Open Access: a remedy against bad science | Open Access Working Group

"When articles and data are published open access, this fact alone discourages scientific misconduct. The availability of the complete article, including the raw data, to a very large audience has this kind of effect. One can be sure that if there is something wrong with the article, there will be someone out there who will spot this. The same mechanism is responsible for a major advantage of open access: the fact that scientific information that has been made available using  open access will reach such a large audience that there will always be someone out there who can and will improve on the ideas described in a publication. At the recent Berlin10 conference in Stellenbosch this so-called “proximity paradox” has been brilliantly explained by Elliot Maxwell. He described the effect with the single sentence: ““With enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow”, meaning that with enough dissemination any problem can be solved. Tim Gowers, a fervent proponent of open access has exploited this in his now famous Polymath Project: sharing a very difficult mathematical problem with as many people as possible solved the problem in a fraction of the time than would have been possible doing it any other way. The company Innocentive.com exploits this effect by broadcasting a problem that has to be solved and offering a reward of a fixed amount of money for anyone offering the solution.  In this manner the  “wisdom of the crowd” offers a way to keep science and scientists on track, while at the same time it stimulates a new way of doing science: by speeding it up, promoting the pursuit of new research, increasing  innovation potential by contributions from unforeseen sources and accelerating the translation from actual discovery to practical solutions (E. Maxwell). And the crowd can only be wise with Open Access to information. Another effect of open access on the quality of science is that it effectively reduces duplicative and dead-end scientific projects. And last but not least open access facilitates the accountability for research funding and it facilitates focusing on real priorities...."