This Is The A-Bomb Moment For Computer Science

"Every day, scholars like me produce new knowledge, computational tools, and data that is increasingly available to anyone. Data science thrives through open-source licenses for each new computational tool, and there are more text databases easily available, for free, than ever before. Just one example: Anyone can now freely download an archive of 3.3 billion public Reddit comments. And all you need to analyze all that text is the power of a serious desktop computer, not an advanced data center.

The body that funds my research, Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, strongly encourages and sometimes requires academics to publish their work in open-access journals, free to the public. There's also an increasing push to publish data and the code used for statistical analyses alongside our papers.

This is a good thing for science, probably, but it also means that anyone, anywhere, can get ahold of my research, my code, and any data I open-source — and use it for any purpose."