You can view the livestream at http://fora.tv/live/open_science/open_science_summit_2010

Follow us on Twitter @OpenScience2010  #OSS2010

For more on the aims of the movement and the conference see

http://www.xconomy.com/san-francisco/2010/07/07/the-open-science-shift/

Recent years have seen technological revolutions in informatics, communications, and the life sciences. Xconomy readers are deeply engaged with these trends, but may be unaware of the most important development of all, the transition (sometimes painful), to an Open Science system better suited for a global, networked, knowledge economy. Sadly, rapid technical progress has thus far not been matched by a revolution in the democratization of scientific problem solving. Instead, the practices and institutions that comprise our science and innovation paradigm are badly strained, and in some cases, arguably crumbling in the face of rapid technological and economic change.

Peer review, the scientific journal, the way we measure scientific reputation and apportion funding…these basic practices embody certain unquestioned assumptions that may not have been updated since their 17th century origins. Now, a courageous contingent of early adopters is blazing a path toward greater collaboration and transparency in science. From July 29-31 at Berkeley, we’ll tell their story.

We can conceptualize the Open Science Shift roughly as follows:

1. Better Tools for Collective Intelligence:

Activists around “open notebook science” have been quick to point out their frustrations that scientists have imported the limitations of pen and paper into the digital realm. Scientists are slowly adopting Web 2.0 tools for online science. BioTorrents is a new protocol for sharing scientific data sets, inspired by the popular BitTorrent file sharing system. The rise of Open Access publishing (PloS) has blazed a new path for journals, but is only a harbinger of things to come. Science blogging and nascent social networking for scientists hint at new possibilities for faster, more accurate measurement of scientific reputation, if only the right balance can be struck to harness the “wisdom of the crowd” to accelerate progress. eBay, Amazon, and Craigslist transformed how we conduct commerce and share our stuff. Just imagine the impact of an analogous transformative platform for the way we do science. One possible contender, backed by some of the folks who were behind Skype and Lastfm, is Mendeley Research Networks.

2. Bottom up, “Open Innovation” and DIY efforts

You may have heard of Dr. Hugh Rienhoff, who made the cover of Nature a few years ago after his heroic efforts to discover the genetic mechanisms behind his daughter’s rare condition gave new meaning to the phrase “personal genomics.” But do you know about Scott Johnson of the Myelin Repair Foundation, Craig Benson who founded Beyond Batten, or Beth Anne Baber, who created the Nicholas Connor Institute for Pediatric Cancer? Each of these “cure entrepreneurs” saw a failure of the current biomedical system and stepped up to create their own research initiatives to fill the gap. Come meet garage biology “hackers” like the ones pictured here. Can a generation of “DIY” biology hobbyists help kickstart

a new biotech revolution the way the home brew computer club did for personal computing? Disclaimer: I’m biased, since I helped assemble the lab shown in that link!

If garage labs worry, you, perhaps it will reassure you to know that special agent Ed You of the FBI is on the case (or perhaps not!) We’ll have several leading thinkers on the topic of bio-security respond to the growing DIY biology phenomenon.

3. Radically different financial, legal, and incentive mechanisms that encourage and require collaboration, transparency, and sharing.

The vast majority of research funding in the US is routed through the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. Does it make sense to have such a “single point of failure” for science funding, and what are the biases built into the system? How about “microfinance for science” crowd-funding platforms that specifically fund young grad students and post docs instead of older, established principal investigators whose reputations are already secured and, who, after gaining tenure, may have put their best days behind them? That’s what motivated David Vitrant, founder of fundscience.org, Dave Fries, creator of Sciflies.org, and Zach Burke, who oversees Eurekafund.org, a funding site for technologies focused on energy and environment.

Over two and half days, July 29-31, at the inaugural Open Science Summit at Berkeley, we’ll consider all these issues and more. The venue itself is significant. Only a short time ago, Berkeley received the largest corporate grant in the university’s history from BP. Along with many of our conference participants, I enthusiastically support synthetic biology, an emerging field of tremendous promise that could prevent and mitigate environmental catastrophes like the one we’re experiencing. Yet, the role of Big Oil/Big Energy in funding this set of technologies, and the modern research university’s dependency on this money, raises hard questions that must be answered. Will we choose an “open source” path for developing synthetic biology platforms, transparently assessing the safety risks and preventing any one actor from achieving a monopoly, so that everyone shares the economic benefits?

When Berkeley recently announced an option for incoming members of this year’s freshman class to participate in a genomics study, the move was immediately criticized by several prominent ethics groups. Yet the age of personal genomics is here, like it or not. Discouraging students from exploring this frontier seems out of touch at best, paternalistic at worst.

The UC system is under siege with budget cuts that threaten to gut the very foundations of California’s knowledge economy. In the final insult to already serious injuries, Nature Publishing Group and the UC library system are currently engaged in a standoff over proposed hikes in subscription fees to the world’s most prestigious set of journals.

Clearly, it is time for all those concerned about the future of science to stand together to build a better path forward. Please join me at the end of July to chart this course.

Joseph Jackson is a philosopher, entrepreneur, activist, and organizer in the Open Science Movement. He is CEO of Lava-Amp, a company building an inexpensive hardware platform for portable PCR, for use in developing countries and in biology education.

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Ready for a rapid, radical reboot of the global innovation system for a truly free and open 21st century knowledge economy? Join us at the first Open Science Summit, an attempt to gather all stakeholders who want to liberate our scientific and technological commons to enable an new era of decentralized, distributed innovation to solve humanity’s greatest challenges.

Those interested can register at opensciencesummit.com

Enlightenment 2.0:  Unleashing the Open Science Revolution

Renowned physicist Freeman Dyson identifies two kinds of scientific revolutions, those driven by new concepts (theoretical), and those driven by new tools (technological).

In the last 500 years we’ve witnessed paradigm shattering conceptual shifts associated with names such as Copernicus, Newton, Darwin, and, Einstein. Simultaneously, the evolution of technology drives progress in unpredictable ways—Galileo borrowed principles from the technology of eye-glasses to pioneer the use of the telescope in astronomy, while Watson and Crick relied on Rosalind Franklin’s skill with X-ray diffraction (a tool from physics) to probe the structure of life.  (Undoubtedly, Franklin’s contribution would have been more fully recognized under a true Open Science Paradigm.)

To this classification of scientific revolutions, we can now add a third kind, an Organizational Revolution, the advent of a truly “Open Science,” which will profoundly affect the pace and character of subsequent theory and tool-driven paradigm shifts.

The 21^st century is off to a rocky start, and as economic and ecological crises converge, there is no shortage of dire predictions. On the other hand, politicians and pundits point to the expectation that Science and Technology will let humanity invent its way out of the problems we’ve created. This rosy outlook ignores a deep crisis that has been brewing and could hamstring our innovative capacity when we most urgently need it.

Despite nostalgic myths that Science is the realm of open inquiry, reasoned debate, and the pursuit of objective truth, it has always been politicized, though never to the dangerous degree attained just in the past decade. The viciousness of the fight over embryonic stem cell research, the conflict over creationism, and the politics of climate change are unprecedented new lows. Public confidence in science and technology is deeply shaken, as the outcry over genetically modified organisms attests. When biotechnology, the veritable “toolkit of life,” that could feed the hungry, heal the ill, and fuel the economy without despoiling the environment, is greeted with suspicion and downright hostility, we must acknowledge a deep failure. Citizens and consumers correctly worry that science has sold them out, as companies compromise safety and engineering standards in the dash to control the marketplace.

Beginning in the mid 1980’s a few judicial decisions, with no public or policy deliberation whatsoever, opened the floodgates to an exponential expansion in the filing of patents covering new subject matter and technologies that were never anticipated in the industrial age during which the system evolved. Indeed, there is a growing consensus that the unchecked proliferation of intellectual property rights is perversely out of touch with, and downright inimical to, the collaborative, cumulative, and interdependent essence of innovation in the 21^st century’s networked knowledge economy. As the global economy struggles to find a new equilibrium after the financial meltdown, it is indisputable that old business models are unsustainable—this applies equally, indeed, especially, to technology and biomedicine, where cycles of over-hype, under-deliver, bubble then bust, have failed to produce cures for desperate, disappointed, and now disillusioned patients, bold proclamations of a “War on Cancer,” notwithstanding.

In the last ten years, a collection of burgeoning movements has begun the herculean task of overhauling the outmoded institutions and worldviews that make up our global scientific governance system. Proponents of the Access to Knowledge movement (A2K) have united around the principle that data and knowledge are “anti-rivalrous,” the value of information increases as it spreads. Open Access Journals have demonstrated a new path for publishing that utilizes the power of the internet to instantly distribute ideas instead of imposing artificial scarcity to prop up old business models. “Health 2.0” entrepreneurs are seeking to apply the lessons of e-commerce to empower patients. However, these different efforts are each working on a piece of a problem without a view of the whole. It is not sufficient or realistic to tweak one component of the innovation system (eg, patent policy) and assume the others stay static. Instead, dynamic, interactive, nonlinear change is unfolding. The Open Science Summit is the first and only event to consider what happens throughout the entire innovation chain as reform in one area influences the prospects in others. In the best case scenario, a virtuous circle of mutually reinforcing shifts toward transparency and collaboration could unleash hitherto untapped reserves of human ingenuity.

Imagine a vastly accelerated research, development, and commercialization cycle using an entire Open Innovation process from start to finish. In both commercial and academic labs, scientists would log results using Open Protocols such as Open Wetware. In the next stage, scientists submit to Open Access journals—but the process of peer review would be ongoing as “real time publication” allowed researchers to transform results into a publication along a continuum that ranged from initial reports to rough drafts to final submissions. A paper would never be “finished” as critique and response would be ongoing long after publication. New, sophisticated reputation “feedback” algorithms (like those powering Ebay or Amazon but optimized for science), supplant the old static journal model. This is already emerging to a limited extent with tentative forays into social networking software for science and post publication commentary experiments such as PLoS One. Young post-docs, instead of laboring under a stultifying grant system that rewards conservatism and incrementalism, pitting researchers against each other for an artificially limited number of spots, could simultaneously compete and collaborate with others around the globe, using platforms such as that being developed by India’s Open Source Drug Discovery Foundation. In the past, science has been said to advance one funeral at a time, but we can no longer afford to wait for generational replacement. Work done on open source projects would allow young researchers to build prestige, without regard to traditional hierarchy. Open Innovation prizes, offering cash and other rewards for solutions to problems ranging from cancer to aging, would spur progress and provide further incentives. New “micro-finance” platforms for research would enable patients and philanthropies to more efficiently direct funds to projects that slip through the cracks of the current system while also routing around “chokepoints” such as the NIH which can become a “single point of failure” in science funding (see Bush/stem cells).

Next, research tools would be widely shared and disseminated, not hidden behind industrial secrecy or priced out of reach via an exclusive license. Platform “enabling technologies” in some of the world’s most important fields would be maintained as a “protected commons.” Stem cell lines or vectors to be used in gene therapy are prime examples of technologies where collective innovation to create an “Open Standard” would clearly benefit all interested parties, especially patients desperately awaiting cures. The widespread penetration of these “upstream” technologies would utterly transform the landscape of the biotechnology industry, disrupting concentrations of power that have accumulated over the past few decades and allowing entire ecologies of enterprise to spring up, colonizing a “long-tail” of niches that multi-nationals neglect in the pursuit of only the highest margin returns. Once standard, non-proprietary biotech packages are available, in principle, launching a biotech startup could come to more closely resemble the process of starting an IT company to make web apps today.

In this revitalized context, as technologies approached commercialization stage, a variety of business models would be available using non-exclusive licensing and Open Source inspired agreements where appropriate, or allowing royalty free use for “neglected” diseases, crops, etc. Whatever model a particular company pursued would depend on its particular sector of the life sciences (diagnostics, vaccines, drug discovery, plant breeding, etc)… the point is that there are a huge range of alternative organizational models that have remained unexplored.

Finally, regulatory reform would create transparency in clinical trials, shifting the funding model to prevent conflicts of interest and ensuring the data was publicly available for all to see. Profits would not come at the expense of patients.

Now look at reality. Without massive coordinated effort we shall surely fail to achieve a Free and Open Science and Technology Paradigm. The vision sketched here needs to come about within the next decade if humanity is to make any progress against our interrelated great challenges—Energy, Climate, Health, Food Security, and Poverty. By 2020 there must be a distributed, global network of institutions participating in the governance of Science and Technology. I hope you share our excitement for this unique instant in history when it is finally possible for mankind, a species distinguished and defined by its capacity to use tools, to unleash the unlimited problem solving powers of the tool of tools, science.

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The type of communism with which Gates hoped to tar the creators of Linux was born in an era of enforced borders, centralized communications, and top-heavy industrial processes. Those constraints gave rise to a type of collective ownership that replaced the brilliant chaos of a free market with scientific five-year plans devised by an all-powerful politburo. This political operating system failed, to put it mildly. However, unlike those older strains of red-flag socialism, the new socialism runs over a borderless Internet, through a tightly integrated global economy. It is designed to heighten individual autonomy and thwart centralization. It is decentralization extreme.

Instead of gathering on collective farms, we gather in collective worlds. Instead of state factories, we have desktop factories connected to virtual co-ops. Instead of sharing drill bits, picks, and shovels, we share apps, scripts, and APIs. Instead of faceless politburos, we have faceless meritocracies, where the only thing that matters is getting things done. Instead of national production, we have peer production. Instead of government rations and subsidies, we have a bounty of free goods.

I recognize that the word socialism is bound to make many readers twitch. It carries tremendous cultural baggage, as do the related terms communal, communitarian, and collective. I use socialism because technically it is the best word to indicate a range of technologies that rely for their power on social interactions. Broadly, collective action is what Web sites and Net-connected apps generate when they harness input from the global audience. Of course, there’s rhetorical danger in lumping so many types of organization under such an inflammatory heading. But there are no unsoiled terms available, so we might as well redeem this one.

When masses of people who own the means of production work toward a common goal and share their products in common, when they contribute labor without wages and enjoy the fruits free of charge, it’s not unreasonable to call that socialism.

However, I dispute his assertion that “there are no unsoiled terms available.”  P2P is just such a term, and as we struggle to continue to define the contours of P2P theory it is important not to fall back into terminology that is inextricably linked to old economic paradigms.  See the recent post from Ryan Lanham for more.

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what happened post Grokster should give you an indication of what will happen here: basically, the entertainment industry will gleefully declare victory, and make statements about how this is a major victory against “piracy.” But, in actuality, the exact opposite of that will occur. Unauthorized file sharing continues (or even increases) and it becomes that much more difficult for the legacy industries to win back customers and embrace these new, useful and efficient tools of distribution and promotion. It’s a classic case of winning the battle and losing the war.

(above quote from http://plugincinema.com/plugin/content/view/1874/1/)

http://www.thelocal.se/18908.html

P2P file-sharing suffered a setback today in what is a symbolic but hopefully Pyrrhic victory for the international entertainment industry lobby.  The defendants will appeal, all the way to the Sweden’s Supreme Court or the European Court of Justice.  Nice to see that while the global economy crashes, the lawyers and courts stay busy and gainfully employed as always!

“The Stockholm district court has today convicted the four people charged with promoting other people’s infringement of copyright laws,” the court said in a statement.

The four defendants in the case, Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Peter Sunde and Carl Lundström, were each sentenced to one year in prison and ordered to pay 30 million kronor ($3.56 million) in damages.

Specifically, the case dealt with alleged illegal file sharing of 20 songs, nine films, and four computer games with the US entertainment industry looking to claim up to $15 million in damages from the accused.

“He’s facing a damages claim of 30 million kronor and is also supposed to sit in prison for a year because he provided an internet connection. It’s incomprehensible to him,” said Samuelson.

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Also since 2006, Nature Publishing Group, along with O’Reilly media and Google, has hosted the annual SciFOO camp.  I attended last year and it was clear that while Nature sees the “writing on the wall” nobody is quite sure how to rate the quality or significance of science blogs, nor how such blogging will count toward building a scientist’s resume.  For an interesting look at the future of the scientific paper see Bora Zivcovik’s piece of the same title:  http://jcom.sissa.it/archive/07/02/Jcom0702(2008)C01/Jcom0702(2008)C02/Jcom0702(2008)C02.pdf

Probably, the end game is some type of social software for science (think Ebay ratings and Amazon recommendations but much more sophisticated and optimized for scientific discourse).  Another significant advance in 08 was the implementation of post publication commentary by PLOS ONE, even though participation has not been overwhelming.  See discussion here  http://scienceblogs.com/clock/2008/08/postpublication_peerreview_in.php

For a comprehensive review of previous efforts along these lines (and why they have failed so far, see Michael Nielson:  http://michaelnielsen.org/blog/?p=448)  There seems to be a serious incentive problem, as scientists just aren’t motivated to engage in this kind of mini-critiquing.

Building a “killer app” for online science ratings poses profound epistemological difficulties and will require at the very least, a multidisciplinary team of game theorists, economists, scientists, and psychologists to get the ball rolling.  To my knowledge, the India Open Source Drug Discovery Foundation is trying to implement a micro-attribution credit tracking system to let participants accumulate “points” or other reputation metrics that can then be exchanged for cash prizes or other forms of career advancement.  It is clear that an infrastructure for online science reputation is urgently needed–however, leadership is lacking and various initiatives will probably keep trying to invent the wheel separately and failing for a while longer.  My view is that some kind of consortium analogous to the W3C (perhaps a standing resource on design principles for reputations systems) could ease the pain.

For now, we must be content with annual “Best of” lists such as the one in the Open Laboratory compendium.  Full entries are available here  http://scienceblogs.com/clock/2008/12/the_open_laboaratory_2008_all.php

This is the unedited version of all 860 submissions available for free.  The value added version with professional editing of the top 50 is available for download for a small fee with proceeds going to support the annual Science Online conference.  http://www.lulu.com/content/6110823

Oddly, one of the most informative posts I have come across was not included in the submissions (this may reflect the perception that it was not “newsworthy” to the Science Blogging/Open Access participants, but as an observer I found it most informative).  I refer to a post detailing a “feud” between Nature and PLOS after an unfavorable editorial on the “failure” of the Open Access model.  http://scienceblogs.com/clock/2008/07/on_the_nature_of_plos.php

Finally, a great post from 2007 was featured in the previous edition of Open Laboratory.  These reflections on the “Marketplace of Ideas”/Science and Democracy raise important considerations for the design of a truly robust online science infrastructure.  http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2007/03/science-and-democracy-iii.html

We’ll explore these ideas and more in future posts.

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