Cameron Neylon

I am thinking about how to present the case for Open Science, Open
Notebook Science, and Open Data at [Science in the 21^st^
Century](http://www.science21stcentury.org/), the meeting being
organised by Sabine Hossenfelder and Michael Nielsen at the [Perimeter
Institute for Theoretical
Physics](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perimeter_Institute_for_Theoretical_Physics "Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics"){rel="wikipedia"}.
Iâ€™ve put up a [draft
abstract](http://blog.openwetware.org/scienceintheopen/2008/04/08/science-in-the-21st-century/)
and as you might guess from this I wanted to make an economic case that
the waste of resources, both human and monetary is not something that is
sustainable for the future. Here I want to rehearse that argument a bit
further as well as explore the business case that could be presented to
Google/Gates Foundation as a package that would include the development
of the [Science Exchange
ideas](http://blog.openwetware.org/scienceintheopen/2008/04/16/the-science-exchange/)
that I blogged about last week.

This line of thinking arose from [Jenny Rohnâ€™s comment on her own
blog](http://network.nature.com/blogs/user/UE19877E8/2008/04/06/in-which-i-get-into-a-little-muddle-about-archiving)
where we were discussing open notebooks (my emphasis);

> In my example above, the Evil Lab who stole my idea that Gene X is
> involved in Pathway Y publishes their paper to great fanfare in Nature
> in 2008, and my open notebook shows I made the same connection in
> 2007. Big deal. **There are probably 200 groups working on Pathway
> Y**, and several of them were bound to stumble across the same thing,
> including Evil Lab.

Now this would be a difficult thing to pin down in terms of real
numbers. How much of funded research internationally is simply
replication of other work? How much of the work done by people who
donâ€™t win the race actually gets published? And how many people with
potentially valuable contributions to make have their careers blighted
by this sort of competitive replication? This would be very difficult to
accurately quantify. However it is the case that this effect is going to
be strongest in the most competitive fields; i.e. precisely those fields
where an open approach is hardest to sell. Thus if we accept that there
is wasteful replication, then removing that waste, via open practice,
would disproportionately benefit the fields where people are most
resistant. If you accept the further premise that the reason these
fields are competitive is because they have the most direct potential to
improve peopleâ€™s lives then the argument for increased efficiency is
even stronger.

We shouldnâ€™t regard competition as a bad thing. It is good for
maintaining standards and indeed for increasing efficiency. Nor is
replication of results a bad thing. But simple replication through a
lack of communication, and then abandonment of results, because they are
the same as what someone else has already published is inefficient. An
interesting question is whether it is more effective for constructive
replication to be done with knowledge of the other work, thus making
sure it is complementary, or in complete ignorance, ensuring that there
arenâ€™t any issues of unconscious assumptions being built in due to
awareness of the other work. But this is something that can be worked
out. People manage double blind trials so I see no reason why
collaborating groups could choose not to confer if that were
appropriate. Overall there are gains to be made both in preventing
replication but also in encouraging the right type of replication; of
creating a positive encouragement to shed new light on a system by
replicating results in a slightly different context or from a different
perspective.

There are further efficiency gains to be made through rapid access to
new information. This must be tempered by the risks that this
information may be of lower quality than the traditionally peer reviewed
literature and without real data it is difficult to know where the
balance lies. In the business world, timeliness of information is
critical and therefore high quality real time data is very valuable. We
can wave our hands around and come up with some figures for this, say
saving a month of time on 1% of postdoc projects (is that a conservative
estimate? Who knows?). This would add up to a significant quantity of
money over time, certainly to tens, possibly hundreds of millions of
dollars per year.

But possibly the biggest gains are the hardest to estimate. What is the
value to a research funder of ensuring the research they support is
available for re-use in new and unexpected ways? Enough that the UK
government has spent hundreds of millions on e-science to try and
develop systems to enable storage and handling of a large data sets over
the last several years but putting a figure on the actual value is
tough, particularly when the technical problems are still to be solved
and many of the benefits are still to materialise. To ask the question a
different way, what is the economic value of
[GenBank](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GenBank "GenBank"){rel="wikipedia"}?
Of the [Protein Data
Bank](http://www.pdb.org "Protein Data Bank"){rel="wikipedia"}? Huge I
would have thought, but I wouldnâ€™t know how to put a number on it.
Economists, however do develop numbers for this kind of thing so finding
some numbers ought to be do-able.

To me the biggest efficiency gains may come from the ability to
distribute work and have problems solved by those best able to handle
them. The opportunity to get the right information to the right people
at the right time could, in my view, make a real step change in the rate
at which we can work possible. Again, very difficult to quantify, and
there may be losses as well. Potentially poorer communication in a
distributed network where the partners may not even know each other
could lead to misunderstandings and wasted effort. I believe
Jean-Claudeâ€™s experience is that the Open Notebook approach [helps to
mitigate against
this](http://usefulchem.blogspot.com/2008/02/opening-up-black-boxes-of-science.html)
and improves communication over a traditional approach, but it remains a
potential confounding factor.

So to wrap up. There are potentially large efficiency gains to be made
by carrying out science in the open. Funders will both have the data at
their fingertips and know that they are generating that data more
effectively. All of this relies absolutely on a technical implementation
that means the data is captured and made available effectively but those
are issues that we know about and are working on. And it makes the case
for working with funders who know and understand about the issues of
handling and processing data. But the underlying point is that with the
right framework the gains in terms of results per currency unit will
rise. For a relatively small investment in infrastructure development
the returns on that much bigger investment into general research will
rise significantly.

I have avoided trying to come up with any specific numbers here because
I am sure my calculations would just show my ignorance of economics. We
should be talking to economists to try and quantify the range of values
these efficiency gains could lead to and talking to research funders
about getting the background information that would enable these values
to be pinned down. If we can achieve qualitatively more science for the
same money then working with business minded funders to help them
increase their impact may well be the way forward.

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I am thinking about how to present the case for Open Science, Open Notebook Science, and Open Data at Science in the 21
<sup>
 st
</sup>
Century, the meeting being organised by Sabine Hossenfelder and Michael Nielsen at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics.

Messaggi di Rogue Scholar

The economic case for Open Science