For most citizens, the lack of accessibility to scientific research and the scientific research process is inconsequential. It hardly impedes one’s ability to wake up each morning, to earn an honest living, and to fall asleep each evening. In fact, in the eyes of most, the only community of individuals who ostensibly stands to benefit (or suffer) from the degree of accessibility they are afforded to scientific research and the scientific research process is the scientific research community itself.

Why, then, should increasing the transparency and accessibility of these resources concern anyone but the scientific research community?

Often, in those appeals made by researchers and educators for increasing access to these resources, we are asked to consider the economic disadvantages that will arise if scientific innovation is stifled, the consequences this will have upon our national security, and the obstacles this will place, in turn, upon our individual (and collective) freedom. In other words, all too often, we are asked to value scientific research as an integral component in maintaining our economic and social standard of living. Unfortunately, for most citizens, such appeals serve only to equate the importance of scientific research with the importance of scientific researchers; and in doing so, discourage those uninterested in pursuing scientific research as a profession from considering it as anything but an occupation – and scientific understanding anything but a professional qualification.

It is for this reason that we have undertaken this effort.

Our scientific understanding is far more than the combined product of esoteric experiments conducted by university lecturers and reclusive thinkers. It is a product of our collective curiosity. A curiosity unabashedly embraced by children, but all too often, suppressed during our transition to adulthood by those pressures which demand our abandonment of ‘childish things’. Scientific research is not a mere occupation, but an extension of our childhood curiosity into the realm of organized study. In the process that underlies its conductance, scientific research provides the inquisitive mind with the tools by which to focus its curiosity upon a single idea, to gather information prior to forming opinions, and to acknowledge the imperfection and approximation inherent in those opinions it forms.

Imagine how rich our public discourse would be if we were all encouraged to embrace our individual curiosity, empowered to gather information prior to forming opinions, and able to communicate these opinions with the humility their imperfections demanded.

In 1969, US physicist Robert Rathburn Wilson (1914-2000) was asked to testify before the the Congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy of the United States Congress to justify the $200 million in funding he had requested to construct a particle accelerator. During the proceedings, he was asked by US Senator John Pastore (1907-2000) what, if any, impact the accelerator would have toward improving national security, or in placing the US in a position of being competitive with the Soviet Union. It was in reply to this question that Wilson provided his since oft-quoted response:

“It only has to do with the respect with which we regard one another, the dignity of men, our love of culture. It has to do with whether we are good painters, good sculptures, great poets. I mean all the things that we really venerate in our country and are patriotic about. It has nothing to do directly with defending the country, except to make it worth defending.”

Since its founding, The Open Source Science Project has evolved to offer students and academic researchers tools by which to improve their ability to secure research funding – thereby allowing researchers to invest more time and energy in their work; while simultaneously providing a central platform where any individual may readily access the cutting-edge of contemporary research and directly communicate with those individuals whose work lies along it.

“We strongly believe that the economy and global society of tomorrow will be built upon the innovations of today.  It is the goal of this project to encourage students and academic researchers to actively engage their curiosity and pursue those ideas that will ultimately bring about these innovations,” said Priyan D. Weerappuli, executive director of The Open Source Science Project.  “Few institutions have achieved a greater degree of success in instilling an awareness of this reality among their students than the University of Michigan.  We are excited to now have the privilege of working with these students to pursue the innovations that will revolutionize our tomorrows.”

Demonstrations such as these, though often dismissed (or ignored) by the scientific research community, should serve to remind researchers and non-researchers alike of the increasingly important role that informational intermediaries (talk-show hosts, political commentators, and the growing new-media community) have begun to play in shaping public opinions that, ultimately, will impact the research community and the research process as a whole. All scientific research strives, ideally, to transcend the bonds of human subjectivity and produce a body of purely objective understanding. The reality illustrated by debates over the teaching of evolution and global warming in school, however, is that outside the ivory towers where a large amount of scientific research is conducted, general knowledge of the research process is extremely limited – and thus, vulnerable to the influence of these intermediaries.

Consider the influence that the direct marketing of brand-name pharmaceuticals to physicians and the general public has had on the diagnosis and treatment of illness. In 2007, a team of researchers at the San Francisco VA Medical Center and the University of California San Francisco conducted a study based upon data gathered from the 2003 National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey (NAMCS) which found that “for 20 commonly used drugs, the median frequency of brand name use was 98% [...] among 12 medications with no generic competition at the time of the survey, the median frequency of brand name use was 10% [... and] among 8 medications with generic competition at the time of the survey (‘multisource’ drugs), the median frequency of brand name use was 79%.”

They subsequently concluded, based upon these results, that “this may lead to higher health care costs by promoting the use of brand-name products when generic alternatives are available.” Additionally, a secondary influence of such marketing, as demonstrated by the team of researcher who conducted a study (entitled Influence of Patients’ Requests for Direct-to-Consumer Advertised Antidepressants) published in a 2005 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA); “antidepressants were prescribed far more often when [patients] requested them.

In addition, [patients] portraying major depression and making either brand-specific or general requests were more likely than patients making no request to receive minimally acceptable initial depression care. These results underscore the idea that patients have substantial influence on physicians and can be active agents in the production of quality. The results also suggest that [direct to consumer (DTC)] advertising may have competing effects on quality, potentially averting underuse while promoting overuse.”

While those pharmaceutical companies who engage in such advertising maintain that exposure to marketing raises consumer awareness of conditions and available treatments, and that this awareness motivates patients to seek medical care and request drug therapy, the results of this study indicate that “DTC advertisement-driven requests (along with general requests) dramatically boost prescribing.”

Similar to the lackluster fate that generic brand drug manufacturers suffer as a consequence of their refusal (or inability) to actively promote their products through advertising or direct marketing; the lack of initiative scientific researchers have taken to articulate the fundamental nature of scientific research, the questions contemporary researchers are most actively pursuing, and those goals for which they strive; has created a void into which a number of informational intermediaries have stepped in to dominate the broader conversation regarding the role scientific research should play in society, and in determining when it has strayed beyond its socially-constructed boundaries. If scientific research is to truly free itself from the bonds of human subjectivity; those who engage in it must realize (and accept) that they work and live within a human society, and that as long as they seek to effectively exercise the authority of their understanding upon this larger community, they must address those concerns its members express.

While this article doesn’t seek to comment upon the question of what role scientific research should play in society, it will attempt to present the scientific research process as it is currently practiced, to distinguish what scientific research is, from what it isn’t, and to explore methods by which this information may be better communicated between individuals within and without the scientific research community.

Scientific research is, fundamentally, the extension of one’s childhood curiosity into the realm of organized study. In other words, it is an organized approach to answering the questions we all have about how we, and the world we live in, function. Anyone may conduct such research – irrespective of their individual background, or the institution within (or without) which it is being conducted. Whether formally conducted, or otherwise, the scientific research process generally follows a largely-intuitive structural form that extends from the time the researcher (or investigator) determines a topic/question for study to the time when they begin forming conclusions based on the data they gather throughout their course of study. In point form, this structure may be outlined as:

• Determine a topic/question for study (why do leaves change color in the fall?)
• Develop a hypothesis (leaves change color due to changes in the length of daylight hours)
• Determine the parameters of your study (this study will focus only on maple trees in Northern Virginia – United States)
• Gather data (measure the change in color day-to-day between June 1st and December 1st for three consecutive years)
• Analyze data (study the data you have gathered and compare it to other studies that may have been done by others)
• Test your hypothesis (see if your data indicates a relationship between day-length and the change in color)
• Draw conclusions based on your data (determine what your data is telling you)
• Conduct further studies if necessary (determine whether your hypothesis hold true for maple trees in other areas)

One important, though often misunderstood, aspect of this process (occasionally referred to as the scientific method) is that scientific researchers hold that no hypothesis can be proven.

Because the accuracy of a scientific experiments rests upon how well a researcher is able to limit the number of uncontrolled variables that influence their system of study, and because no system in nature exists independently of all others; the scope of all research conclusions is always limited by the parameters within which any and all studies within a given topic have been conducted.

Let us consider, for example, the hypothetical study described above (why do leaves change color in the fall?).

While the researcher may have observed that the population of maple trees they studied in northern Virginia behaved in a certain way; it isn’t possible for the researcher to know with 100% certainty (based solely on their results) whether or not maple trees in Michigan, Japan, Russia, or France will behave in the same way. Similarly, it isn’t possible for the researcher to know whether the population of maple trees they studied will change color in the same way if the average temperature were higher or lower; if the sky was generally cloudier or clearer; if the overall quality of the air in the region was better or worse; if the trees being studied were taller or shorter; if they received more or less water; or if any number of other variables were to be altered. It is for this reason that researchers are careful to note that a hypothesis may only be supported, and not proven. This aspect of the research process, however, is rarely communicated to non-researchers with a sufficient degree of clarity and eloquence; and it is the lack of such communication that has facilitated the birth of the generic, and oft-repeated, arguments that science is truth or that science is only a theory.

There are several approaches that could be taken to instilling an awareness of this aspect of scientific research within the broader non-research community.

One approach – which may be exercised at the primary and secondary educational levels – is shifting from a testing standard that assesses what a student remembers, to one that assesses what a student has understood. In other words, rather than asking students to recite a given theory on an exam; tests could be structured to encourage students to consider what observations a given theory is based upon by asking ‘how have we studied this system, and why do we believe it functions in this way?’ in lieu of ‘what do we know about this system?’.

Such short-answer/essay exams, though cumbersome (from a grading perspective) in the age prior to the internet, are far more practical today where the burden of grading and reviewing may be distributed inexpensively across a large number of individuals rather than placed solely upon the teacher who administers it.

Within the United States, private companies such as NCS Pearson, Inc. currently employ workers (often retired teachers and administrators) to score standardized tests.

A secondary approach, in addition to outsourcing the task of grading to private companies, may be to utilize the large population of undergraduate college students pursuing scientific and/or educational degrees and incorporate the grading of exams taken by students within a local geographic region to the course curricula (or extra-curricula) portfolio of undergraduate students within the region.

Outside of the classroom, the fundamental shift which needs to occur is to remove intellectual intermediaries from the dialogue between scientific researchers and the broader human society. This shift is one which will require that scientific researchers are provided incentives, and opportunities, to develop their communication skills which – in and of itself – is a task that will require a shift in the criteria upon which academic tenure is awarded, and the manner in which scientific research departments are funded.

In late 2009, two formal reports were published in the scholarly journal Nature presenting the summary remarks of these meetings, and it is the content of these remarks that have inspired this article.

Within contemporary scholarly practice, the results of research projects are published in an abridged form – where salient ideas and supporting facts are combined in a single discrete ‘package’.  Raw data, however, is rarely (if ever) included in such publications.  Despite the general sentiment conveyed in these remarks encouraging increased openness and data-sharing in academic research; both stopped short of expressing any commitment on behalf of the research community to proactively engage in more open research practices – asking, instead, that funding agenciestake the initiative toward introducing openness into the research process by requiring that data-sharing plans be presented as part of grant applications.

While much may be said for the progress that contemporary scientific researchers have made toward increasing our collective understanding of the world in which we live; the resistance encountered by those who have sought to increase openness in scholarly research, and the degree to which the intellectual fruits of each scientific inquiry may be accessed by others, remains the Achilles heel of a community which has long prided itself upon the nobility of its ultimate mission – the acquisition of knowledge and understanding.

The question, unfortunately, that few appear to be interested in addressing – or, for that matter, asking is - why?

The most reasonable answer to this question, as it may be gleaned from reports such as those published in the aforementioned issue of Nature, is fairly straightforward – and mirrors the classic psychological thought problem referred to as the prisoner’s dilemma.  As described by Russian mathematical psychologist Anatol Rapoport (1911-2007), and his student Albert M. Chammah, the nickname Prisoner’s Dilemma, attributed to A.W. Tucker, derives from the original anecdote used to illustrate the game.  Two prisoners, held incommunicado, are charged with the same crime.  They can be convicted only if either confesses [...] Further, if only one confesses, he is set free for having turned state’s evidence and is given a reward to boot [...] The prisoner who has held out is convicted on the strength of the other’s testimony and is given a more severe sentence than if he had also confessed [...] It is in the interest of each to confess whatever the other does.  But it is in their collective interest to hold out.”

For individual researchers, the act of increasing the accessibility of your data and work increases the likelihood that (a) it may be stolen by your competitors, (b) flaws in your approach may be discovered, and that (c) your peers may utilize your data to derive conclusions you may not have considered yourself and which may possess a scientific worth greater than your own.  It is, thus, in the self-interest of each individual researcher to maintain a degree of inaccessibility with respect to their research data.  To illustrate these concerns, consider the following theoretical situation:

You discover an herb in a remote corner of the world that is applied by the local population as a treatment for burns.  This herbal treatment, you observe, works remarkably well, and soon you begin seriously contemplating the prospect of studying it’s chemical properties in the hope of deriving a synthetic counterpart that may be mass-produced and marketed as a treatment for burns worldwide.  Once you have made the decision to continue along this path, however, you run into the above-described dilemma.  If you publish your discovery, or portions of your data while you are engaged in analyzing this compound, you expose yourself to the risk that another researcher will take your initial ideas and ‘beat you to the punch’ by working faster or more efficiently than you (possibly due to their ability to access greater sources of funding).  If you choose to wait until after you have developed your synthetic treatment and announced your results, to publish your data, however, while you may have avoided the risk of your peers ‘beating you to the punch’, you now expose yourself to the risk that somebody will discover flaws in your method, and invalidate your conclusions – or worse – discover ways to improve the efficacy of the treatment you have derived by altering steps in your procedure and producing a treatment more effective than your own – thereby rendering your work, and your treatment, commercially useless.

That being said – and while these concerns may illustrate why individual researchers behave as they do; the degree of inaccessibility that exists within contemporary scientific research is of no benefit to the scientific research community as a whole; nor to the broader society that largely finances, and is ultimately served by the understanding gleaned from each individual scientific inquiry.

Scientific research is founded upon the principal of reproducibility. Because scientists hold that there is no absolute correct answer to any scientific question; the validity of all experimental conclusions is a byproduct of the degree to which it may be reproduced by others. If, in other words, a given experiment is conducted properly, and a valid conclusion reached; another researcher conducting the same experiment under the same conditions should be able to reproduce the result recorded by the original investigator. An inability to do so implies that some error must exist within the original procedure, or in the logic applied by the original researcher in formulating their theory.

Ultimately, however, it is the student (and future researcher) who seeks to build upon the work of their predecessors who suffers the most from this inaccessibility to scientific research data as they are then forced to either (a) place their faith in the validity of the study conducted by their predecessor, or (b) make assumptions regarding the conditions under which the original study was conducted in order to better formulate their own study and interpret its results.

Being a firm believer in the idea that progress cannot be achieved simply by identifying the problem which exists in the status quo; the approach I believe holds the most promise in transforming the status quo is one where incentives are provided for researchers who choose to engage in open-research practices; and where sufficient precautions are taken to protect the intellectual property that this data represents.

Currently, the primary obstacle to encouraging a communal shift toward open research is the manner by which research grants and faculty appointments are awarded.

Within the status quo, both financial grants and academic faculty positions are awarded based upon the number of publications a candidate has contributed toward, the quality of the journals in which they were published, and (to a lesser extent) the degree to which each has since been cited by other authors engaged in similar fields of study. In other words – as the old adage reads – researchers must “publish or perish”.

What if, however, researchers were able to generate funding from sources outside the traditional network of grant agencies? What if researchers were provided an opportunity to interact directly with members of the general public – particularly those entrepreneurs who may ultimately develop the industrial applications that will render their research commercially valuable?

While it is highly unlikely that individual citizens will be able to afford, let alone be willing to contribute (in their entirety) the large budgets some research projects demand; what if the weight of this total budget were spread across a large community of individuals? If we consider the minute size of the individual investment necessary to sustain such a financial model (the non-profit US-based organization Kiva has distributed $81,993,335.00 US gathered from 527,583 lenders – average loan size: $413.11 US); the prospect of funding scientific research projects with the aid of direct public investment becomes increasingly feasible, especially if we keep in mind the utility afforded us by the internet to reach such a community of individuals at a minimal cost.

Such a model of direct-investment would, furthermore, enable researchers to develop their professional reputation based upon the overall quality of the work they conduct, as well as develop an openly-accessible portfolio of research material and data that would provide a far deeper insight into the overall quality of their work than a mere publication (or list of publications) ever could.

As noted above; simply providing access to a larger pool of finances, however, will not be enough to bring about the change needed in order to truly compel researchers to abandon contemporary closed-door research practices for their open alternatives. Precautions will also have to be taken to ensure that each individual researcher is properly credited for the work they have conducted, and the body of data they have produced. There are, potentially, several techniques that may be applied in concert to achieve these ends. These include (1) limiting the release of data and related records prior to publication, (2) releasing – in full – all data and related records following publication, and (3) ensuring that the license under which this data and information is ultimately published for open access is mutually designed to facilitate further analysis by other researchers while ensuring that their progenitor is properly accredited for their gathering – a viable candidate for this license may be the Reproducible Research Standard currently being developed by Yale Postdoctoral Associate and Kauffman Fellow Victoria Stodden.

I am under no illusion that the task of creating a more open scientific research culture will be easy. But it is what we must do, precisely because of the increasingly important role that scientific research promises to play in our rapidly growing human society. Just as transparency and accessibility have long remained the elusive goals of political establishments; so too have they now become those of the institutions which have been built around and upon the community of scientific researchers.