From open source to open science | pharmaphorum

“Open science is the new open source... These tenets closely parallel those of open source, the spiritual predecessor of open science. The non-profit Open Source Initiative’s founding goal about 10 years ago was to have open source software provide ‘better quality, higher reliability, more flexibility, lower cost, and an end to predatory vendor lock-in.‘   The result? ... What started in the early 2000s as a movement is now an industry with expected revenues of $8.1 billion in 2013¹... Although the National Institutes of Health (NIH) now makes huge amounts of research data available online, the fight for open access has only just begun. Private journals still hold most science publications hostage in their vaults ... While most academics can get full publications via their university library system, the rest of us are left out in the intellectual cold.  For open science to thrive, taxpayer-funded research results need to be freely accessible to everyone... Non-profit journals such as Public Library of Science (PLoS) are helping to lead that transformation... The Do-It-Yourself Biology (aka DIY Bio) movement has gained surprising momentum in just a few short years... through the creation of the same type of user communities that enabled open source to succeed. According to DIYbio.com, there are 25 local groups that meet up worldwide, 8 of which already have community laboratory space accessible to citizen scientists.  As most research projects at some point require access to complex laboratory equipment or technologies, these community labs are a critical success factor for open science. BioCurious in Sunnyvale, CA and GenSpace in Brooklyn, NY are two of the first and largest community labs, with dozens of ongoing citizen scientist / hacker research projects. It wouldn’t be surprising to see community hacker labs in most major US cities within the next few years... the Internet provides plenty of other nifty apps and tools that are changing the way science is done. For example, both citizen and professional scientists can now seek funding ... using fundraising sites such as Kickstarter, Petridish and Razoo... And if you have funding, you can now take advantage of thousands of global research service providers to carry out any life science experiment imaginable. Online ‘virtual’ marketplaces for research services and products are bringing ecommerce to research and empowering citizen and professional scientists to a degree never before possible... Pharmaceutical companies have started promoting their own brand of open science. Some ... have established entire internal groups devoted to developing unique ways to foster ‘open innovation’.   Pfizer’s recent use of Facebook for clinical trial recruitment ^...  is a good example of how pharma is waking up to the potential of social media to change how drug research is done. Other large pharma companies are following suit. Merck recently gave significant funding to CALIBR⁵, a San Diego-based non-profit research institute, as part of a new approach to translating academic research results into biomedical drug candidates. Janssen, the pharmaceutical arm of JNJ, also recently opened a research innovation center in San Diego, but equipped it with research laboratories and offices for up to 20 small drug discovery and medical device companies⁶. For a single monthly fee, companies get a fully equipped laboratory and ... access to technologies and expertise typically only available within a large pharma company. These attempts to promote open innovation are a ... positive sign that the industry recognizes the need for change... At its heart, open science is really about lowering the barriers to research so that scientists ... professional and citizen can turn their thoughts into actions and do something about their probably crazy, but possibly brilliant, ideas!”