Robyn Williams: This week, a top scientist – by definition. Each year the ABC advertises for scientists to join us for a spell to make programs, and one of our first winners out of hundreds of applicants was Dr Alice Williamson from the University of Sydney. She's a chemist, grew up in the north of England, and did her doctorate at Cambridge. She works on malaria but she's also an advocate for open science. Here's why.

Alice Williamson: For those of you have the pleasure of knowing a scientist you might be well aware that we really love talking about our research – in fact it can be quite difficult to get us to stop. So perhaps it might surprise you to learn that lots of science is conducted in secrecy and that some researchers won’t talk about their results outside the safety of their laboratory.

There are many, many reasons for this secrecy. One of them is that scientific research is largely funded by grants from governments or industry and these grants are very highly competitive. So competition is fierce. Often scientists choose not to share details of their work until it is published in a peer-reviewed academic journal.

Academic journals have been around for a while – 350 years in fact. The first one was called Philosophical Transactions and it was published on the 6th March 1665. I'll share the title with you, because I really like it. It's ‘Philosophical Transactions: Giving Some Accompt of the Present Undertakings, Studies and Labours of the Ingenious in Many Considerable Parts of the World.' The studies and labours of the ingenious and the not-so-ingenious continue to be published in journals to this day, although now it is now estimated that there could be as many as 30,000 different scientific journals.

Publications are one of the main forms of currency in academia. The impact of a scientist's work is largely measured by the number of publications that they have and the number of citations that each publication receives.

So, is this secrecy a problem if that research ends up being published in the end?

Well one of the problems is that not everyone can access that research, not even once it has been published. At least not without paying a subscription to the journal. At first this might seem fairly reasonable – if we take something similar like a magazine for example, we expect magazines to make a profit. There is a difference, however. Magazines usually, I hope, pay journalists to write the stories that are included, they pay artists or photographers to provide captivating images and they also pay editors to fact check the information and make the story sound much better. Academic publishing on the other hand, doesn’t work quite like this. It is the scientists who write the articles, it is the scientists who provide the graphs and figures, and you guessed it, it's the scientists who do the fact checking – or the peer review - and they do this all for free. But while almost all of the content of journals is produced by scientists, the very same scientists who created that content can’t access it without paying the subscription.

Now this is a truly impressive business model. Imagine if this weekend you went out to a restaurant for a meal dinner and you had to take with you the ingredients, you had to have prepared the recipe, you had to go shopping for the ingredients, you have to cook the meal, you have to serve the meal, you probably have to wash up too, that's a big part of science. And then you have to pay for the privilege.

This business model has made some publishing houses extremely large amounts of profits. For example, in 2010 Elsevier reported a profit margin of 36% - that was higher than Google, Apple or Amazon.

But this model is also preventing the people who pay for research from accessing the primary literature. Citizens. Much of science is funded by the public through taxation. Similarly, when institutions pay for these subscription fees for journals, much of this money also comes from public funding.

Increasingly scientists and funding agencies are pushing against this model and calling for all research outputs to be freely available. This type of publishing is called open access.

Open access has many benefits for science and society. For example, when prohibitive subscription costs are removed, researchers in poorer countries are able to access journal articles. It also stands to reason that if more people can read your research you might have a higher chance of getting a citation, so it could be good for scientists. And of course taxpayers can also read the research. Or if they don't understand those journals, which can sometimes be a little bit complicated or even dry, might I add, at least science journalists and communicators can read those original articles and translate that information into science stories that can really affect, impress and educate the public.

Open scientists, like myself, think that we can and should, push transparency in science even further by making all of our data publicly available and in real time. We believe that increased transparency makes science more efficient and can help to democratise science because all of the data is freely available, and anyone can take part in the research.

In 2012 I moved to Australia to join Professor Matthew Todd’s group at the University of Sydney and to work as part of the Open Source Malaria consortium. Open Source Malaria are pioneers in something called open source drug discovery and are trying to show that science is better and more efficient when ideas and data are shared. The project was founded by Matt Todd in 2011, and since then we have been trying to find a new medicine for malaria, a disease that killed over 1200 people per day in 2016. The project shares many similarities with traditional drug discovery programs, but there are also some very big differences, namely that we won’t patent any of our findings and that all of our data is freely available on the Internet.

This means that instead of writing all of our data in paper notebooks, which sometimes get a little bit dusty on the shelves of the laboratory, we keep all of our data in electronic form and we publish it directly to the internet straight away. Now that lab notebook is a bit like a scientist's diary. And in fact sometimes it can even feel a little more personal than a diary, because you have to write things as they happen. When things work it's great but often, in the science laboratory, things don't quite turn out the way that they were planned. And you have to share these failed experiments. Now that is a really key and important part of open science. Most journals only contain research that actually worked out – and that seems like a good idea, but there have been several times where I would have loved to have come across The Journal of Failed Chemical Reactions. It would have saved me so much time and anguish and maybe I could have got out a bit more when I was doing my PhD. If we want to find a cure for malaria as quickly and cheaply as possible, we don't want other malaria researchers to waste time trying to reproduce medicines we already know didn't work. Maybe they were lousy at killing the malaria parasites. We don't want them to find out in the same way we did.

We also avoid email in the project and have all our project discussions online on public forums such as GitHub. This means that people can actively contribute to the project and change the direction of the project and help with decision making.

The radical transparency of our project has also led to some unusual and exciting collaborations. Because all of our data is shared online the barrier to participation in our project is significantly lowered and we are able to work with undergraduate and even high school students. When we first mentioned the idea of making drugs with high school teachers and their students, we got some pretty funny looks. We call this part of the project Breaking Good – because unlike Walter White and Jesse our aim is to empower young people to make molecules that matter – medicines that treat disease.

Since 2014, Open Source Malaria have been working with high school students to make new malaria medicines, and in 2016 we successfully reproduced a medicine called Daraprim that had been subject to a 5500% price-hike in the US. Open science enables us to engage young people in real research and to discuss difficult and important subjects like the ethics of drug pricing and access to medicines.

The focus of my current research is looking at ways that we can increase participation in science by all members of the public. Expensive journal subscriptions inadvertently lock-out citizen scientists and high school students from research projects. At the moment for example, together with a high school we are trying to write a review of the literature, but the students can’t access the original papers. Citizens can’t subscribe to 30,000 different scientific journals, so we need to find a way to make science more accessible and to democratise our discipline.

Scientists love sharing ideas, discoveries and even lab disasters. Open science enables us to do this more quickly. And after all, isn’t sharing knowledge and discovery really what science is all about? Thank you.

Robyn Williams: Dr Alice Williamson, and a compelling case for open science. She does her research at the University of Sydney and was speaking at the Powerhouse Museum. Next week, Lila Landowski on nerve regeneration, strokes and fatigue. I'm Robyn Williams.