News in Science

'Old-boys club' holding back innovation

Science needs to break free of its power-brokers and embrace a participatory web-based culture to boost innovation, says one expert.

John Wilbanks, of Science Commons - a project of Creative Commons - says the plethora of machine-generated data, that characterises today's scientific activity, needs the power of open networks to make sense of it properly.

"The value of any individual piece of knowledge is about the value of any individual piece of lego," Wilbanks said in a keynote address to the Open Access and Research Conference held in Brisbane last week.

"It's not that much until you put it together with other legos."

He says the ability to connect knowledge brings scientific revolutions. For example Watson and Crick's breakthrough on the structure of DNA involved them reading all the scientific papers on nucleotide bonding and encoding it in the form of a physical model, says Wilbanks.

But this kind of "human scale" analysis is no longer feasible in an age when automated laboratory processes generate vast amounts of information faster than the human mind can process it.

"For example, we have 45,000 papers about one protein or one gene," says Wilbanks.

He says a scientist might once have analysed the impact of one drug on one gene, but now pipetting robots are capable of analysing 25,000 genes at a time.

"Most of the research says the smartest of us can handle five or six independent variables at once - not 25,000," he says.

Science commons

Wilbanks says we now need to harness the power of machines to help us make the best sense of all this data we're generating.

He wants to see the results of scientific experiments made freely available in an open commons of information.

Related bits of knowledge should be integrated and easily searched and shared via publicly-accessible databases on the web, says Wilbanks.

"It's really about building a network culture for knowledge," he says.

For example, he says, it should be as easy to search for all the potential gene targets for Alzheimer's disease as it is to search for a hotel online.

Wilbanks says the technology involved is not "rocket science" and is already used by wealthy institutions, including the pharmaceutical industry.

But many researchers can't take advantage of such knowledge integration due to their lack of access to the technology or because they can't afford information protected by copyright or patents.

"The participatory culture on the web hasn't really made it into the sciences yet," says Wilbanks.

He says a network that is open to as many people as possible increases the chance of someone in the network connecting information in a way that causes a revolution in knowledge.

Reward system

Wilbanks says as well as freedom from intellectual property restrictions a science commons would rely on researchers actively sharing knowledge.

But he says most researchers are currently rewarded for publications and patents rather than sharing.

This has led to a world of "over-atomised" disconnected knowledge that is stifling the possibility of scientific revolutions, says Wilbanks.

He says the cost of research and its control by "old-boys clubs" also encourages researchers to stick to tiny and "safe" questions that fit in with existing tracks of thinking.

Wilbanks argues a science commons could boost the chance of knowledge revolutions by reducing the cost of taking risks, freeing up researchers to ask big questions and to generate and test lots of hypotheses quickly.

"There are 10,000 questions you can ask about signal transduction and neurones. I would like to have all 10,000 questions asked every day," he says.

Pioneers

Wilbanks says the Science Commons project is working with foundations that fund non-profit disease research to develop tools that can be used to network scientific information.

He says they are drawing on innovations by those in the new discipline of synthetic biology, which builds 'designer life', and relies on sharing DNA information on the web.

Wilbanks says in a relatively brief period of time student researchers in synthetic biology have already used shared DNA information to design bacteria that can detect arsenic in groundwater.

"Synthetic biology is an example of where the absence of a control culture has led to very rapid innovation," says Wilbanks.