Full Circle Associates

David Bollier commented yesterday on the recent announcement of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation attitude on open scientific research. Is Hell Freezing Over? Bill Gates Embraces the Knowledge Commons

"Yesterday, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced that it would require that any researcher who accepts its grant monies for HIV/AIDS research will have to agree to share their scientific findings. The Gate Foundation was apparently frustrated that two decades of secrecy and competition among AIDS researchers have impeded efforts to come up with an AIDS vaccine. Scientists often decline to share their research because they are trying to obtain patents, withhold data until it is published, or simply protect their institutional turf.

But that’s not the best way to develop an AIDS vaccine, according to Nick Hellmann, the interim director of HIV projects at the Gates Foundation. The best research strategy is one that fosters an open, sharing environment. Says Hellmann: “There have to be better networks and collaborations [among HIV/AIDS researchers]. So we require all grantees to collaborate across a spectrum of grants.”"

I was cheering when I heard the announcement. I also shared Howard Rheingold's careful skepticism (or is that optimistic skepticism?)

I have worked with a number of Gates Foundation grantees and I see the tremendous struggle to collaborate horizontally between organizations and professions to create global public scientific goods. The institutional structures, including publish or perish, are so embedded. Decision making, risk taking behaviours, innovation are all captives of the vertical research structures. It is hard to swim against that tide.

Some research institutes such as Canada's Michael Smith Genome Sciences Center already embrace open research. As I understand it from their CTO, every data stream has an RSS feed and the compensation structure is based on more than publishing and patents, and includes knowledge sharing. As David pointed out, the Open Source software development community has patterns that could be adopted in scientific research. As I noted in a blog post last month, the scientific publication Nature is doing an experiment in open review.

The path forward starts with intent, such as stated by Gates. The next steps are to look at this not just as a change in research and publishing protocols, but from a whole systems, organizational change perspective. This means reexamining old practices, inventing new ones, and finding the bridging opportunities that allow people and organizations to transform into open, collaborative players.

Tags: research, collaboration, opensource