Arguments For Open Science
Some recent controversies around scientific publications illustrate the potential benefits of open science.
- Open access publication of research reports and data allow for more rigorous peer review
An article published by a team of NASA astrobiologists in 2010 in Science reported a new bacterium known as GFAJ-1 that was purported to metabolize arsenic (unlike any previously known species of lifeform). This finding, along with NASA's claim that the paper "will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life", was roundly criticized within the scientific community. Much of the scientific commentary and critique around this issue took place in public forums, most notably on Twitter, where hundreds of scientists and non-scientists created a hashtag community around the hashtag #arseniclife. University of British Columbia astrobiologist Rosie Redfield, one of the most vocal critics of the NASA team's research, also submitted a draft of a research report of a study that she and colleagues conducted which contradicted the NASA team's findings in arXiv, an open research repository, and called for peer review of both their research and the NASA team's original paper on her lab's research blog.
Read more about this topic: Open Science
Famous quotes containing the words arguments, open and/or science:
“Children are intensely invested in getting their way. They will devote more emotional and intellectual energy to winning arguments than parents ever will, and are almost always better rested.”
—Jean Callahan (20th century)
“Let a man learn to look for the permanent in the mutable and fleeting; let him learn to bear the disappearance of things he was wont to reverence; without losing his reverence; let him learn that he is here, not to work, but to be worked upon; and that, though abyss open under abyss, and opinion displace opinion, all are at last contained in the Eternal Cause.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The universe is the externisation of the soul. Wherever the life is, that bursts into appearance around it. Our science is sensual, and therefore superficial. The earth, and the heavenly bodies, physics, and chemistry, we sensually treat, as if they were self-existent; but these are the retinue of that Being we have.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)