Thomas Lin
The New England Journal of Medicine marks its 200th anniversary this year with a timeline celebrating the scientific advances first described in its pages: the stethoscope (1816), the use of ether for anesthesia (1846), and disinfecting hands and instruments before surgery (1867),
among others.
For centuries, this is how science has operated ? through research done in private, then submitted to science and medical journals to be reviewed by peers and published for the benefit of other researchers and the public at large. But to many scientists, the longevity of that process is nothing to celebrate.
The system is hidebound, expensive and elitist, they say. Peer review can take months, journal subscriptions can be prohibitively costly, and a handful of gatekeepers limit the flow of information. It is an ideal system for sharing knowledge, said the quantum physicist Michael Nielsen, only ?if you?re stuck with 17th-century technology.?
Dr Nielsen and other advocates for ?open science? say science can accomplish much more, much faster, in an environment of friction-free collaboration over the Internet. And despite a host of obstacles, including the skepticism of many established scientists, their ideas are gaining traction.
Open-access archives and journals like arXiv and the Public Library of Science (PLoS) have sprung up in recent years. GalaxyZoo, a citizen-science site, has classified millions of objects in space, discovering characteristics that have led to a raft of scientific papers.
On the collaborative blog MathOverflow, mathematicians earn reputation points for contributing to solutions; in another math experiment dubbed the Polymath Project, mathematicians commenting on the Fields medalist Timothy Gower?s blog in 2009 found a new proof for a particularly complicated theorem in just six weeks.
And a social networking site called ResearchGate ? where scientists can answer one another?s questions, share papers and find collaborators ? is rapidly gaining popularity. Editors of traditional journals say open science sounds good, in theory. In practice, ?the scientific community itself is quite conservative,? said Maxine Clarke, executive editor of the commercial journal Nature, who added that the traditional published paper is still viewed as ?a unit to award grants or assess jobs and tenure.?
Dr Nielsen, 38, who left a successful science career to write Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science, agreed that scientists have been ?very inhibited and slow to adopt a lot of online tools.? But he added that open science was coalescing into ?a bit of a movement.?
Science is moving to a collaborative model, said Bora Zivkovic, a chronobiology blogger who is a founder of the the ScienceOnline conference, that held its sixth edition last week, ?because it works better in the current ecosystem, in the Web-connected world.?
Facebook for scientists?
?I want to make science more open. I want to change this,? said Ijad Madisch, 31, the Harvard-trained virologist and computer scientist behind ResearchGate, the social networking site for scientists.
Started in 2008 with few features, it was reshaped with feedback from scientists. Its membership has mushroomed to more than 1.3 million, Dr Madisch said, and it has attracted several million dollars in venture capital from some of the original investors of Twitter, eBay and Facebook.
A year ago, ResearchGate had 12 employees. Now it has 70 and is hiring.
The Web site is a sort of mash-up of Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Only scientists are invited to pose and answer questions.
Scientists populate their ResearchGate profiles with their real names, professional details and publications ? data that the site uses to suggest connections with other members. Users can create public or private discussion groups, and share papers and lecture materials. ResearchGate is also developing a ?reputation score? to reward members for online contributions.
The Paper Trade
Dr S?nke H Bartling, a researcher at the German Cancer Research Center who is editing a book on ?Science 2.0,? wrote that for scientists to move away from what is currently ?a highly integrated and controlled process?, a new system for assessing the value of research is needed. If open access is to be achieved through blogs, what good is it, he asked, ?if one does not get reputation and money from them??
?I would love for it to be free,? said Alan Leshner, executive publisher of the journal Science, but ?we have to cover the costs.? Those costs hover around $40 million a year to produce his nonprofit flagship journal. (Like other media organizations, Science has responded to the decline in advertising revenue by enhancing its Web offerings, and most of its growth comes from online subscriptions.)
Similarly, Nature employs a large editorial staff to manage the peer-review process and to select and polish ?startling and new? papers for publication, said Dr Clarke, its editor. And it costs money to screen for plagiarism and spot-check data ?to make sure they haven?t been manipulated.?
Peer-reviewed open-access journals, like Nature Communications and PLoS One, charge their authors publication fees ? $5,000 and $1,350, respectively ? to defray their more modest expenses.
Science 2.0
Scott Aaronson, a quantum computing theorist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has refused to conduct peer review for or submit papers to commercial journals. ?I got tired of giving free labor,? he said, to ?these very rich for-profit companies.?
Dr Leshner, the publisher of Science, agrees that things are moving. ?Will the model of science magazines be the same 10 years from now? I highly doubt it,? he said. ?I believe in evolution.
?When a better system comes into being that has quality and trustability, it will happen. That?s how science progresses, by doing scientific experiments. We should be doing that with scientific publishing as well.?