<story><title>Publicly funded science should be open science</title><url>http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204644504576653573191370088.html?mod=googlenews_wsj</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>mechanical_fish</author><text>I was hoping that this article would restrain itself to arguing for open, publicly-readable journals. Baby steps, folks. Gotta walk before you run and all that.&lt;p&gt;Mandating open journals is practical. Convincing the current community of, say, biologists to share their raw data is not. I don&apos;t think molecular biologists would literally poison each other rather than divulge their sequence data prior to its publication in a major journal, but they&apos;d consider it. The system of funding and promotion is going to have to undergo a very big shift before this dream comes to life. (Although I suspect it &lt;i&gt;will&lt;/i&gt; come to life, eventually.)</text></comment>
<story><title>Publicly funded science should be open science</title><url>http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204644504576653573191370088.html?mod=googlenews_wsj</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>markkat</author><text>This would be very difficult in biology. Any single experiment isn&apos;t evidence of much, and once I do get a notion that I am on to something, if I slap that up on the web, I&apos;ll probably get beaten to the punch by someone that has more resources and/or is better positioned. It would also be tough to argue that my early experiment was critical or even necessary to get there. So I would do a lot of work, and gift it to someone else. Of course, I know that this is the point, but it&apos;s problem enough that grants are basically over-hyped sales pitches. Good science is methodical and rigorous. Until funding is less results-based, you need to show big results. It&apos;s crazy to think that it&apos;s enough to fund promising evidence. Promising evidence is even more subjective. More hyperbole is not what we need.&lt;p&gt;We need to fund the process first. Then people, then results.</text></comment>