Daily Life in an Ivory Basement

In thinking about open science and open communication about science, I've always been frustrated by the people who claim that the risks outweight the benefit. Their arguments seem sound if you buy into a certain kind of logic (the creationists will try to twist whatever you say! the climate change deniers will use your words in ways you did not intend! people will steal your research! you cannot communicate openly about what you're doing!) but I could never pin down why I felt that way. I had a eureka moment about it today, though.

When someone tells me that (for example) we should not make all BEACON research proposals fully public because they will be misinterpreted by creationists and used against us, they are saying this: in their personal opinion, the identified risks outweight the identified benefits. They already know (and I agree that this will happen) that people will take the BEACON-funded study of -- for example -- some fascinating tailless ascidians as a scientific boondoggle, an excuse for a trip to France that won't result in anything but more incomprehensible literature about chordate origins. And they can't imagine that, without careful shaping of the message and management of the public image, this will not happen. Since there's no particularly obvious benefit to posting them publicly, the risks (of misinterpretation) outweigh the benefits (of some nebulous "open science" thingy). So halt! the publication.

Same arguments apply to climate change (but they'll just misuse/misinterpret the data!) and open science in general (but someone will just steal my data/ ideas/...!)

This is fundamentally a failure of imagination. It is doing a risk analysis based on your worst fears, and neglecting a benefit analysis of your wildest hopes.

For examples:

In the case of BEACON, we have a sprawling collection of 100 faculty spread across 5 institutions. I have literally no idea what more than half of them are doing. Wouldn't it be great if I could do a text search of their proposals, and even better if I could stumble across a BEACON colleague in a Google search on some topic or other? Or if we could attract students that didn't even know they were interested in "evolution in action", but came to our Web site based on Google's indexing of a rich array of research projects and then found themselves hooked?

What about the climate change skeptic (or agnostic) who suddenly gets a chance to sit down and look at all the data and can conclude that hey, this is actually really complicated? And it's probably not as simple as the skeptics claim? (Aside: I'm unbelievably pissed at the climate change community for the idiocy of their current closed-ness.)

And what about the collaborators that I could get (and am getting) from posting about some of our projects? In the worst case, I post about things and no one pays any attention; in the best case that I can think of, I make connections and establish cred that enables future collaborations, publications, and grant opportunities. (This is already happening.)

At the heart of science is an ethos that has to include openness in order to work properly. Any constriction in the flow of ideas and the interchange of opinions is a block in the very lifeblood of science itself. If we indulge those who argue against free communication, we are preventing not only some imagined negative consequences, but all of the happy coincidences that are beyond our limited imaginations.

So turn on, tune in, and don't drop out.

--titus