behind publish or pay walls.

I think there's just too much momentum in
the direction of open access and that what

you're just going to see over the next few
years is one domino after another fall.

They'll be more and more of these
kinds of policies that mandates and

ultimately will end up with a world where.

Essentially all scientific
papers are freely accessible.

Maybe being a bit too optimistic but
I mean five years ago.

All of this the current efforts would
have seemed like kind of a pipe dream.

A lot of happened when
entering your question.

But.

OK So

let me repeat the question and
tell me if I've got it right.

You know there's a huge
amount of importance attached

at the moment to publishing in high
impact journals Nature and Science and

things like this and the question is if
we move to an open access journal model.

You know what happens to that does
that remain in place is it replaced by

something else that
the question you're asking.

Sure.

Sure.

I mean look it's should be said.

Nature for example has recently
launched an open access journal.

I forgotten the name but.

Actually we're not using the nature
brained with it which is perhaps why have

I forgotten and it's clearly
an experiment and what I think about the.

Experiment that maybe indicates
a little bit of ambivalence.

Springer one of the very I think
they're the second largest of

the scientific publishers
actually bought by a mid Central

which was the original one of
the original open access publishers.

I thought yeah well here we go.

They're going to Canada.

No they haven't counted at all and
did they really supported it.

So it's growth and development.

So I think.

If they can find a business
model that will make it

pay that will just become
part of the existing.

Kind of ecosystem.

So only you could open access journals
like post biology which has an impact

factor of I think it's thirteen or
something like that.

You know that's.

You know if it's straight into this kind
of system you're talking about of impact.

The only difference is
it's all open access so to

some extent I think the issues are maybe a
little bit of fog and all to one another.

Yeah.