Economics and Mechanisms » Commons

Open science: why is it so hard?

Dimitrios Diamantaras — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 18:22:49 +0000

OK, I am becoming obsessed with Lemire's blog. One more post from there now, and back to my own work I go. Incidentally, the book by Michael Nielsen discussed below is sitting in my queue of e-books I really should be reading yesterday. (Once again, I have snipped most of the text of the post, for which I strongly recommend that you visit the source.) And before I go, let me obey Lemire's injunction and repeat: scholarship is not a publishing business.

Open science: why is it so hard?:

[Snip…]

Thus, a much more significant vision is Nielsen’s open science. Michael Nielsen is arguing for a culture shift in science: from a science obsessed with individual performance (and publications) to a science culture resembling more that of open source software or wikipedia.

I fear however that despite all the (well deserved) press that Michael Nielsen’s latest book has been getting, too few people understand the importance of this shift. It is not about becoming hippies. It is not a socialist utopia. On the contrary, the system we have right now is akin to an highly regulated industry. All power is in the hands of the government and a few large organizations (universities, publishers) working in tandem. The barrier to entry is maintained artificially high. Open science is really about creating “open markets” with freer exchanges. It has the potential to boost our collective productivity by orders of magnitude through the removal of unneeded friction.

[Snip…]

And we finally get a hint at why it is so hard it is to open up science: the business of science has become intertwined with businesses like the publishing business. ACM has to speak both as an association of computing professionals, and as a publishing house.

What should be a critical support service, the publication of results, ends up driving much of our culture. The journals become the science. The medium becomes the message.

In effect, we have too much organizational scarring tissue in science. It could be that we need to reboot the system. As a starting point, we should collectively recognize the problem. Repeat after me: scholarship is not a publishing business.

Further reading:

Is Open Access publishing the solution? Really?

ACM’s role in public policy

Time for scholarly publishers to disavow the AAP

Update:

The ACM charges the authors of any conference for the publication of proceedings. However, they do not require payment for publishing in their journals: instead they request page charges.

(Via Daniel Lemire's blog)

Protest against the proposed SOPA and PIPA bills

Dimitrios Diamantaras — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 13:04:35 +0000

These bills would strangle freedom on the World Wide Web. I urge all visitors to visit the Electronic Frontier Foundation's action page and take action. Thank you.

Bacteria that channel Elinor Ostrom

Dimitrios Diamantaras — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 16:26:22 +0000

This blog post, from Not Exactly Rocket Science, caught my attention. I blogged about it in my more general-audience blog. Here I want to elaborate a little bit on the connection with Elinor Ostrom's work. Ostrom studies how various human societies have evolved mechanisms to manage common property resources. She shows how in many cases these mechanisms lead to much better outcomes for the users of the commons than what the plain old game theoretic foundation of the "tragedy of the commons" that we teach undergraduate students (and graduate students, too) leads us to believe. I like how the study of bacteria I started this post with shows the same idea operating via chemical signals and evolutionary pressures in populations of bacteria. Surely humans can continue to evolve useful mechanisms to manage their own common property resource problems better, if bacteria can. Note that the bacteria in this study did not have a uniformly good solution: only if the population of the colony gets large enough does the evolutionary advantage of cheaters evaporate. But it does evaporate, eventually.