Unless scientists and researchers start to put the interests of collaboration and “open science” ahead of their desire to be promoted or win tenure the system will not change
This is the main problem because most won't.
This is the main problem because most won't.
Currently, science is funded based on individual results. You can't blame folk for wanting to be promoted or to win tenure.
Yeah, there's a direct tension between the move over the past few decades towards very competitive grant funding (10% funding rates, short grant terms, much fewer long-term, large block grants for centers), and a goal of having everyone share everything altruistically. If you purposely set up science funding so that it encourages cutthroat competition, people are going to have to behave like cutthroat competitors, and those who try not to will (on average) lose to those who do.
The current system uses paper publishing (# / impact factor) as a proxy for this, but it produces a lot of perverse incentives. If we found a way to see whose concepts were being used and when - people would instead throwing out any idea they'd have hoping that it be picked up (even unknowingly) by other researchers so they can get some of the credit.
If this could be done, would it fix this status / scooped problem, and is there actually a way to replicate the "fork" structure of something like GitHub? Unfortunately, science is both: 1.) hard to pull in-depth semantic data out of (I'm guessing a lot of nuance) and 2.) not formally coded like programming language.