Cameron Neylon

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[Michael Nielsen](http://michaelnielsen.org/blog/michael-a-nielsen/) is
a good friend as well as being an inspiration to many of us in the Open
Science community. I've been privileged to watch and in a small way to
contribute to the development of his arguments over the years and I
found the distillation of these years of effort into the
[talk](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnWocYKqvhw&feature=player_embedded)
that he recently gave at
[TEDxWaterloo](http://www.tedxwaterloo.com/tedxwaterloo-2011/) entirely
successful. Here is a widely accesible and entertaining talk that really
pins down the arguments, the history, the successes and the failures of
recent efforts to open up science practice.

**Professional scientific credit is the central issue**

I've been involved in many discussions around why the potential of
opening up research practice hasn't lead to wider adoption of these
approaches. The answer is simple, and as Michael says very clearly in
the opening section of the talk, the problem is that innovative
approaches to doing science are not going to be adopted while those that
use them don't get *conventional* scientific credit. I therefore have to
admit to being somewhat nonplussed by [GrrlScientist's
assessment](http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/punctuated-equilibrium/2011/apr/19/1)
of the talk that "Dr Nielsen has missed --- he certainly has not
emphasised --- the most obvious reason why the Open Science movement
will not work: credit."

For me, the entire talk is about credit. He frames the discussion of why
the Qwiki wasn't a huge success, compared to the Polymath project, in
terms of the production of conventional papers, he discusses the
transition from Galileo's anagrams to the development of the scientific
journal in terms of ensuring priority and credit. Finally he explicitly
asks the non-scientist members of the audience to do something that even
more closely speaks to the issue of credit, to ask their scientist
friends and family what they are doing to make their results more widely
available. Remember this talk is aimed at a wider audience, the
TEDxWaterloo attendees and the larger audience for the video online
(nearly 6,000 when I wrote this post). What happens when taxpayers start
asking their friends, their family, and their legislative
representatives how scientific results are being made available? You'd
betterÂ believeÂ that this has an affect on the credit economy.

**Do we just need the celebrities to back us?**

Grrl suggests that the answer to pushing the agenda forward is to enlist
Nobelists to drive projects in the same way that [Tim
Gowers](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Gowers "Timothy Gowers"){.zem_slink
rel="wikipedia"} pushed the Polymath project. While I can see the logic
and there is certainly value in moral support from successful scientists
we already have a lot of this.
[Sulston](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Sulston),
[Varmus](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_E._Varmus),
[Michael](http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/) and
[Jon](http://phylogenomics.blogspot.com/) Eisen, and indeed Michael
himself just to name a few are already pushing this agenda. But moral
support and single projects are not enough. What we need to do is hack
the underlying credit economy, provide proper citations for data and
software, exploit the obsession with impact factors.

The key to success in my view is a pincer movement. First, showing that
more (if not always completely) open approaches can outcompete closed
approaches on traditional assessment measures, something demonstrated
successfully by [Galaxy
Zoo](http://www.galaxyzoo.org "Galaxy Zoo"){.zem_slink rel="homepage"},
the [Alzeimers Disease Neuroimaging
Initiative](http://adni.loni.ucla.edu/), and the [Polymath
Projects](http://polymathprojects.org/). Secondly changing assessment
policy and culture itself, both explicitly by changing the measures by
which researchers are ranked, and implicitly by raising the public
expectation that research should be open.

**The pendulum is swinging and we're pushing it just about every
which-way we can**

I guess what really gets my back up is that Grrl sets off with the
statement that "Open Science will never work" but then does on to put
her finger on exactly the point where we can push to make it work.
Professional and public credit is absolutely at the centre of the
challenge. Michael's talk is part of a concerted, even quite carefully
coordinated, campaign to tackle this issue at a wide range of levels.
Michael's [tour of his
talk](http://michaelnielsen.org/blog/speaking-about-open-science/),
funded by the [Open Society Institute](http://www.soros.org/) seeks to
raise awareness. My
[recent](http://cameronneylon.net/blog/a-collaborative-proposal-on-research-metrics/)
[focus](http://cameronneylon.net/blog/metrics-and-money/) on
[research](http://cameronneylon.net/blog/three-minutes-of-audio-hacking-research-reputation/)
[assessment](http://cameronneylon.net/blog/beyond-the-impact-factor-building-a-community-for-more-diverse-measurement-of-research/)
(and [a project](http://beyond-impact.org/) also funded by OSI) is
tackling the same problem from another angle. It is not entirely a
coincidence that I'm writing this in a hotel room in Washington DC and
it is not at all accidental that I'm very interested in progress towards
widely accepted [researcher identifiers](http://www.orcid.org/).Â The
development of [Open Research
Computation](http://www.openresearchcomputation.com/) is a deliberate
attempt to build a journal that exploits the nature of journal rankings
to make software development more highly valued.Â 

All of these are part of a push to hack, reconfigure, and re-assess the
outputs and outcomes that researchers get credit for and the the outputs
and outcomes that are valued by tenure committees and grant panels. And
from where I stand we're making enough progress that Grrl's argument
seems a bit tired and outdated. I'm seeing enough examples of people
getting credit and reward *for being open* and simply doing and enabling
better science as a result that I'm confident the pendulum is shifting.
Would I advise a young scientist that being open will lead to certain
glory? No, it's far from certain, but you need to distinguish yourself
from the crowd one way or another and this is one way to do it. It's
still high risk but show me something in a research career that is low
risk and I'll show something that isn't worth doing.

**What can you do?**

If you believe that a move towards more open research practice is a good
thing then what can you do to make this happen? Well follow what Michael
says, give credit to those who share, explicitly acknowledge the support
and ideas you get from others. Ask researchers how they go about
ensuring that their research is widely available and above all *used*.
The thing is, in the end changing the credit economy itself isn't
enough, we actually have to change the culture that underlies that
economy. This is hard but it is done by embedding the issues and
assumptions in the everyday discourse about research. "*How useable are
your research outputs really?"* is the question that gets to the heart
of the problem. *"How easily can people access, re-use, and improve on
your research? And how open are you to getting the benefit of other
people's contribution?"* are the questions that I hope will become
embedded in the assumptions around how we do research. You can make that
happen by asking them.

 

###### Related articles {#related-articles .zemanta-related-title}

- [Michael Nielsen goes on
  tour](http://mndoci.com/2011/04/16/michael-nielsen-goes-on-tour/)
  (mndoci.com)
- [TED talk about "Open Science" debate
  TEDxWaterloo](http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/tag/michael-nielsen/)
  (wired.com)
- [Speaking about open
  science](http://michaelnielsen.org/blog/speaking-about-open-science/)
  (michaelnielsen.org)
- [Open
  Science?](http://r.zemanta.com/?u=http%3A//www.guardian.co.uk/science/punctuated-equilibrium/2011/apr/19/1&a=41260636&rid=510cb30f-a29a-49b0-af41-c7ef3c48f3fe&e=feed9d6763ed8d868b92f005273bb650)
  (guardian.co.uk)
- [Reinventing Discovery with Michael Nielsen at York University!
  \[Confessions of a Science
  Librarian\]](http://scienceblogs.com/confessions/2011/03/reinventing_discovery_with_mic.php)
  (scienceblogs.com)

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Michael Nielsen is a good friend as well as being an inspiration to many of us in the Open Science community. I’ve been privileged to watch and in a small way to contribute to the development of his arguments over the years and I found the distillation of these years of effort into the talk that he recently gave at TEDxWaterloo entirely successful.

Michael Nielsen, the credit economy, and open science

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[![An old measuring tape](http://cameronneylon.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/300px-TapeMeasure.jpg "An old measuring tape"){decoding="async"}](http://commons.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:TapeMeasure.jpg)
:   Image via
    [Wikipedia](http://commons.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:TapeMeasure.jpg)

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I know Iâ€™ve been a bit quiet for a few weeks. Mainly Iâ€™ve been away
for work and having a brief holiday so it is good to be plunging back
into things with some good news. I am very happy to report that the
[Open Society Institute](http://www.soros.org/) has agreed to fund [the
proposal](https://docs.google.com/document/edit?id=1l32FjbfBkykwMbN75FfVqxSxghINfR9JuQGLrUCauFA&hl=en_GB&authkey=CM-Ok9kC)
that was built up in response to my [initial
suggestion](http://cameronneylon.net/blog/a-collaborative-proposal-on-research-metrics/)
a month or so ago.

OSI, which many will know as one of the major players in bringing the
Open Access movement to its current position, will fund a workshop that
will identify both potential areas where the measurement and aggregation
of research outputs can be improved as well as barriers to achieving
these improvements. This will be immediately followed by a concentrated
development workshop (or hackfest) that will aim to deliver prototype
examples that show what is possible. The funding also includes further
development effort to take one or two of these prototypes and develop
them to proof of principle stage, ideally with the aim of deploying
these into real working environments where they might be useful.

The workshop structure will be developed by the participants over the 6
weeks leading up to the date itself. I aim to set that date in the next
week or so, but the likelihood is early to mid-March. The workshop will
be in southern England, with the venue to be again worked out over the
next week or so.

There is a lot to pull together here and I will be aiming to contact
everyone who has expressed an interest over the next few weeks to start
talking about the details. In the meantime Iâ€™d like to thank everyone
who has contributed to the effort thus far. In particular Iâ€™d like to
thank Melissa Hagemann and Janet Haven at OSI and Gunner from
[Aspiration](http://www.aspirationtech.org/) who have been a great help
in focusing and optimizing the proposal. Too many people contributed to
the proposal itself to name them all (and you can check out the
GoogleDoc history if you want to pull apart their precise contributions)
but I do want to thank [Heather Piwowar](researchremix.wordpress.com)
and [David
Shotton](http://www.zoo.ox.ac.uk/staff/academics/shotton_dm.htm) in
particular for their contributions.

Finally, the success of the proposal, and in particular the community
response around it has made me much more confident that some of the
dreams we have for using the web to support research are becoming a
reality. The details I will leave for another post but what I found
fascinating is how far the network of people spread who could be
contacted, essentially through a single blog post. Iâ€™ve contacted a
few people directly but most have become involved through the network of
contacts that spread from the original post. The network, and the tools,
are effective enough that a community can be built up rapidly around an
idea from a much larger and more diffuse collection of people. The
challenge of this workshop and the wider project is to see how we can
make that aggregated community into a self sustaining conversation that
produces useful outputs over the longer term.

*It's a complete co-incidence that Michael Nielsen posted a piece in the
past few hours that forms a great document for framing the discussion.
I'll be aiming to write something in response soon but in the meantime
follow the top link below.*

###### Related articles {#related-articles .zemanta-related-title}

- [The mismeasurement of
  science](http://michaelnielsen.org/blog/the-mismeasurement-of-science/)
  (michaelnielsen.org)
- [Alt-metrics: A
  manifesto](http://www.academicproductivity.com/2010/alt-metrics-a-manifesto/)
  (academicproductivity.com)
- [Archival Metrics \| Promoting a Culture of Assessment in Archives and
  Special Collections](http://archivalmetrics.org/)
  (archivalmetrics.org)
- [ReaderMeter: Crowdsourcing research
  impact](http://www.academicproductivity.com/2010/readermeter-crowdsourcing-research-impact/)
  (academicproductivity.com)
- [Ouroboros and Peer Review: New Proposals Continue to Chase Their Own
  Tails](http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2010/10/04/ouroboros-and-peer-review-new-proposals-continue-to-chase-their-own-tails/)
  (scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org)

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Image via Wikipedia  I know Iâ€™ve been a bit quiet for a few weeks. Mainly Iâ€™ve been away for work and having a brief holiday so it is good to be plunging back into things with some good news. I am very happy to report that the Open Society Institute has agreed to fund the proposal that was built up in response to my initial suggestion a month or so ago.

Publicaciones de Rogue Scholar

Michael Nielsen, the credit economy, and open science

Beyond the Impact Factor: Building a community for more diverse measurement of research