Transcriber: Capa Girl Reviewer: Fran Ontanaya
Well good afternoon everybody.
Thank you all very much for coming along today.
I'd like to begin my talk with a story.
It's a story that begins but does not end
with a mathematician named Tim Gowers.
Gowers is one of the world's most renowned mathematicians,
he is a professor at Cambridge University and the recipient
of the Fields Medal, often called the Nobel Prize of Mathematics.
Gowers is also a blogger
and in January of 2009 he used his blog
to pose a very striking question:
Is massively collaborative mathematics possible?
So what he was proposing in this post was to use his
blog to attack a difficult unsolved mathematical problem,
a problem which he said he "would love to solve"
completely in the open, using his blog to post
his ideas and his partial progress.
What's more, he issued an open invitation
inviting anybody in the world who thought that
they had an idea to contribute to post their idea
in the comment section of the blog.
His hope was that by combining the ideas of many minds
he could make easy work of his hard mathematical problem.
He called this experiment the Polymath Project.
Well, the Polymath Project got off to a slow start.
The first 7 hours nobody posted any comments.
But then, a mathematician from the University of British Columbia
named Joseph Somolosie posted a short comment.
And he seemed to break the ice because a few minutes later
a high school teacher named Jason Dyer posted
a suggestion. And a few minutes after that
another mathematician named Terence Tao,
also a "Fields" medalist, posted an idea.
And things really started to move quickly at this point.
Over the next 37 days 27 different people would post
800 substantive comments containing 170,000 words.
I was not a serious participant but I was following along closely from the start.
And it was just amazing.
The speed with which an idea would be tentatively proposed
and then really rapidly developed by other people
and improved sometimes discarded. It's just amazing.
Gowers described the process as being
to ordinary research as driving is to pushing a car.
At the end of the 37 days, Gowers used his blog to
announce that they had solved the core problem, in fact,
they had solved a harder generalization of the problem.
The Polymath Project had succeeded.
So what the Polymath Project suggests, at least to me,
is that we can use the internet to build tools
that actually expand our ability to solve
the most challenging intellectual problems.
Or to put it in another way, we can build tools which actively
amplify our collective intelligence in much the same way
as for millennia we've used physical tools to amplify
our strength. OK?
So, what I'd like to talk about today, what I'd like
to explore today, is what this means for science.
It's much more important than just solving a single mathematical problem.
It means an expansion in the range of scientific
problems we can hope to attack at all.
It means potentially an acceleration in the rate of scientific discovery.
It means a change in the way we construct knowledge itself.
So, before I get too over-excited, however,
I would like to talk about some of the challenges,
some of the problems.
Particularly, I'd like to describe a failure of this approach.
So it occurred in 2005, or started in 2005, a grad student
at Caltech, named John Stockton, had a very good idea
for what he called the "Quantum Wiki"
or "Qwiki" for short. OK? It's a great idea.
What he did with the Qwiki, was --
The idea of the Qwiki was that it was going to be
a great repository of human knowledge.
Much like Wikipedia. But instead of being focused
on general knowledge it was gonna be focused on
specialist knowledge in quantum computing.
It was gonna be a kind of a super textbook for the field,
with information about all the latest research,
about what the big open problems in the field were,
people's speculation about how to solve the problems and so on.
Like Wikipedia, the intention was that it would be written
by the users, in this case, by experts in quantum computing.
I was present at the conference of Caltech in 2005
when it was announced and some of the people who I spoke to
were very skeptical, but some of the people
were very excited about the idea.
They were impressed by the implementation,
they were impressed by the amount of initial
seed material which had been put on the site
and most of all they were excited by the vision.
But just because they were excited
didn't mean they wanted to take the time themselves to contribute.
They hoped that other people would do so.
And in the end, nobody, essentially,
was really all that interested in contributing.
If you look today, except in a few small corners,
the Qwiki is essentially dead.
And sad to say, this is quite a common story.
Many scientists, in fields ranging from genetics
to String Theory, have tried to start science-wikis
along very similar lines. And typically they've failed,
for essentially the same reason.
It's not just science-wikis either.
Inspired by Facebook, many organizations have tried
to create social networks for scientists which will
connect scientists to other people with similar interest.
So they can share things like data or code their ideas and so on.
Again, it sounds like a good idea.
But if you join one of these sites,
you will quickly discover that they are essentially empty.
They are virtual ghost towns.
So what's going on? What's the problem here?
Why are these promising sites failing?
Well, imagine that you are an ambitious young scientist.
In fact, I know some of you here are ambitious young scientists.
Imagine you are an ambitious young scientist.
You would really like to get a good job, a permanent job,
a good job, doing the work that you love.
But it's incredibly competitive to get such jobs.
Often there will be hundreds
of very highly qualified applicants for positions.
And so you find yourself working, 60, 70, 80 hours a week
doing the one thing that you know will get you such a job.
And that is writing scientific papers.
You might think that the Qwiki is a wonderful idea in principle,
but you also know that writing a single mediocre paper
would yield much more for your career in your job prospects
than a long series of brilliant contributions to such a site.
So even though you may like the idea, you may think
that it will advance science more quickly, you just can't
conceive of it as being part of your job. It's not.
The only things which can succeed in this kind of environment
are projects like the Polymath Project, which even though
they employ an unconventional means to an end
they have an essential conservatism about them.
The end product of the Polymath Project
was still a scientific paper.
In fact, it was several papers. Right?
So unconventional means but conventional ends.
So there is a kind of conservatism about it.
Don't get me wrong, the Polymath Project is terrific
but it is a pity that scientists can only
use tools which have this kind of conservative nature.
So let me tell you a story about an instance
where we moved away from this conservatism.
So it's a rare story where the conservatism has been broken.
It occurred in the 1990s when, as you know,
for the first time biologists were taking large amounts
of genetic data to collect in the Human Genome Project.
And there were sites online which would allow biologists
to upload that data so it can be shared with other people
around the world and analyzed by other people.
Probably the best one of these is the site GenBank
which some of you may have heard of or used.
And these sites, like GenBank, had the problem in common
with Qwiki that scientists, they're not paid or rewarded for sharing their data.
It's all about publishing papers. So there was
a considerable reluctance to actually upload the data.
Everybody could see that this was silly but it was
obvious that this was the right thing to do.
But just because this was obvious didn't mean
that people were actually doing it.
So a meeting was convened in Bermuda in 1996
of many of the world's leading molecular biologists.
And they sat and they discussed the problem
for several days and they came up with,
what are now called the Bermuda Principles,
which state that: first -- once human genetic data
is taken in the lab, it should be immediately uploaded
to a site like Gene Bank, and two --
that the data would be in the public domain.
And these principles were given teeth because
they were taken by the big scientific grant agencies,
the US National Institutes of Health, the UK Wellcome Trust
actually baked into policy.
So it meant that if you were a scientist
who wanted to work on the Human Genome,
you had to agree to abide by these principles,
And today, I'm very pleased to say, as a result,
you can go online -- anybody here -- and download
the human genome. So that's a terrific story.
But the Human Genome is just a tiny fraction
of all scientific knowledge. Right?
Even just in other parts of genetics,
there is so much knowledge that is still locked up.
I spoke with one bioinformatician who told me
that he'd been "sitting on the genome of an entire species
for more than a year." An entire species --
And in other parts of science, it is routine
that scientists hoard their data, they hoard the computer code
that they write, that could be useful potentially
to other people, they hoard their best ideas and they often
hoard even the descriptions of the problems
that they think are most interesting.
And so what I and other people in the Open Science Movement
would like to do is we'd like to change this situation.
We would like to change the culture of science
so that scientists become much more strongly motivated
to share all of these different kinds of knowledge.
We want to change the values of individual scientists
so they start to see it as part of their job to be sharing
their data, to be sharing their code.
To be sharing their best ideas and their problems.
So, if we can do this, this kind of change in values,
then we will indeed start to see these individual scientists
rewarded for doing these things.
They will be incentives to do them.
It's a difficult thing to do, however.
We're talking about changing the culture of entire large parts of science.
But it has happened before once in history.
Right back at the dawn of science,
Galileo, 1609, he points his telescope up at the sky
towards Saturn, and he sees for the first time in history
what we now know are the rings of Saturn.
Does he tell everybody in the world? No.
He doesn't do that.
He writes down a description, privately, and then he scrambles
the letters in the description into an anagram and he sends
that anagram to several of his astronomer rivals.
And what this ensures is that if they later make the same discovery,
he can reveal the anagram and get the credit
but in the meantime he hasn't given up any knowledge at all.
And I'm sad to say that he was no uncommon at the time.
Newton, Huygens, Hooke, Leonardo, they all used similar devices.
The printing press had been around for 150 years by this time.
And yet there was a great battle in the 17th and 18th centuries
to change the culture of science so that it became
expected that when a scientist made a discovery
they would would reveal it in a journal.
And that's great. That change has happened. Terrific!
But today we have new technologies,
new opportunities to share our knowledge in new ways
and the ability to create tools that actually allow us
to solve problems in entirely new ways.
So we need to have a second Open Science Revolution.
It is my belief that any publicly funded science
should be open science.
How can we achieve this change?
Well, if you are a scientist -- and I know many of you
are not scientists -- but if you are a scientist,
then there are things that you can do.
You can get involved in an open science project
even if it's just for a small fraction of your time.
You can find forums online where you can share
your knowledge in new ways, ways that allow
other people to build on that knowledge.
You can also, if you are more ambitious,
start an open science project of your own.
If you're really bold you may wish to experiment with
entirely new ways of collaborating in much
the same way as the Polymath Project did.
But above all, what you should do,
is be very generous in giving credit to those of your colleagues
who are practicing science in the open and to promote their work.
These only conservative scientific values that look down
on these activities -- the sharing of data, the blogging,
or using the wikis and so on --
you can reject those conservative values and engage
your scientific colleagues in conversation
to promote the value of these new ways of working,
to emphasize that it takes bravery to do these things
particularly by young scientists.
It's through such conversation that the culture of science
can be changed. So if you are not a scientist,
there are also things that you can do.
My belief is that the single most important thing
that we can do to give impetus to open science,
is to create a general awareness amongst the population
of the issue of open science and of its critical importance.
If there is that general awareness, then the scientific
community will inevitably find, it will be dragged
by the population at large in the right direction.
There are simple things you can do.
You can talk to your friends and acquaintances
who are scientists and just ask them
what are they doing to work more openly.
Or you can use your imagination and your personal power
to raise awareness in other ways.
We're talking about changing not just what scientists do
but what grant agencies do,
what universities do and what governments do.
And you can influence all of those things.
Our society faces a fundamental question:
What kinds of knowledge are we going to expect
and incentivise our scientists to share?
Will we continue as we have done in the past
or will we embrace new kinds of sharing which lead
to new methods for solving problems and an acceleration
in the process of science entirely across the board.
My hope is that we will embrace open science
and really seize this opportunity
that we have to reinvent discovery itself.
Thank you. (Applause)