innovation
‘Take the insights of the web and apply them to science seriously. What you get is better, faster and more efficient science at a lower cost’
an active mind perpetually in motion. In person he comes across less scholarly academic, more internet entrepre- neur. He was in Dublin recently for the first in a series of new events organised by McCann Fitzgerald. Dubbed ‘Open Minds’, the events gather local and international speakers to engage with topical issues relevant to science, engineering and technology businesses in Ireland. Outlining how science can benefit from the principles
of the web, Boyle makes the analogy between how web search engines work and scientific research. In both cases, the most useful material gets ranked highest because search engines have a clever way of sorting out good sources from bad ones. “Google doesn’t look at what the sites say … it looks at who links to the sites. That’s called peer review; except it’s being done by all of us all the time, in the process of just communicating,” he says. The same open, democratic idea can be seen in the act
of buying a book online. Any person is presented with all the information they need to see, such as what others thought of a book, along with other works they liked, and the transaction is made in a single click. Science has no equivalent to this simple process, says Boyle, because much of the knowledge lies in closed systems. “Right now we are generating scientific information at
digital speeds, but our method of processing is still ana- logue; it’s the Mark 1 eyeball. Sure, we’ve got search engines, but we haven’t got anything like the sophistica- tion of search that we have for many other things on the web. Why? Because much of the scientific literature lives behind paywalls or in journals. You can find that the word occurred, but you can’t link to the article. It’s not possible for a university to text mine all of the digi- tal journals it subscribes to, to see if patterns emerge, to say ‘ah, here’s this person writing about rheumatology information and here’s this cancer biologist’s writings and the same gene is involved in both’.”
Science Commons Boyle cites a recent article in the American Journal of Medicine which found thatmost biomedical scientists who abandon promising research areas do so because they are unable to get the materials to replicate the experiment. One of the goals of Science Commons is to eliminate bar- riers to scientific innovation; not by removing patents but
by lowering the cost of transactions. The web makes it easier to share virtual things but sci-
ence has tended to bring a mindset from the physical world. “If this is the kind of property that lives on net- works – if it’s a file, if it’s an image, if it’s an idea – you can have it and I can have it too. Our instincts about how to handle themare derived froma world like this, where con- trol is a very good thing. Someone has to own that field so we know who gets to plant it and who gets to reap fromit. In the digital world, that may well be true, but we need to figure out exactly when it’s true,” says Boyle. He makes it clear he is talking about state-funded basic
research, as distinct from private sector innovation. The first part of his proposal is for the published results of that research to be available on the open web within a certain amount of time after publication. “That is being done in the EU and the US it’s only being done in the last three years. Isn’t that amazing? We’re paying for the research, we’re giving the money and we don’t bother to say ‘here’s a condition that you make the research available’.”
Cost of scientific research Secondly, he favours reducing the transaction costs. Wikipedia, notes Boyle, stands fair comparison with many scientific journals, yet its contributors do so for free – the lowest possible cost. He proposes a system whereby anyone sharing their expertise or actual physi- cal material would receive appropriate credit in the sci- entific community, be it a high grading in an EU Framework grant application, or a higher rating in a tenure review for a university posting. “If you align social and private incentives, good things
happen. In science, the scientists are smart people, nice people and often sharing people. We have done a really poor job of incentivising them to do the things that would benefit science. So take the insights of the web and apply themto science seriously. It has to be done by the funders, it has to be done by universities, and what you get is bet- ter, faster and more efficient science at a lower cost. “Every time we lower the cost of scientific research,
good things
happen.More scientific information andmore accurate information gets to more researchers faster, and it does so in ways that problems can be solved. Right now there are diseases that we’re not going to go and develop
44 Irish Director Summer 2011
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