There’s a fantastic article in this month’s Scientific America about the merits of open access and collaboration in science. We’ve certainly been of the minds that openness, whether in relation to data, patents or ideas, is at the heart of an array of potential advances in the sciences. Projects like the MSF-led Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative or the Cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid offer great examples of the positive outcomes enabled by openness and sharing that would have been largely impossible in a closed, proprietary model.

But despite such successes, there remains a great deal of scepticism about the merits of an open model in science. The usual response is that as potential profits, attribution and, for academics, tenure and promotion, are closely tied to their research efforts, opening up risks livelihoods, etc. Sounds all too familiar.
However in his article “Science 2.0 — Is Open Access Science the Future?”, Mitchell Waldorp does a great job highlighting how openness actually does a better job at securing attribution, while allowing researchers to learn not only what works (as is published in academic journals, etc) but also the process and insights that preceded those successes.

In particular he quotes Drexel University chemist Jean-Claude Bradley,,who notes that a Wiki’d model of science actual offers scientists better protection for their ideas as “Every change on a wiki gets a time stamp, so if someone actually did try to scoop you, it would be very easy to prove your priority—and to embarrass them. I think that’s really what is going to drive open science: the fear factor. If you wait for the journals, your work won’t appear for another six to nine months. But with open science, your claim to priority is out there right away.”

So will a time-stamp mitigate fears of theft or patent infringement? And if it does, will scientists see the potential offered by more open access to data and ideas as a faster route to solutions?

Allowing the world’s brightest minds to stand on the shoulders of their peers, or in this context to see their unprocessed thoughts and insights, offers the world the potential for monumental advances in science and human development that we can ill-afford to miss out on.