A revolution in open science? The opportunities and challenges of open data

Editor's Notes

1. You have just been discussing global challenges; major targets for modern science – about science for policy. I will talk about some of the processes of science that will be vital if those challenges are to be effectively met – about policy for science. I restrict my talk to science itself, Chas Bountra will talk about one of the main domains of application – that of the commercial.
2. But first a little helpful history. This is Henry Oldenberg, the first secretary of the newly formed Royal Society in the early 1660s. Henry was an inveterate correspondent, with those we would now call scientists both in Europe and beyond. Rather than keep this correspondence private, he thought it would be a good idea to publish it, and persuaded the new Society to do so by creating the Philosophical Transactions, which remains a top-flight journal to the present day. But he demanded two things of his correspondents: that they should submit in the vernacular and not Latin; and that evidence (data) that supported a concept must be published together with the concept. It permitted others to scrutinize the logic of the concept, the extent to which it was supported by the data and permitted replication and re-use. Open publication of concept and evidence is the basis of “scientific self-correction”, which historians of science argue were the crucial building blocks on which the scientific revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries was built and remain fundamental to the progress of science, and its value to humanity as the most reliable means of acquiring knowledge. Openness to scrutiny by scientific peers is the most powerful form of peer review.
3. But Oldenberg’s world has changed. The last 20 years has seen a revolution in the rate at which data can be acquired, in the volume and complexity that can be stored and in the immediacy of ubiquitous communication. We have an unprecedented data storm. This poses challenges and opportunities in the way science is done.
4. The fundamental challenge is to scientific self-correction. Journals can no longer contain the data, and neither scientists nor journals have taken the obvious step of having data relevant to a publication concurrently available in an electronic database. (example of last year’s Nature paper revealing that only 11% of results in 50 benchmark papers in pre-clinical oncology were replicable – a crisis of credibility?)But enormous data volumes are created by publicly funded research that are never used as the basis for publication. There is a powerful argument that open sharing of such data has enormous potential.
5. The opportunity is, as some have argued, of another scientific revolution of a scale and significance equivalent to that of the 18th and 19th centuries. Integrating data from a large number of cognate databases, ensuring dynamic data that is automatically up-dated, and using powerful techniques for database interrogation and data and text mining permit us to ask questions in new ways with the potential to gain a more profound understanding of deep data relationships and the information and knowledge that they potentially contain, as promised by the vision of a semantic web.
6. Henry Oldenburg: the scientific journal and the process of peer review  Henry Oldenburg (1619-1677) was a German theologian who became the first Secretary of the Royal Society.  He corresponded with the leading scientists of Europe, and believed that rather than waiting for entire books to be published, letters were much better suited to quick communication of facts or new discoveries.  He invited people to write to him, even laymen who were not involved with science but had discovered some item of knowledge. He no longer required that science be conveyed in Latin, but in any vernacular language. From these letters the idea of printing scientific papers or articles in a scientific journal was born. In creating the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in 1665, he wrote:   "It is therefore thought fit to employ the [printing] press, as the most proper way to gratify those [who] . . . delight in the advancement of Learning and profitable Discoveries [and who are] invited and encouraged to search, try, and find out new things, impart their knowledge to one another, and contribute what they can to the Grand Design of improving Natural Knowledge . . . for the Glory of God . . . and the Universal Good of Mankind."  Oldenburg also initiated the process of peer review of submissions by asking three of the Society’s Fellows who had more knowledge of the matters in question than he, to comment on submissions prior to making the decision about whether to publish.REFAaron Klug, (2000) “Address of the President, Sir Aaron Klug, O.M., P.R.S., Given at the Anniversary Meeting on 30 November 1999”, Notes Rec. R. Soc. Lond. 2000 54, 99-108.Marie Boas Hall, Henry Oldenburg: Shaping the Royal Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2002).
7. Open communication of data offers many benefits:  Data sharing in specific scientific communities offers greater benefits to the individual than does hugging their own data (e.g. bio-informatics).Data sharing permits faster, more efficient response to emergencies (e.g. the 2011 Hamburg-centred e-coli infection).Mandating open data concurrent with publication has the potential to deter fraud (examples of invented data) and malpractice (mention clinical trials) – stress system integrity as well as personal integrity.Openness stimulates novel, highly creative and efficient modes of scientific collaboration (e.g. crowd sourcing and Tim Gowers).The stimulus it offers to the “citizen science movement”, which has the potential in the next decade or so to fundamentally change the social dynamics of science.A response to the increasing demand from many citizens to interrogate for themselves the evidence for a particular policy that may have major impacts on the lives of individuals and society, and after all they pay, through their taxes for publicly funded scienceAnd finally, and crucially, it offers more efficient and speedier means of addressing many modern science-related challenges (e.g. climate change; energy; infectious pandemics etc)
8. Henry Oldenburg: the scientific journal and the process of peer review  Henry Oldenburg (1619-1677) was a German theologian who became the first Secretary of the Royal Society.  He corresponded with the leading scientists of Europe, and believed that rather than waiting for entire books to be published, letters were much better suited to quick communication of facts or new discoveries.  He invited people to write to him, even laymen who were not involved with science but had discovered some item of knowledge. He no longer required that science be conveyed in Latin, but in any vernacular language. From these letters the idea of printing scientific papers or articles in a scientific journal was born. In creating the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in 1665, he wrote:   "It is therefore thought fit to employ the [printing] press, as the most proper way to gratify those [who] . . . delight in the advancement of Learning and profitable Discoveries [and who are] invited and encouraged to search, try, and find out new things, impart their knowledge to one another, and contribute what they can to the Grand Design of improving Natural Knowledge . . . for the Glory of God . . . and the Universal Good of Mankind."  Oldenburg also initiated the process of peer review of submissions by asking three of the Society’s Fellows who had more knowledge of the matters in question than he, to comment on submissions prior to making the decision about whether to publish.REFAaron Klug, (2000) “Address of the President, Sir Aaron Klug, O.M., P.R.S., Given at the Anniversary Meeting on 30 November 1999”, Notes Rec. R. Soc. Lond. 2000 54, 99-108.Marie Boas Hall, Henry Oldenburg: Shaping the Royal Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2002).
9. Henry Oldenburg: the scientific journal and the process of peer review  Henry Oldenburg (1619-1677) was a German theologian who became the first Secretary of the Royal Society.  He corresponded with the leading scientists of Europe, and believed that rather than waiting for entire books to be published, letters were much better suited to quick communication of facts or new discoveries.  He invited people to write to him, even laymen who were not involved with science but had discovered some item of knowledge. He no longer required that science be conveyed in Latin, but in any vernacular language. From these letters the idea of printing scientific papers or articles in a scientific journal was born. In creating the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in 1665, he wrote:   "It is therefore thought fit to employ the [printing] press, as the most proper way to gratify those [who] . . . delight in the advancement of Learning and profitable Discoveries [and who are] invited and encouraged to search, try, and find out new things, impart their knowledge to one another, and contribute what they can to the Grand Design of improving Natural Knowledge . . . for the Glory of God . . . and the Universal Good of Mankind."  Oldenburg also initiated the process of peer review of submissions by asking three of the Society’s Fellows who had more knowledge of the matters in question than he, to comment on submissions prior to making the decision about whether to publish.REFAaron Klug, (2000) “Address of the President, Sir Aaron Klug, O.M., P.R.S., Given at the Anniversary Meeting on 30 November 1999”, Notes Rec. R. Soc. Lond. 2000 54, 99-108.Marie Boas Hall, Henry Oldenburg: Shaping the Royal Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2002).
10. Henry Oldenburg: the scientific journal and the process of peer review  Henry Oldenburg (1619-1677) was a German theologian who became the first Secretary of the Royal Society.  He corresponded with the leading scientists of Europe, and believed that rather than waiting for entire books to be published, letters were much better suited to quick communication of facts or new discoveries.  He invited people to write to him, even laymen who were not involved with science but had discovered some item of knowledge. He no longer required that science be conveyed in Latin, but in any vernacular language. From these letters the idea of printing scientific papers or articles in a scientific journal was born. In creating the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in 1665, he wrote:   "It is therefore thought fit to employ the [printing] press, as the most proper way to gratify those [who] . . . delight in the advancement of Learning and profitable Discoveries [and who are] invited and encouraged to search, try, and find out new things, impart their knowledge to one another, and contribute what they can to the Grand Design of improving Natural Knowledge . . . for the Glory of God . . . and the Universal Good of Mankind."  Oldenburg also initiated the process of peer review of submissions by asking three of the Society’s Fellows who had more knowledge of the matters in question than he, to comment on submissions prior to making the decision about whether to publish.REFAaron Klug, (2000) “Address of the President, Sir Aaron Klug, O.M., P.R.S., Given at the Anniversary Meeting on 30 November 1999”, Notes Rec. R. Soc. Lond. 2000 54, 99-108.Marie Boas Hall, Henry Oldenburg: Shaping the Royal Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2002).
11. Openness of itself has no value unless it is “intelligent openness”, where data are:Accessible – they can be foundIntelligible – they can be understoodAssessable – e.g. does the creator have an interest in a particular outcome?Re-useable – sufficient meta-data to permit re-use and re-purposing.These should be standard criteria for an open data regime.But we must recognise that the amount of meta and background data required for intelligent openness to fellow citizens is usually far greater than that required for openness to scientific peers. If all data were to be intelligently open to fellow citizens on the basis that that have ultimately paid for it, science would stop tomorrow. A way forward would be to make a much greater effort to make data intelligently open in what we could call “public interest science”, including those issues that frequently arise in public debate or concern.