Reinventing the Scientific Method - IEEE Spectrum

"Two very big examples, very broad examples are data sharing and code sharing, both of which are things which in most disciplines people don’t get a whole lot of credit for. Very often there’s a lot of very important scientific knowledge locked up in, for example, code, which you might use to do all sorts of data processing in the laboratory or simulations or whatever. And yet, when I talk to people who write a lot of code as part of their scientific job, they’ll say that very often they’re extremely reluctant to release that code publicly because well, first of all, it’ll end up being a pain; they’ll have all sorts of support and maintenance requests from other people. And second, it’s not something they can use as part of their tenure case; it’s just not something they get a whole lot of credit for....So the largest single open project that I’ve done, not surprisingly, is writing my book. It was a four-year-long project, and a funny little thing—which was the most useful thing, ultimately—was actually just using a public bookmarking service to share the research that I was doing. So when I’d see something that was interesting, an interesting paper or interesting news article or blog post, I’d bookmark it so it would be publicly shared, and then there’s a discussion site called FriendFeed, which would allow little discussions to take place around that. And at first not very many people were commenting, but ultimately it’s this little community of people who see a lot of these bookmarks and provided in some cases really remarkable extra information. They’d debunk it or they’d follow it up or say, “You should be looking at this or that or whatever.” And I think I ended up sharing about 1500 or so links there, and I got thousands of comments from hundreds of people, and certainly the book’s a lot better than it otherwise would have been as a result. And I used the same pattern, in fact in all of the research that I do now...."