[Asis-l] LiveScience: Era of Scientific Secrecy Near End

[gerrymck]

Colleagues/

A Must Read For A Friday Afternoon ...

/Gerry

Era of Scientific Secrecy Near End
By Robin Lloyd, LiveScience Senior Editor

posted: 02 September 2008 11:30 am ET

Secrecy and competition to achieve breakthroughs have been part of
scientific culture for centuries, but the latest Internet advances are
forcing a tortured openness throughout the halls of science and
raising questions about how research will be done in the future.
The openness at the technological and cultural heart of the Internet
is fast becoming an irreplaceable tool for many scientists, especially
biologists, chemists and physicists — allowing them to forgo the long
wait to publish in a print journal and instead to blog about early
findings and even post their data and lab notes online. The result:
Science is moving way faster and more people are part of the dialogue.

[snip]

Open science

The open science approach forces researchers to grapple with the
question of whether they can still get sufficient credit for their
ideas, said physicist Sabine Hossenfelder, co-organizer of a
conference on the topic set to begin Sept. 8 at the Perimeter
Institute in Ontario, Canada.

[BTW: I Will Be Attending This Unique Conference Science in the 21st
Century: Science, Society, and Information Technology [
http://tinyurl.com/6ll8fb ]  / Look For Conference-Related Postings on
My Scholarship 2.0 blog [ http://scholarship20.blogspot.com/ ] within
the next two weeks]

[snip]

Open science is a shorthand for technological tools, many of which are
Web-based, that help scientists communicate about their findings. At
its most radical, the ethos could be described as "no insider
information." Information available to researchers, as far as
possible, is made available to absolutely everyone.

Beyond email, teleconferencing and search engines, there are many
examples: blogs where scientists can correspond casually about their
work long before it is published in a journal; social networks that
are scientist friendly such as Laboratree and Ologeez; GoogleDocs and
wikis which make it easy for people to collaborate via the Web on
single documents; a site called Connotea that allows scientists to
share bookmarks for research papers; sites like Arxiv, where
physicists post their "pre-print" research papers before they are
published in a print journal; OpenWetWare which allows scientists to
post and share new innovations in lab techniques; the Journal of
Visualized Experiments, an open-access site where you can see videos
of how research teams do their work; GenBank, an online searchable
database for DNA sequences; Science Commons, a non-profit project at
MIT to make research more efficient via the Web, such as enabling easy
online ordering of lab materials referenced in journal articles;
virtual conferences; online open-access (and free) journals like
Public Library of Science (PLoS); and open-source software that can
often be downloaded free off Web sites.

The upshot: Science is no longer under lock and key, trickling out as
it used to at the discretion of laconic professors and tense PR
offices. For some scientists, secrets no longer serve them. But not
everyone agrees.


[ MUCH MORE ]

SECTIONS

Networked Cyborgs

Is It A Good Thing?

[snip]

Open science also has the potential to prevent discrimination in
access to information. Arxiv, the site for posting pre-print physics
papers, was started in 1991 by Cornell physicist Paul Ginsparg, then
at Los Alamos National Laboratory, to help provide equal access to
prepublication information to graduate students, postdocs and
researchers in developing countries.

[BTW: Paul Ginsparg will be of of several Major Players presenting at
The Conference]

Drawbacks of Open Science

Fear Of Losing Peer Review

For The Good Of Truth, Humanity, Economies?

Access To An Expanded Excerpted Version of The Article And A Link To
The Full Article Itself Is Available At

[ http://tinyurl.com/6f366g ]

Thanks to Sabine Hossenfelder For The HeadsUp !

/Gerry

Gerry McKiernan
Associate Professor
Science and Technology Librarian
Iowa State University Library
Ames IA 50011

gerrymck at iastate.edu

There is Nothing More Powerful Than  An Idea Whose Time Has Come
Victor Hugo

[ http://www.blogger.com/profile/09093368136660604490 ]

Iowa: Where the Tall Corn Flows and the (North)West Wind Blows
[ http://alternativeenergyblogs.blogspot.com/   ]