An inspiring talk

I recently went to a seminar talk by Michael Nielsen that I really enjoyed. So here are a couple notes and thoughts on that. Nielsen spoke mainly of what he calls "extreme open science", and touched on many of the topics he covers in this essay. This is an area I've been "working" in for the last few months, in quotes because the work is mainly thinking, and, as a result, there aren't that many artifacts to point to. Nielsen emphasized that the system by which scholarly work is evaluated currently does not incentivize open sharing of results, code, data etc. He also brought up the same example I always use, namely that of the NIH's requirement for depositing of genomic data resulting from work they funded, as a case in which a funding agency mandate is creating an incentive for sharing and, consequently, open science. Nielsen is in a position that allows him to be quite inclusive of all relevant good ideas, and vague about whether he's advocating any specific approach in particular. In a sense his attitude seems rather descriptive, so I'm finding reading what he's written informative and quite comprehensive.

At the same time I was trying to find a way to justify my own first stab at an approach in this field, in a way that was consistent with his framework. By necessity, anything I have to say about this has to be a lot more focused, and it has to be translatable to artifacts, code, methods, what have you. That has led me to think of the situation in terms of the following diagram:

The idea here is that the odds of a scientist sharing or not sharing the raw fruits of his or her labor (as opposed to just publishing something *about* those raw fruits) is a function of the incentive to share them and the ease of doing so. For the purposes of this diagram, then, I'm assuming that, even if there is no incentive, if it is very easy to share, a scientist will choose to do so (i.e. the x-intercept is somewhere to the right of 0). Conversely, even if there is an incentive, difficulty in sharing will overwhelm the incentive (i.e. the y intercept is also upward of 0). You can set up this diagram differently by making different assumptions about the intercepts, and of course you can argue about whether the line separating YES (inclined to share) from NO (disinclined to share) should be straight, curved, or whatever. I'm neither a psychologist nor a game theoretician, so I'm sure there's a more sophisticated version of this somewhere out there, but I don't know where to look for it. In any case, the gist of the point I'm trying to make is this: there seem to be two strategies for shifting behavior from NO to YES. The first, shown by the red arrow, is to increase the incentive to share. This is what Nielsen focused on in his talk, making references to the scientific patronage system of yesteryear, and alluding to the possibility of something similar emerging today (e.g. innocentive.com). The second strategy, shown by the blue arrow, is to increase the ease (i.e. decrease the difficulty) of sharing. As a technologist, this is the strategy I've been thinking and writing about. While I love the idea of institutions like NIH and innocentive.com changing the incentive landscape, I, personally, have no influence over them and no voice with which to advocate the wider adoption of such policies. But as a technologist, someone involved with designing open source, next generation system-ware, I do have a say about the environment that scientists conduct science in. My ideas, then, center around making that environment such that it increases the ease of sharing simply by virtue of what it is.

More about the specifics of that coming soon...