Open science for open mind | Euler's maze

"I have been working on neurobiological research for more than 15 years since I graduated from medical school. The first field in neuroscience attracted me is neural stem cells, then the neurodevelopment, and I saw the many breakthroughs happening in the past 15 years in understanding the pathogenesis of neurological diseases and normal cortical development. What Raymond Kurzweil described in his book ‘Singularity is Near”, that an exponential increase in technologies like computers and genetics is somehow true. During my study of Alzheimer’s disease and Down syndrome in the past 15 years, I saw the finish of human genome project, broad applications of high throughput sequencing technology, new frontiers of bioinformatics, epigenetics and induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells, genome-wide association study (GWAS) to identify susceptible locus for depression and schizophrenia. I used these new technologies myself, including high throughput DNA methylation profiling and iPS cells to discover new pathways in Alzheimer’s disease and Down syndrome, which is unthinkable when PCR is still a new technique when I studied in medical school. I believe all these advances are unachievable without open science approaches. When I prepared my master thesis 15 years ago, I had to go to libraries to get literature prints using copy machines, and prepared thesis defense slides using developed films. That is the start of my science career though watching copy machine working and staying in darkrooms for film development had not much fun. Nowadays, with one computer connected to internet, I can find almost all the resources and solutions to my questions and technique problems, from the open access to papers, protocols, methods, software, discussions, webinars, and Google becomes the most often used tool instead libraries. With the exponential increase of publications, you can imagine how much time it saves for you to keep you in the frontier of your research field. The open science approaches not only include the free access to scientific publication like what NIH is doing in PubMed central, but also all other scientific resources that are shared by all the research community ..."