Science in the Open » Blog Archive » Network Enabled Research: Maximise scale and connectivity, minimise friction

“Prior to all the nonsense with the Research Works Act, I had been having a discussion with Heather Morrison about licenses and Open Access and peripherally the principle of requiring specific licenses of authors... The path that leads me here is one built on a technical understanding of how networks functional and what their capacity can be. This builds heavily on the ideas I have taken from (in no particular order) Jon Udell, Jonathan Zittrain, Michael Nielsen, Clay Shirky, Tim O’Reilly, Danah Boyd, and John Wilbanks among many others... Ultimately the wider global public is for the most part convinced that research is something worth investing in, but in turn they expect to see outcomes of that research, jobs, economic activity, excitement, prestige, better public health, improved standards of living. The wider public are remarkably sophisticated when it comes to understanding that research may take a long time to bear fruit. But they are not particularly interested in papers... We ignore that at our peril... So why are we having this conversation? And why now? What is it about today’s world that is so different? The answer, of course, is the internet... But there are a group of people who are starting to be interested in rocking the boat. The funders, the patient groups, that global public who want to see outcomes. The thought process hasn’t worked through yet, but when it does they will all be asking one question. “How are you building networks to enable research”... As service providers, all of those who work in this industry – and I mean all, from the researchers to the administrators, to the publishers to the librarians – will need to have an answer. The suprising thing is that it’s actually very easy. The web makes building and exploiting networks easier than it has ever been because it is a network infrastructure. It has scale... The problem arises with the systems we have in place to get material online... Currently we take raw science and through a collaborative process between researchers and publishers we generate a communication product, generally a research paper, that is what most of the community holds as the standard means by which they wish to receive information. Because the publishers receive no direct recompense for their contribution they need to recover those costs by other means. They do this by artificially introducing friction and then charging to remove it. This is a bad idea on several levels... If we care about taking advantage of the web and internet for research then we must tackle the building of scholarly communication networks...”