Regular readers know I frequently suggest the community of science would be better off if its institutional contexts favored more collaboration and less competition. (I’m not the only one.) So I wanted to mention a project, OpenWetWare that’s trying to move biology in that direction.
The project “is an effort to promote the sharing of information, know-how, and wisdom among researchers and groups who are working in biology & biological engineering.” Its website is a wiki where members can contribute information about crucial experimental materials (and how to make them), experimental protocols, and other useful resources. As well, professors in different locations have started using OWW for their courses to post course materials and encourage discussion.
There’s a nice essay posted, Science 2.0, that looks at the project from the point of view of what the Web 2.0 technologies could make (and have already made) possible for the community of biologists. The essay acknowledges that despite very positive early reactions, some scientists have misgivings about whether this “open science” approach can work:
… there is a strong resistance to posting research progress and topics prior to their publication due to fear of being ‘scooped’. This is an unfortunate limitation based on academic community norms, rather than a limitation of the technology. We hope to start to change these norms by demonstrating that sharing information about research in progress will be far more likely to lead to collaboration than to competition.
(Bold emphasis added.)
I’m hopeful that biologist will treat this as an empirical question and find out whether they can change the way the game is played rather than giving up without even trying.
You might also like the Synaptic Leap, the Tropical Disease Initiative and BioForge.
I’m hopeful that biologists will treat this as an empirical question and find out whether they can change the way the game is played rather than giving up without even trying.
I think the whole field will start to move in that direction if a few labs/individuals have considerable success by working in the open — that is, success directly attributable to Open Science practice.
I know of three or four theses being written on public wikis or blogs, Jean-Claude Bradley’s UsefulChem project, Sivappa Rasapalli’s Totally Retrosynthetic and Rosie Redfield’s lab. If anyone knows of other Open Science efforts, please tell me about them!
Bill,
Thanks for mentioning UsefulChem. In addition to maintaining our internal laboratory notebook completely public on our wiki, external collaborators have been comfortable using a mailing list to share all details of their contribution in the development of new anti-malarial compounds.
I’d like to point out another Open Science website, JeffsBench.com. It has a slightly different approach that the sites mentioned above. JeffsBench is not an open notebook but it is trying to promote communication among researchers. There are tools to discuss the primary literature as well as protocols, etc. in addition to social networking features. The power of this site is that it is a central location for scientists to discuss science that is not immediately a part of their research project. It can be a lot like the conversation that takes place at the pub or in the hallway at a conference.
Eventually I expect that a combination of these tools will revolutionize the way we do research.