Open collaborative design/Open Source Scientific Research
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Scientific research can also be done in a spirit of open collaboration.
The main paradigm for scientific research in the 20th century was the peer-reviewed scientific journal. A scientist writes a paper, submits it for review by other scientists and, if it is found to be up-to-standard, the paper is published in a copyrighted journal and made available to subscribers.
This model has many advantages: the main one being that poorly conducted experiments are filtered out by the peer-review process. On the other hand, subscription to journals is often expensive (e.g. It costs $200 a year to subscribe to Nature), limiting access to scientific knowledge,
An alternative is open scientific research, in which scientific papers are posted freely on the Internet for anyone to access, without intellectual property restrictions. This allows for a different kind of peer-review, an open peer-review like what we see on Wikipedia.
Open collaboration in science allows scientific experiments to be global collaborations of interested parties around the world. This allows for greater n numbers, as data can be aggregated from a large number of researchers. This leads to more reliable results.
A key tenet of the scientific method is that all experiments be repeatable. When anyone can read about an experiment and replicate it for themselves, false results - due to sloppy design, fluke or fraud - are neutralized. By making scientific papers open, experiments can be repeated by anyone, not just subscribers. This will ultimately lead to more reliable scientific results.
Another application of open collaboration to scientific research is allowing people to contribute processing power to computing for scientific research. Rather than have a supercomputer crunching numbers in a lab, thousands of people's personal computers around the world can be used. This has been very successful at helping calculate how proteins fold — see http://folding.stanford.edu/
