To blow open the doors of science, or not?

“The concept of ‘open science,’ which has been getting a lot of press lately, seems like a topic appropriate for this blog—a blog in which the goal is to take peer-reviewed journal articles and transform them into language more accessible and interesting to a general, scientifically literate audience... A recent Science Friday interview called ‘Can Science be Done without Secrecy...’ featured the author of a book called Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science. In this interview, Michael Neilsen expresses his surprise and concern that scientists aren’t using the collaborative power of the information era as much as they could. He states that scientists keep their results close and their data closer (for as long as it’s proprietarily possible), lest they be scooped. If they are not scooped, their results are published in proprietary scientific journals... His main point seems to be that there are many virtual avenues for delivering and discussing scientific data and discoveries, with more than just the kinds of peers who would be selected for a peer review panel, and that those avenues aren't being used as interestingly or productively as they could be... Another recent article about both the reasons science is sometimes inaccessible... is ‘The Other Academic Freedom Movement,’ by Konstantin Kakaes on Slate. The biggest reason presented is that ‘in a world where academics could just post a paper up on their own websites, the primary purpose of a journal article is its professional validation...’ And somebody who wants to hire you for a job or ask you to give a colloquium to a room full of people holding coffee and cookies—they want to know how many times you’ve been published in journals, not how many times you’ve uploaded some files to your website... One of the most logical arguments for more scientific openness relates to everybody’s favorite spring topic: taxes. Billions of dollars of scientific research is funded by you and your grandma... To address that valid point, a bipartisan group of politicians introduced the Federal Research Public Access Act, introduced a few days ago, which would provide access to almost all federally funded research (except, you know, the research on secret spy plane technology). This act is a response to the Research Works Act, introduced in December, which is meant to strengthen and uphold the current publishing system. So we have the problem of research not getting to ‘the people,’ and we have the problem of researchers not always working together in the ways that we could, and if those things don’t change, there’s no way to how science could change, either for the better or for the worse.”