Sixteen and counting: sharing science on the Web

Posted on 22 September 2007
Filed under OneWebDay2007, Open access

On August 6, 1991, a post to a Usenet newsgroup started a revolution. Today, the world is tantalizingly close to realizing the vision hinted at in that post to alt.hypertext sixteen years ago.

Seeking a way to facilitate the sharing of data among high energy physicists, a contractor named Tim Berners-Lee designed a system “to allow links to be made to any information anywhere”. Although Berners-Lee cautioned that his “WorldWideWeb” was still “very prototype”, he instructed readers how to obtain a copy of the source code.

Today, the Web is the home to a Fortune 500 company with the mission “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”. The company’s founders were recently named among the 10 richest people in America.

The Web is also the platform for the largest encyclopedia in human history. Not just the biggest, though: coincidentally, this encyclopedia is available at no cost to anyone in the world with access to the Internet. Oh, and anyone can edit it, too.

Millions of people rely on the Web every day for information about transportation, employment, entertainment, medical concerns, and news from around the world. It’s also a vital platform for personal communications and social interaction.

Lest we paint too utopian a portrait, there are significant challenges engendered by the Web, and many opportunities not yet realized. Though powerful, the Web is simply a tool; like other tools, the ends to which it is applied depend on society’s directions. The Web will take us only where we tell it to go. Therefore, today – OneWebDay – seems an opportune moment to consider where we are going.

What, then, became of the Web’s original goal: to enable scientists to share information?

First, the good news. A vibrant and growing movement has developed to lobby and labor for the cause of access to scientific information – not only for other scientists, but for everyone. An impressive array of thinkers and civic leaders have collaborated to build remarkable software, Web sites, journals, organizations, and legal code. The models they have constructed are more equitable, more sustainable, and more effective at promoting human development.

With open access, the cost of scholarly communication is no longer a royalty, but an investment. The result is the ability to do better science, more quickly, for less cost.

The members of the open access movement are no mere theorists:

Nearly 3,000 peer-reviewed academic journals are now made freely available online, in full text, from the minute the newest issue is released.
Of the journals that do not provide free access themselves, the overwhelming majority nevertheless permit their authors to post their own articles for free access on a Web site at their university or in their discipline.
Funders of research, both public and private, are increasingly requiring their grantees to make their resulting articles available online for free.
- In July, the U.S. House of Representatives voted to join the trend, approving language to mandate open access for research funded by the National Institutes of Health, the single largest funder of biomedical research in the world. (Consideration is pending in the Senate.)

Following behind academic journal literature is a move for access to scientific data. The Nature family of journals has editorialized in favor of free online access to this data and adopted policies to encourage its authors to comply. Along with data sets, the sharing of data artifacts such as laboratory images and computer visualizations will not be long. By the day, the tools to collect, search, and manipulate these data improve.

A few bold researchers are going so far as to invite their colleagues – and the public – into the process of research as it takes place. Rosie Redfield, a microbiologist at the University of British Columbia, posts frequent updates from her lab on a blog, often writing several times a week. The academic blogosphere is a place of increasing importance for scholars to encounter new ideas and to share their own. And many of today’s students – a generation which grew up on the Web – are sharing their academic work as naturally as they share photos from their summer vacation.

There are challenges to be solved, technical as well as social and political. But as the evidence accumulates, much apprehension dissolves, and stakeholder consensus aligns in favor of open access. Piece by piece – or, since this is the Web, should I say bit by bit? – an information commons grows. Sixteen years later, we are here.

The Web was built for scientists to share information. Let’s make it happen.