
Publicly funded science should be open science - michael_nielsen
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204644504576653573191370088.html?mod=googlenews_wsj
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mechanical_fish
I was hoping that this article would restrain itself to arguing for open,
publicly-readable journals. Baby steps, folks. Gotta walk before you run and
all that.

Mandating open journals is practical. Convincing the current community of,
say, biologists to share their raw data is not. I don't think molecular
biologists would literally poison each other rather than divulge their
sequence data prior to its publication in a major journal, but they'd consider
it. The system of funding and promotion is going to have to undergo a very big
shift before this dream comes to life. (Although I suspect it _will_ come to
life, eventually.)

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hugh3
Biggest factor left out: laziness.

I have no philosophical objection to sharing all my raw data just on the
offchance somebody wants to look through terabytes of wavefunction data. But
it'd take _time_ and _effort_ to organise it all. It's enough trouble for me
just to get the relevant and important bits ready for publication, I don't
want to sort through all my raw data as well.

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zerostar07
Lazyness because there is no incentive. Again, the open source analogy comes
handy: I usually write hugely embarrassing code for my projects, but if i had
to open source it, not only would i write better, i might actually discover
errors hitherto undetected. Equivalently, people would triple-check their data
to avoid being embarrassed. That would also signal a shift from the "publish
or perish" madness to "just publish good", which is huge.

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markkat
This would be very difficult in biology. Any single experiment isn't evidence
of much, and once I do get a notion that I am on to something, if I slap that
up on the web, I'll probably get beaten to the punch by someone that has more
resources and/or is better positioned. It would also be tough to argue that my
early experiment was critical or even necessary to get there. So I would do a
lot of work, and gift it to someone else. Of course, I know that this is the
point, but it's problem enough that grants are basically over-hyped sales
pitches. Good science is methodical and rigorous. Until funding is less
results-based, you need to show big results. It's crazy to think that it's
enough to fund promising evidence. Promising evidence is even more subjective.
More hyperbole is not what we need.

We need to fund the process first. Then people, then results.

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peteforde
True story: I grabbed the URL and started to email Michael Nielsen.

Nice work, dude. :)

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zerostar07
He is an HN regular too, i think ; certainly the most esteemed scientist i 've
seen in here.

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aresant
If you want to change a system, understand its motivations.

The article supplies a half-truth in this regard:

"If you're a scientist applying for a job or a grant, the biggest factor
determining your success will be your record of scientific publications."

That's true, but the larger story is "IP"

A friend of mine has spent the past 8 years barely scraping by earning a PhD
in Chemistry and working as a post-doc.

His motivation for the investment of time and energy is entrepreneurial: he
plans to start a business using his discoveries.

Protecting his business interests means patents, means a closed system, means
secrecy until it comes time to publish and he can be assured prior art status.

Beyond that an enormous part of Universities funding comes from IP royalties.

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arethuza
"Protecting his business interests"

Who funds his research? If he is funding it out of his own pocket then yes, I
think it would be fair for him to have some joint ownership of the IP.
However, if it was funded by someone else (e.g. the public) then my view is
that everyone who contributed to funding that research should have the ability
to access and use the results.

~~~
atakan_gurkan
It is not really clear-cut. Typically a graduate student in the US does many
things (from teaching to building a lab's basic equipment), and gets paid very
little. I would not have a problem if a grad student claims that she did
enough work for the money she is paid and her "discoveries" are the outcome of
things she has done in her spare time. She is expected to publish of course,
but there is already a remedy for not publishing: You cannot get a job in
academia, and your advisor will not get further funding.

The funding provides the raw materials and the equipment in addition to the
grad students' salary, so it is not unreasonable for the funding agency to
require some open access to the outcome of the project. But this has to be
said in advance, so people can decide whether to live on a low salary for many
years while doing highly qualified work. If you want full access to my
findings, so I would not be accumulating intellectual capital during my grad
student years, then I would like a decent salary.

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EGreg
I wrote about something similar here:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3161027>

