Open Science - Michael Nielsen at TEDxWaterloo

Michael Nielsen is one of the pioneers of quantum computation. His research contributions include involvement in one of the first quantum teleportation experiments, named as one of Science Magazine's Top Ten Breakthroughs of the Year for 1998. Michael left academia to write a book about open science, and the radical change that online tools are causing in the way scientific discoveries are made.

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)