Open Science or Free Science?

The open science meme is rather in vogue at the moment. But Bill Hooker raises an interesting point (in a post that kindly links to a couple items on this blog):

should we be calling the campaign to free up scientific information (text, data and software) "Free Science", for the same reasons Stallman insists on "Free Software"?

Interestingly, there is another parallel here:

Just as free software gained the alternative name "open source" at the Freeware Summit in 1998, so free open scholarship (FOS), as it was called until then by the main newsletter that covered it - written by Peter Suber, professor of philosophy at Earlham College - was renamed "open access" as part of the Budapest Open Access Initiative in December 2001. Suber's newsletter turned into Open Access News and became one of the earliest blogs; it remains the definitive record of the open access movement, and Suber has become its semi-official chronicler (the Eric Raymond of open access - without the guns).

Science Commons - the Conference

To late to go to this, of course, but it's interesting to see the science commons meme spreading. And there's always some yummy papers to console.

A Triptych of Science Opens

Here's a man after my own heart:

I've never had an idea that couldn't be improved by sharing it with as many people as possible -- and I don't think anyone else has, either. That's why I have become interested in the various "Open" movements making increasing inroads into the practice of modern science. Here I will try to give a brief introduction to Open Access to research literature; in the second instalment I will look at ways in which the same concept of "openness" is being extended to encompass data as well as publications, and beyond that, what a fully Open practice of science might look like.

(Via Open Access News.)

Open Science and Modularity

As the open meme sweeps through field after field, there is a tendency to assume that openness on its own is enough. But as this wise post by Pedro Beltrão about open science explains, there's something else you need if you are to get the full benefits of opening up: modularity.

Open source thrives because major tasks are split up into smaller ones, joined by clean interfaces. This enables tasks to be distributed, and sometimes performed in parallel. Competition operates at the level of the small tasks - the best solutions are chosen - rather than at the top level, which is how proprietary software typically works.

But as Beltrão points out, science is still encouraging competition at the topmost level - at the point when results are published - which leads to teams being scooped and work wasted. Far more sensible if the whole were split up into smaller tasks where competition can operate more fruitfully, and he has some practical suggestions about how that might be achieved.

The Science of Open Source

The OpenScience Project is interesting. As its About page explains:

The OpenScience project is dedicated to writing and releasing free and Open Source scientific software. We are a group of scientists, mathematicians and engineers who want to encourage a collaborative environment in which science can be pursued by anyone who is inspired to discover something new about the natural world.

But beyond this canonical openness to all, there is another, very important reason why scientific software should be open source. With proprietary software, you simply have to take on trust that the output has been derived correctly from the inputs. But this black-box approach is really anathema to science, which is about examining and checking every assumption along the way from input to output. In some sense, proprietary scientific software is an oxymoron.

The project supports open source scientific software in two ways. It has a useful list of such programs, broken down by category (and it's striking how bioinformatics towers over them all); in addition, those behind the site also write applications themselves.

What caught my eye in particular was a posting asking an important question: "How can people make money from open source scientific software?" There have been two more postings so far, exploring various ways in which free applications can be used as the basis of a commercial offering: Sell Hardware and Sell Services. I don't know what the last one will say - it's looking at dual licensing as a way to resolve the dilemma - but the other two have not been able to offer much hope, and overall, I'm not optimistic.

The problem goes to the root of why open source works: it requires lots of users doing roughly the same thing, so that a single piece of free code can satisfy their needs and feed off their comments to get better (if you want the full half-hour argument, read Rebel Code).

That's why the most successful open source projects deliver core computing infrastructure: operating system, Web server, email server, DNS server, databases etc. The same is true on the client-side: the big winners have been Firefox, OpenOffice.org, The GIMP, Audacity etc. - each serving a very big end-user group. Niche projects do exist, but they don't have the vigour of the larger ones, and they certainly can't create an ecosystem big enough to allow companies to make money (as they do with GNU/Linux, Apache, Sendmail, MySQL etc.)

Against this background, I just can't see much hope for commercial scientific open source software. But I think there is an alternative. Because this open software is inherently better for science - thanks to its transparency - it could be argued that funding bodies should make it as much of a priority as more traditional areas.

The big benefit of this approach is that it is cumulative: once the software has been funded to a certain level by one body, there is no reason why another should't pick up the baton and pay for further development. This would allow costs to be shared, along with the code.

Of course, this approach would take a major change of mindset in certain quarters; but since open source and the other opens are already doing that elsewhere, there's no reason why they shouldn't achieve it in this domain too.

The BMJ Evolves towards... the Dark Side

The British Medical Journal is a fine institution, with a long and glorious history of publishing important medical research. On top of that it was enlightened, allowing mere members of the public (like me) to read all of its content through an open access policy that placed it at the vanguard of scientific publishing.

No more.

An editorial claims that "The BMJ is evolving". As far as I can tell from information on the site (not to mention the sign-in page I meet at the above address), it seems to be evolving in precisely the opposite direction to everyone else, by reducing the amount of its content that is freely available.

More and more scientific journals recognise the virtues of open access, both in terms of efficiency (the dissemination of knowledge and the building of scientists' reputations) and ethics (since the general public pays through taxes for most published research). A full and very clear explanation of both the why and the how of open access can be found here.

Update: Miraculously, the editorial mentioned above now seems to be available to hoi polloi....