Reinventing Discovery, Part II

This is the second part of my review of Michael Nielsen's book "Reinventing Discovery - The New Era of Networked Science" (first part is here). Last time we talked about Galaxy Zoo, the Polymath Project, and why scientists don't (usually) do Wikis.  This time I'd like to focus on the book parts which talk about ArXiv

ArXiv

First of all, I have to say I've been using ArXiv extensively lately as part of the ACUMEN project, trying to figure out who and what can be found there. The place is a bit of a mess - it's not Pubmed - but it still left me in awe, because not only that most of the astronomers I've searched had papers there, most of them contributed at least one of the papers themselves (you can see who submitted the paper). 

ArXiv comes with a service called SPIRES (now inSPIRE) which can tell you how many times a paper was cited, who's citing who, and so forth. This way, it's possible to measure at least some of the impact of preprints (if you're a high-energy physicist). So, not only ArXiv makes the scientific communication faster, it also helps evaluate the impact of this kind of communication more accurately. 

Unfortunately, not everybody gives ArXiv the honor it deserves. Nielsen tells how when he was writing the book, a physicist told him that Paul Ginsparg, ArXiv's creator, was wasting his talent on "collecting garbage", reflecting a disregard certain scientists have for "mere" tool builders. I don't know if this attitude is common in the scientific community, but it's discouraging nonetheless. 

Open Access can be problematic 

Citizen science isn't always all that - in the Polymath Project, there were people with good intentions but not much knowledge, their contributions didn't have much value to the project and had to essentially filtered out. 

Misinformation - premature publications , especially in fields the mainstream media takes interest in, can spread far and wide, confuse the general public and discredit research projects in the eyes of the public. 

How we can be more open (if you're reading this, you probably don't need these suggestions). 

In the last few pages of the book, Nielsen suggests practical steps toward open science. A scientist can upload old data, code, etc. online for reuse (be sure to tell people how to cite it!); He/she can open a blog, contribute to other people's open science projects, or try to create a new one. Nielsen advises to "be generous in giving other scientists credit when they share their scientific knowledge in new ways" which I think is an excellent advice, even though the formatting and style guides are a bit behind the times when it comes to social media. 

  

All in all, Reinventing discovery is a great book, however, I was a little disappointed to find only a small section dedicated to science blogs. The author explains that he had enough of the hype around blogging and that he doesn't want "to cover that well-trodden ground again", but I think the book could have benefited from a few more pages about the subject (yes, I know I'm not very objective here...). Also, though the book deals with - and recommends - open access, it isn't under Creative Commons licence (you can read why here). 

Nielsen, Michael (2011). Reinventing Discovery Princeton University Press Other: 9780691148908

Reinventing Discovery: Book Review, Part I

In Arthur C. Clarke's story "Into the Comet" he describes a spaceship with a computer malfunction that dooms all abroad to eventual death by starvation/oxygen deprivation, whichever comes first. The solution is a device older than the computer: the abacus. The entire crew ran calculations on acabi, and they make their way out of the comet's nucleus successfully. That is an extreme example of citizen science (or oh-my-God-we're-all-going-to-die science) but it shows the principle, that collaboration by a large number of people can solve very complicated problems. Michael Nielsen's excellent book, 'Reinventing Discovery' tells us about many such examples, though in most of them participants have to do a lot more than just calculate without thinking.

Source

Take 'Galaxy Zoo': volunteers can help classify galaxies (it turns out people do it faster and more accurately than a computer). It all began when one overworked grad student, Kevin Schawinski, wanted to prove that elliptical galaxies aren't always old, but had simply too many galaxies to go through in order to prove his theory. He and a post-doc, Chris Lintott, joined forces and opened a website which allowed anyone to come and classify galaxy photos. The project is an enormous success, with 22 scientific papers so far and the spin-offs Galaxy Zoo 2 and Galaxy Zoo:Hubble.

Another story Nielsen recounts is the story of the Polymath Project: Fields Medal recipient Tim Gowers posted a mathematical problem in his blog and asked for a collaborative efforts. Twenty-seven people wrote 800 comments and solved the problem within 37 days. Now there is a Polymath blog which keeps up the good work.

These projects were a success, but Nielsen also studies failed projects and the reasons for their failure. He argues (which I wholly agree!) that scientists are rewarded by writing as many good scientific papers as possible. Contributing to, say, Wikipedia, essentially takes away time from research and gives nothing in terms of academic reputation.

Galaxy Zoo is a success because it gives astronomers something to write about, and it's possible the Polymath project succeeds because it A. involves people with tenure and B. involves people who want to be noticed by people with tenure.

Personally, I think the solution to scientists' reluctance to cooperate in collaborative projects is simple: put them in a spaceship and tell them they won't be able to make it home until they collaborate. However, it is possible the oxygen run out while they'd argue about whose name gets to be first in the authors' list. Also, spaceships are very costly.

Next part: what Nielsen has to say about Arxiv and the future of open science.

Bora's Review

Joerg Heber's Review

Michael Nielsen talks Open Science in a TED event:

Nielsen, Michael (2011). Reinventing Discovery Princeton University Press Other: 9780691148908

Publishing Open Access is Good for Your Academic Reputation

In the academic world, reputation is the currency of choice. "Reputation," of course, is a very loose term and can include anything from publishing in high-impact journals to being a good advisor to your students.

How does OA contribute to your academic reputation?

The first significant scholarly repository, arXiv.org, was started by high-energy physicists, but quickly expanded to include other scientific disciplines. Today, archiving in arXiv.org is practically a necessity for physicists. Archiving provides the physics community with faster communication, better access, and the opportunity for an unofficial peer-review, even before the work has been submitted to a journal. Unfortunately, journal publishing is still important for official purposes (promotion, tenure, etc.) and so libraries are still forced to buy physics journals.

Another example is PLoS. PLoS peer-reviewed journals charge the authors a fee in return for publishing, and papers are published under Creative Commons licences. PLoS journals probably wouldn't have been as successful (PLoS Biology had the highest IF in its category in 2009) if libraries were asked to pay for them. It pays off for authors to pay PLoS for the prestige of publishing in such high-impact journals.

Eysenbach (2006) found that immediate-OA papers in PNAS, in comparison with those who weren't immediately available in OA, were more likely to be cited earlier and more often. However, Davis et al., who studied papers from 11 journals published by the American Physiological Society, haven't found an increase in citations for OA papers in the first years after publication. They did find that these papers had significantly more downloads and unique visitors, which means OA papers reach wider audience.

Open Access also allows scientists to build reputation in places and among people who otherwise wouldn't have been able to read their researches (the MIT OCW is very popular in developing countries). Given how important citation metrics are to a scientist, publishing Open Access seems to be a very logical step, career-wise.

Willinsky, John (2010). Open access and academic reputation Annals of Library and Information Studies, 57, 296-302

Davis PM, Lewenstein BV, Simon DH, Booth JG, & Connolly MJ (2008). Open access publishing, article downloads, and citations: randomised controlled trial. BMJ (Clinical research ed.), 337 PMID: 18669565

Eysenbach, G. (2006). Citation Advantage of Open Access Articles PLoS Biology, 4 (5) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.0040157