The Road to Open Science

Academics and even science seem to place a great deal of weightage on opinions of the big names. Like, in the 1920’s, when Ralph Kronig proposed an interpretation of quantum spin, he ran his paper by 2 big-shots, Neils Bohr and Pauli. Both dismissed the idea. And so Kronig did not publish his paper. A couple of other scientists did publish the same idea and walked away with the glory. Kronig was furious and cursed physicists “who are always so damned sure of, and inflated with, the correctness of their opinion”.

In private, Bohr said that Kronig “was a fool”, who should have published if he had been that sure. Easier said than done. In the academic and scientific worlds, a nod from a bigwig is necessary to get published. Kronig wouldn’t have stood a chance of getting published once it was known that both Pauli and Bohr had rejected his paper.

Fast forward to today. Were things any different nowadays, I wondered? Has the Internet changed the way scientific papers are published? Turns out it has. Like that famous news a month back that neutrinos were found to travel faster than light. It wasn’t published via a scientific journal. Rather, it was published via arXiv, a site that posts research papers before they're formally published in a scientific journal. Additionally, papers on arXiv are not peer-reviewed ahead of time.

So how reliable is arXiv then? Turns out its intent is different from a regular journal. arXiv is a way to announce early, “I think I found something. Have a look and tell me if I made a mistake or not?”. Since the neutrino paper, over 80 papers have been posted (again in arXiv) as responses, some criticizing the experimental setup and reliability, others offering explanations as to how the results could still co-exist with Einstein’s theory of relativity. Yet others have decided to conduct the experiment again and check for themselves.

If the paper passes all the checks and criticisms being hurled at it, then it’s that much stronger when it goes for official publication. And if it’s wrong, well, nobody wasted time and money going through the official process of publishing and retracting.

So is this the new way that science is being done?

Not quite yet. The entire academic system today looks at number of papers published. Reviewing or sharing ideas online is still seen as a waste of time or a channel that opens the doors for even non-scientists to find mistakes (amateurs can and do find errors in mathematical papers online). So until the academic system stops looking only at papers published, “open science” will continue to be the exception rather than the rule.

Comments

  1. KumarNovember 2, 2011 at 4:09 PM

    Sure, open science may never be there. Certainly it never was there in the past.

    Since science is a human endeavor and science is always an understanding of nature's happenings in terms of human mind's grasp, interpretation-capability and mind's own limitations, I wonder if there can be any really "objective" science at all.

    Further, with more minds trying to discuss and evaluate newer things, it becomes quite a bit of "clash of opinions". So, should we bracket science also in the domain of religion, wherein apparently there is very nearly nothing beyond opinions?

    I suppose not. Fortunately, there seem to be some human interpretations which are relatively better than many others in describing nature's phenomena, at a given time. This suits science at least. In religion, many people would like to believe that there cannot be anything worthwhile beyond what they believe in. It looks strange to me that even in the spiritual domain developments keep occurring!

    On the whole human mind is a marvel!

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