Science and Technology Facilities Council

Cameron Neylon

I spent last week in Cuba. I was there on holiday but my wife (who is a
chemistry academic) was on a work trip to visit collaborators. This
meant I had the opportunity to talk to a range of scientists and to see
the conditions they work under. One of the strong arguments for Open
Science (literature access, data, methods, notebooks) is that it
provides access to scientists in less priviledged countries to both peer
reviewed research as well as to the details of methodology that can
enable them to carry out their science. I was therefore interested to
see both what was available to them and whether they viewed our efforts
in this area as useful or helpful. I want to emphasise that these people
were doing good science in difficult circumstances by playing to their
strengths and focussing on achievable goals. This is not second rate
science, just science that is limited by access to facilities, reagents,
and information.

**Access to the literature**

There is essentially no access to the subscriber-only literature.Â  Odd
copies of journal issues are highly valued and many people get by by
having visiting positions at institutes in the developed world. I talked
to a few people about our protein ligation work and they were immensely
grateful that this was published in an open access journal. However they
were uncertain about publishing in open access journals due to the
perceived costs.Â  While it is likely that they could get such costs
waived I believe there is an issue of pride here in not wishing to take
'charity'. Indeed, in the case of Cuba it may be illegal for US based
open access publishers to provide such assistance. It would be
interesting to know whether this is the case.

Overall though, it is clear that acccess to the peer reviewed literature
is a serious problem for these people.Â  Open Access publishing provides
a partial solution to this problem. I think to be effective it is
important that this not be limited to self archving, as for reasons I
will come back to, it is difficult for them to find such self archived
papers. It is clear that mandating archival on a free access repository
can help.

**Access to primary data**

Of more immediate interest to me was whether people with limited access
to the literature saw value in having free access to the primary data in
open notebooks. Again, people were grateful for the provision of access
to information as this has the potential to make their life easier. When
you have limited resources it is important to make sure that things work
and that they produce publishable results. Getting details information
on methodology of interest is therefore very valuable. Often the data
that we take for granted is not available (fluorescence spectra, NMR,
mass spectrometry) but details like melting points, colours, retention
times can be very valuable.

There were two major concerns; one is a concern we regularly see, that
of information overload. I think this is less of a concern as long as
search engines make it possible to find information that is of interest.
Work needs to be done on this but I think it is clear that some sort of
cross between Google Scholar and Amazon's recommendation
system/Delicious etc. (original concept
[suggested](http://nsaunders.wordpress.com/2007/08/15/automated-bioinformatics-discovery-through-social-networking/#more-656)
by Neil Saunders) can deal with this.Â  The other concern, relating to
them adoptingÂ  such approaches, was one that we have seen over and over
again, that of 'getting scooped'. Here though the context is subtley
different and there is a measure of first world-developing world
politics thrown in. These scientists are, understandably, very reluctant
to publicise initial results because the way they work is methodical and
slow. Very often the key piece of data required to make up a paper can
only be obtained on apparatus that is not available in house or requires
lengthy negotiations with potential overseas collaborators. By
comparison it would often be trivially easy for a developed world
laboratory to take the initial results and turn out the paper.

The usual flip side argument holds here; by placing an initial result in
the public domain it may be easier for them to find a collaborator who
can finish of the paper but I can understand their perspective. These
are people struggling against enormous odds to stake out a place for
themselves in the scientific community. The first world does not exactly
have an outstanding record on acknowledging or even valuing work in
developing countries so I can appreciate a degree of scepticism on their
part. I hope that this may be overcome eventually but given that the
assumption of most people in my own community is that by being open we
are bound to be shafted I suspect we need to get our own house in order
first.

**The catch...**

All of this is well and good. There are many real and potential benefits
for scientists in the developing world if we move to more open styles of
science communication. This is great, and I think it is a good argument
for more openness. However there is a serious problem with the way we
present this information and our reliance on modern web tools to do it.
Its a very simple problem: bandwidth.

All of our blogs, our data, and indeed the open access literature is
very graphics heavy. I actually tried to load up the front page of
openwetware.org while sitting at the computer of the head of the
department my wife was visiting (the department has two networked
computers). Fifteen minutes later it was still loading.Â  The PLoS One
front page was similarly sluggish. I get irritated if my download speeds
drop below 500K/second, at home, and I will give up if they go down to
100K. We were seeing download rates of 44 bytes/second at the worst
point. In some cases this can even make search engines unuseable making
it near impossible to track down the self-archived versions of papers.
Cuba is perhaps a special case because the US embargo means they have no
access to the main transatlantic and North American cables, in effect
the whole country is on a couple of bundles of phone lines, but I
suspect that even while access is becoming more pervasive the
penetration of reasonable levels of bandwidth is limited in the
developing world.

The point of this is that access is about more than just putting stuff
up, it is also about making it accessible. If we are serious about
providing access, and expanding our networks to include scientists who
do not have the advantages that we have, then this necessarily includes
thinking about low bandwidth versions of the pages that provide
information. I looked through PLoS One, openwetware, BioMedCentral, and
couldn't find a 'text only version' button on any of them (to be fair
there isn't one on our lab blog either).Â  I appreciate the need to
present things in an appealling and useful format, and indeed the need
to place advertising to diversify revenue streams. I guess the main
point is not to assume that by making it available, that you are
necessarily making it accessible. If universal accessibility is an
important goal then some thought needs to go into alternative
presentations.

Overall I think there are real benefits for these scientists when we
make things available. The challenges shouldn't put us off doing it but
perhaps it is advisable to bear in mind the old saw; If you want to help
people, make sure you find out what they need first.


I spent last week in Cuba. I was there on holiday but my wife (who is a chemistry academic) was on a work trip to visit collaborators. This meant I had the opportunity to talk to a range of scientists and to see the conditions they work under.

Messaggi di Rogue Scholar

Open Science and the developing world: Good intentions, bad implementation?