Encouraging collaboration in science innovation

We need to find new ways of supporting and rewarding science researchers who collaborate and share knowledge, says John Wilbanks.

'Open science' describes an open approach to science innovation, where knowledge is shared amongst distributed researchers. At the individual level, researchers can keep an 'open notebook' by placing all of their notes and data online as it is produced.

But it's 'big science' projects in areas such as astronomy, high energy physics and genetics which have brought the most notable successes for open scientific innovation.

John Wilbanks, Vice President for Science at Creative Commons, says: "If we are to discover new drugs and respond to pressing issues like climate change, it's essential that we use all of the knowledge we have to the best of our ability.

"Sharing knowledge throughout a network makes it standard and also increases its value. The  "Personal Genome Project - Homepage" is just one example of what can be achieved by taking an open approach to science innovation."

The value of networks

The protection afforded by intellectually property laws is often seen as a way of motivating people to innovate. But John argues that an open, networked system can also support a high level of innovation and that personal incentives aren't necessarily the most important factor.

"When you put people into a network, collaboration happens for lots of different reasons - collaboration is an emergent property of a networked culture. With many people collaborating in multiple ways, the incentive for any one individual becomes less important."

But he goes on to point out that incentives and funding remain important factors within the settings where science research takes place: "Research institutions, universities, companies and governments need to set up funding and reward structures that encourage and support networking and collaboration."

Tracking and rewarding collaboration

The issue of tracking success and rewarding scientists who collaborate is an important one - John describes it as the most important question for the science community to address if the open approach is to thrive.

"Scientific research traditionally gets evaluated through citations and the value of grants brought in - but these systems don't offer any way of tracking the impact of doing things in an open way. We need to develop a system which tracks sharing and openness, so we can start to reward it as well."

One potential route for tracking and rewarding collaboration is to change the current method of producing citations.

"There's an opportunity to move away from the current method of producing citations between research papers and instead break down knowledge into finer-grained pieces. This will lead us to new methodologies for generating citations, which could include things like graphs showing related concepts."

Contracts between researchers and their funders or universities offer another promising route for measuring and incentivising collaboration. John explains: "We could use contracts to track transactions such as the number of times a research article is downloaded, a dataset is ordered or a biological sample requested.

"This approach would enable funders and universities to reward researchers for sharing their work and create a strong incentive for scientists to share their material more broadly."

Opening up pharmaceutical research

The pharmaceutical industry has traditionally relied upon patents to make profits, but several companies have recently moved towards a more open approach to innovation. In March 2009, for example, Merck announced plans to develop an open access platform for data on human disease biology. Eli Lilly took a similar step in May 2008 when it made its internal grid software open source.

"At the moment, pharma companies try to recoup the cost of multiple drug failures in a small number of successes - and they've depended upon patent protection to make this possible," says John.

"But their problem is not an intellectual property problem - it's simply that we don't know very much about how the human body works. Sharing the knowledge that we do have through an open networked innovation system could, over time, reduce the cost of failure, increase the chance of success and release the pressure on pharmaceutical patents."

About the author

John Wilbanks is Vice President for Science, Creative Commons. The Science Commons initiative aims to unlock the value of research so more people can benefit from the work scientists are doing.