[Insight-users] THE SHARING OF SCIENCE

[Luis Ibanez]

from

"Wikinomics"
"How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything"
Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams
http://www.wikinomics.com/book/
pages 157-160.


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THE SHARING OF SCIENCE



Call it collaborative science, or even Science 2.0. The Enlightenment
[of the seventeenth century] accomplished real alchemy, turning research
into knowledge by spawning the practice of open scientific publishing.
But a centuries-long trend toward openness did not stop there. Today a
new scientific paradigm of comparable significance is on the verge of
ignition, inspired by the same technological forces that are turning the
Web into a massive collaborative work space.


Just as collaborative tools and applications are reshaping enterprises,
the new Web will forever change the way scientists publish, manage data,
and collaborate across institutional boundaries. The walls dividing
institutions will crumble, and open scientific networks will emerge in
their place. All of the world's scientific data and research will at
last be available to every single researcher -gratis- without prejudice
or burden.


Unrealistic you say? Not really, when you consider that conventional
scientific publishing is both slow and expensive for users, and that
these issues, in turn, are increasingly big problems in science. Visit
any campus today and you'll hear ever louder vocal cries for the old
paradigm to be swept aside. As new forms of peer collaboration and
open-access publishing emerge, this looks more likely by the day.
Before we describe this new paradigm, however, let's briefly review the
problems.


Traditional journals aggregate academic papers by subject and deploy
highly structured systems for evaluating and storing the accumulated
knowledge of a scientific community. Each paper is peer reviewed by
two or more experts, and can go through numerous revisions before it is
accepted for publishing. Frustrated authors can find their cutting-edge
discoveries less cutting edge after a lumbering review process has
delayed final publication by up to a year, and in some cases longer.
With the pace of science increasing today, that's just not fast enough.


The other problem is that the vast majority of published research today
is only available to paid subscribers. Ever increasing subscription
fees, meanwhile, have made this research less accessible. What's worst
is that these impediments to access persist despite the availability of
much cheaper electronic publishing methods. Though an unlimited number
of additional readers could access digital copies of research at
virtually no additional cost, publishers hold back for fear of creating
a Napster-like phenomenon.


No doubt these problems are hangovers from a world of physical
distribution and a much more limited volume of publishing. The current
publishing regime emerged in seventeenth-century Europe, when the pace
of discovery was glacial by twenty-first-century standards. Scientific
journals provided the primary infrastructure for scholarly communication
and collaboration. Apart from annual academic symposiums, journals were
'the' place where scientist could find out about, engage with, and
carefully critique each other's work. Publishing journals was expensive,
entailing significant capital and operational costs.


As the scientific endeavor swells in scale and speed, however, a growing
number of participants in the scientific ecosystem are questioning
whether the antiquated journal system is adequate to satisfy their
needs. New communication technologies render paper-based publishing
obsolete. The traditional peer-reviewed journal system is already being
augmented, if not superseded, by increasing amounts of peer-to-peer
collaboration.

....

As large-scale scientific collaborations become the norm, scientists
will rely increasingly on distributed methods of collecting data,
verifying discoveries, and testing hypotheses not only to speed things
up, but to improve the veracity of scientific knowledge itself. Rapid
iterative, and open-access publishing will engage a much greater
proportion of the scientific community in the peer-review process.
Results will be vetted by hundreds of participants on the fly, not by a
handful of anonymous referees, up to a year later. This in turn will
allow new knowledge to flow more quickly into practical uses and
enterprises.

....

When fully assembled, open-access libraries will provide unparalleled
access to humanity's stock of knowledge. Improved access to knowledge,
in turn, will hep deepen and broaden the progress of science, giving
everyone from high school students to entrepreneurs the opportunity to
tap its insights.

....


Digital libraries are only the first step in modernizing scientific
research and publishing. More profound breakthroughs will come as
scientists come to rely less on the "paper" as the prime vehicle for
scientific communication and more on tools such as Blogs, Wikis, and
Web-enabled databanks.



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