TED talk about "Open Science" debate TEDxWaterloo

These kind of talks depress me somewhat. It shows that there is a need to educate scientists into sharing data. Which is kinda sad, because scientists should know this and share by default. It shows current state of science is not yet very far in sharing data with everyone.

The main blockers of open science will probably be paper publishers and commercially funded science. For publishers, it's easy to see why: their market will be reduced to only peer-reviewing services. For commercially funded research (especially political commercial science): It's in their interest not to share the data. Because sharing it would allow critics to scrutinize the data and filter out the ugly.

So to me it seems that the people building tools for collaborative science need to start with a system whose sole goal is to produce papers :) How to do this is a fun problem.

One thing that can be done is to increase the general public's participation in science. StackOverFlow has several proposed science exchanges. These could be a stepping stone for people. This one sounded particularly interesting: http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/12194/sciencehome

Very cool concept this whole open source science thing. But big pharma is going to put a stop on it...