free open science

The ability to collaborate quickly and transparently online is just one facet of a growing movement in research known as open science.

There are many interpretations of what open science means, with different motivations across different disciplines. Some are driven by the backlash against corporate-funded science, with its profit-driven research agenda. Others are internet radicals who take the "information wants to be free" slogan literally. Others want to make important discoveries more likely to happen. But for all their differences, the ambition remains roughly the same: to try and revolutionise the way research is performed by unlocking it and making it more public.

"What we try to do is get people to organise differently," says Joseph Jackson, the organiser of the Open Science Summit, a meeting of advocates. Jackson is a young bioscientist who, like many others, has discovered that the technologies used in genetics and molecular biology, once the preserve of only the most well-funded labs, are now cheap enough to allow experimental work to take place in their garages. For many, this means that they can conduct genetic experiments in a new way, adopting the so-called "hacker ethic" – the desire to tinker, deconstruct, rebuild. Spurred on by the new-found ability to work outside the system, these biologists believe that the traditional way of doing science is not the most efficient and could even be holding back important developments. The first and most powerful change has been the use of the web to connect people and collect information. The internet allows like-minded individuals to seek one another out and share vast amounts of raw data. Researchers can lay claim to an idea not by publishing first in a journal (a process that can take many months) but by sharing their work online in an instant.

"The litmus test of openness is whether you can have access to the data," says Dr Rufus Pollock, a co-founder of the Open Knowledge Foundation, a group that promotes broader access to information and data. "If you have access to the data, then anyone can get it, use it, reuse it and redistribute it… we've always built on the work of others, stood on the shoulders of giants and learned from those who have gone before." He says that it is increasingly vital for many scientists to adopt an open approach. "We have found ourselves in a weird dead end," he says – where publicly funded science does not produce publicly accessible information.

It's a fundamental right to share knowledge, rather than hide it. The best example of open science in action is the Human Genome Project, which successfully mapped our DNA and then made the data public. In doing so, it outflanked J Craig Venter's proprietary attempt to patent the human genome, opening up the very essence of human life for science, rather than handing our biological information over to corporate interests.

The way most people conceive of science – as a highly specialised academic discipline conducted by white-coated professionals in universities or commercial laboratories – is a very modern construction. It is only over the last century that scientific disciplines became industrialised and compartmentalised. Some of history's most influential scientists and polymaths – people such as Robert Hooke, Charles Darwin and Benjamin Franklin – started as gentleman scholars and helped pioneer the foundations for modern inquiry at a time when the line between citizen and scientist was blurred.

Biophysicist Cameron Neylon, the conversion to open science came when he was working at the University of Southampton. He started publishing his lab notebook online. "Once you see how the web connects people and makes them more effective, it's a given," he says. "We can make research more efficient by making parts of the process more public.The sooner we can get to a point where people are rewarded for making more public their ideas, concepts, materials and data, the better off we'll be."

The idea of placing restrictions on the reproduction and distribution of information seems ridiculous . Indeed, there are countless ben­efits to th efreeflow of ideas. Information, as a buy and sell commodity and it is worth recalling what really makes a commodity—it is restriction of access. Inside socialist society the pursuit of knowledge will be free to all. There will be no restrictions on scientific investigation. This is impossible inside capitalism, with its copyright laws and its profit motive.

John Sulston, one of the leading researchers in the Human Genome Project has shown how powerful the profit motive is in science-based commerce. “We can't possibly prohibit discovery. But on the other hand to imagine that we should always exploit, especially if it makes extra money, is insane. I think most reasonable people, including those who run companies, would agree. The trouble is, once people get into a company boardroom, they have no other choice. They have shareholders. I am afraid you have to leave your principles at the door of the boardroom”, he says.” (Guardian, 2 February 2002).