Why Isaac Newton is influencing science sharing today // how to make scientists share

As I was looking for an article related to data sharing for this weeks blog I came back to the September Nature special on Open Access, and Bryan Nelson's article "Data sharing: Empty archives." I know that this particular issue of Nature was widely read by our class, so in an attempt to limit redundancy I followed the Comments of Nelson's article to a similarly themed article.

The article in question "Doing science in the open" by Michael Nielson appeared on physicsworld.com in May. In the early years of science - the really early years - scientists made every effort to keep their discoveries secret. Going so far as to publishing ideas as anagrams in order to have time to work out the kinks of a theory while keeping the idea itself a mystery. This practice, it seems was rather common in the 17th and 18th centuries. Scientists were, presumably, motivated in large part by personal gain. This culture began to change when governments became the patrons of scientists - scientific discovery benefited the public good and the reputation of both the scientists and their patron governments. Since this time some 300 years ago which brought about the practices of scholarly publishing we know today little has changed.

As Nelson noted in "Data sharing: Empty archives," the scientific field has been slow, in some views, to adopt digital data sharing. Nielson, however, notes several successes in scientific data sharing: the "physics preprint server arXiv, which lets physicists share preprints of their papers without the months-long delay typical of a conventional journal, and GenBank, an online database where biologists can deposit and search for DNA sequences." Also, Nielson describes (what I consider to be the coolest data sharing in science I've heard of so far) the "Journal of Visualized Experiments, [JoVE] which lets scientists upload videos that show how their experiments work."

(At the point I reached this part of the article, I wanted to jump ship and blog about JoVE - a site well worth a look!)

But back to the data sharing matters at hand: Nielson goes on to examine some of the failures science online: comments sites, which lack a lot of buy ins; and wikipedia, which hasn't appreciated the contributions of the scientific community as expected.

Collaboration, Nielson argues, is quite natural in the scientific community. No scientists can answer all of the questions, even Albert Einstein occasionally asked a colleague and friend for help. The problem is translating this natural collaboration into the realm of the internet. Nielson closes his article with a sentiment often mentioned in class: "We still require a cultural change that embraces an open scientific culture. This will include new metrics that acknowledge online collaboration as a genuine scientific contribution — something that will act as an incentive for scientists to share their problems online."