Policy by the Numbers: Science

Exploring the world of data-driven innovation

Thursday, May 7, 2015

Mike Masnick is founder of the Copia Institute.In the last few years, there’s obviously been a tremendous explosion in the amount of data floating around. But we’ve also seen an explosion in the efforts to understand and make use of that data in valuable and important ways. The advances, both in terms of the type and amount of data available, combined with advances in computing power to analyze the data, are opening up entirely new fields of innovation that simply weren’t possible before.We recently launched a new think tank, the Copia Institute, focused on looking at the big challenges and opportunities facing the innovation world today. An area we’re deeply interested in is data-driven innovation. To explore this space more thoroughly, the Copia Institute is putting together an ongoing series of case studies on data-driven innovation, with the first few now available in the Copia library.Our first set of case studies includes a look at how the Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) helped jumpstart the biotechnology field today. PCR is, in short, a machine for copying DNA, something that was extremely difficult to do (outside of living things copying their own DNA). The discovery was something of an accident: A scientist discovered that certain microbes survived in the high temperatures of the hot springs of Yellowstone National Park, previously thought impossible. This resulted in further study that eventually led to the creation of PCR.PCR was patented but licensed widely and generously. It basically became the key to biotech and genetic research in a variety of different areas. The Human Genome Project, for example, was possible only thanks to the widespread availability of PCR. Those involved in the early efforts around PCR were actively looking to share the information and concept rather than lock it up entirely, although there were debates about doing just that. By making sure that the process was widely available, it helped to accelerate innovation in the biotech and genetics fields. And with the recent expiration of the original PCR patents, the technology is even more widespread today, expanding its contribution to the field.Another case study explores the value of the HeLa cells in medical research—cancer research in particular. While the initial discovery of HeLa cells may have come under dubious circumstances, their contribution to medical advancement cannot be overstated. The name of the HeLa cells comes from the patient they were originally taken from, a woman named Henrietta Lacks. Unlike previous human cell samples, HeLa cells continued to grow and thrive after being removed from Henrietta. The cells were made widely available and have contributed to a huge number of medical advancements, including work that has resulted in five Nobel prizes to date.With both PCR and HeLa cells, we saw an important pattern: an early discovery that was shared widely, enabling much greater innovation to flow from proliferation of data. It was the widespread sharing of information and ideas that contributed to many of these key breakthroughs involving biotechnology and health.At the same time, both cases raise certain questions about how to best handle similar developments in the future. There are questions about intellectual property, privacy, information sharing, trade secrecy and much more. At the Copia Institute, we plan to more dive into many of these issues with our continuing series of case studies, as well as through research and events.

Applauding the White House Memorandum on Open Access

Wednesday, February 27, 2013

Originally posted on the Google Research Blog by Alfred Spector, Vice President of Research and Special InitiativesLast week the Obama Administration issued a Memorandum that could vastly increase the impact of federally funded research on innovation and the economy. Entrepreneurs, businesses, students, patients, researchers, and the public will soon have digital access to the wealth of research publications and data funded by Federal agencies. We're excited that this important work will be made more broadly accessible.This memorandum directs federal agencies with annual research and development budgets of $100 million or more to open up access to the crucial results of publicly funded research (including both unclassified articles and data). These agencies will need to provide the public with free and unlimited online access to the results of that research after a guideline 12 month embargo period. Before today only one agency, the National Institutes of Health, had a public research access policy.The federal government funds tens of billions of dollars in research each year through agencies like the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, and the Department of Energy. These investments are intended to advance science, accelerate innovation, grow our economy, and improve the lives of all Americans and members of the public. Opening this research up to the public will accelerate these goals.Federal investment in research and development only pays off if it has an impact. Researchers, businesses, policymakers, entrepreneurs, and the public need to be able to access and use the knowledge contained in the articles and data generated by those funds. Making the results of scholarly research accessible and reusable in digital form is one important way to increase the impact of existing taxpayer investments.

Open Access to Scholarly Literature and Why It Matters

Monday, December 3, 2012

Andrew Adams is a Professor of Information Ethics in the Graduate School of Business Administration and Deputy Director of the Centre for Business Information Ethics at Meiji University in Tokyo. This is the first of two Policy By the Numbers posts by Andrew on open access publishing.Scholarly academic communications began with letters between early scientists. Groundbreaking work was sent to multiple people and as the early scientific and scholarly societies grew they started distributing their proceedings to their members, and making them available in libraries. As academia expanded and in particular as science and engineering grew to industrial scale enterprises in which the unknowing duplication of experiments was seen to be a waste of money (knowing duplication as an independent check on results remains a valid exercise though unfortunately one which is rarely given the importance it deserves) the need for wide dissemination of experimental results led to the emergence of scientific publishers of three types: scholarly/scientific societies with a specific disciplinary focus; university presses with a mission partly driven by dissemination of their own researchers' work and partly by general academic desire to improve communications; commercial publishers either founded specifically to meet an apparently unmet need in a specific area or general publishers using their expertise and economies of scale in typesetting, printing, binding and distribution to provide a valuable service to academia as a conduit for scientists to talk to each other.The "gold standard" of academic publishing gradually emerged as peer review: consideration of the merits of a piece by other scholars/scientists with appropriate knowledge of the relevant field. Over the course of the twentieth century a large publishing industry emerged with a set of common practices followed by most publications and most publishers. (There are exception to these practices but there is no space to present them here.) Academics (and a small proportion of researchers in independent research institutions and commercial labs) constitute the main authors, reviewers, academic editors and academic editorial boards of the journals (and in Computer Science fully reviewed conference proceedings) in which most academic work is published. In the twentieth century, publishers provided typesetting, copyediting, printing and distribution services. They generally made a reasonable profit margin on these activities, whatever type of publisher they were. In return, authors (mostly academics) transferred the copyright in their work to the publishers, without charging any financial recompense. Likewise reviewers and editorial boards are generally unpaid. Editors may receive a small stipend and/or a small contribution to administrative support costs (though by no means always).Since about 1990, the system has come under multiple pressures. Commercial publishers have merged or been taken over and a small number of large players, sometimes part of larger multimedia conglomerates and sometimes just large primarily academic presses (though usually also publishing at least textbooks and monographs as well, and often publishing other education/research-related materials). Scholarly societies and universities have come to expect profits from their publishing arms which will support their other activities. Commercial publishers have consistently increased their subscription prices well above both inflation and the funding available to most universities) while at the same time their costs should have been going down after an initial investment in digital reproduction technologies was covered. Meanwhile in a few fields such as Computer Science and Physics (most notably High Energy Physics) the new technology of the Internet was providing a parallel route for academics to disseminate their peer-reviewed articles, first using ftp sites, then the Web and finally through databases with web interfaces providing both machine- and human-accessible meta-data as well as the postscript, pdf, Word document, HTML etc format versions of the text.In addition to this, a relatively small number of journals have been either founded with no subscription costs for electronic access, or moved to such a model. The funding to support these journals comes from a variety of sources including fees from authors who publish (occasionally fees from authors who submit for possible publication), academic society, university, research funder, government or charitable donation support and others.While there remain some methodological difficulties and disputes, most of the studies carried out in the last ten years have shown that when articles are available without readers being restricted by payment (either institutional or individual subscription to the journal or by payment for the individual article) then that article is cited more often. Since the primary purpose of research writing is communication with other researchers and impact on the field, one crude measure of which is the number of times an article is cited, then it is clearly in the interests of research authors, their institutions and the funders of their research that their articles are made freely available. This is, in effect, a pre-requisite for a free market in scholarly/scientific ideas in which the best ideas rather than those easier to access, receive greatest attention.More resources:

The effect of open access and downloads ('hits') on citation impact: a bibliography of studies

Open Access Citation Advantage: An Annotated Bibliography

Androids in Space: Reducing the Cost of Space Exploration

Wednesday, September 5, 2012

Alex Kozak is a Policy Analyst at Google.Space exploration has traditionally been a costly endeavor. The Mars Science Laboratory (MSL), which recently landed the Curiosity rover on Mars to investigate climate and geology of the planet’s surface, ran a total cost of about $2.5 billion USD.Part of the cost associated with launching a project of this magnitude results from strict project design requirements. Launching a robot into space is no simple task, and the technical components must be designed not only to weather the extreme conditions of outer space but also to minimize risk of failure. Add to that the number of components needed to reach the depths of the solar system—which require coordination between diverse and specialized teams—and you end up with long lead times and higher overall costs. Proposals for the design Curiosity rover design, for example, were developed nearly a decade before its eventual launch.You would be hard pressed to find people who disagree with the principle of exploring space. Those who object to space exploration tend to cite the high cost of development relative to the return on investment. So what are some ways that we might consider reducing the overall cost of exploration?NASA is exploring cheaper and faster models of technology development. Its new PhoneSat program examines how "off-the-shelf" consumer software and hardware could be used as a platform for space exploration: NASA PhoneSat engineers also are changing the way missions are designed by rapidly prototyping and incorporating existing commercial technologies and hardware. This approach allows engineers to see what capabilities commercial technologies can provide, rather than trying to custom-design technology solutions to meet set requirements. Engineers can rapidly upgrade the entire satellite's capabilities and add new features for each future generation of PhoneSats.This new model stands to change the face of space exploration. Rather than making several large bets on technical solutions with little room for error or risk, engineers could explore opportunities to rapidly prototype, iterate, and launch less costly robotics. Future space programs might make hundreds of smaller bets with individually higher chances of failure, but this would effectively lower the aggregate chance of failure over large bets designed to minimize risk within a singular technology.

Maximizing research investment with open access

Thursday, June 14, 2012

The US Federal government spent $32.6 billion on academic research in 2009, 59% of all research done in the US. The European Union spent about €50.5 billion on research between 2007 and 2014, and will increase that to €80 billion between 2014 to 2020. Research is described as central to economic development and as an investment in the future. So how can policymakers maximize the impact of their investments?One way is to mandate open access to peer-reviewed articles developed from government-funded research. Open access requirements at benefit researchers and institutions, patients and citizens, and public and private institutions. As a recent report by the Committee for Economic Development found, "The benefits of increased access are so great than any delay in availability of research should be minimized."Different models for open access exist, such as licensing journal and articles under an open copyright license (e.g., a Creative Commons license). The Creative Commons Attribution license in particular grants anyone the right to reuse, remix, and redistribute content as long as they attribute the owner. Public Library of Science (PLoS), consisting of a growing body of open access journals, is a stellar example of open access.The benefits of open access to scholarly publications are starting to be recognized in the US, EU, and in institutions around the world. The UK Government recently tapped Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia founder) to increase access to research. Europe's Horizon 2020 program, dedicating €80 billion to research over 6 years, will reportedly adopt open access requirements. NIH and Harvard University policies demonstrate strong support in the US as well.But what are the specific benefits of open access that make it worthwhile as a public policy? There are many, but to name a few:Saving money. A recent study claims that open access could save European countries hundreds of millions of Euros every year. And Harvard University argues that traditional journal subscription prices are too high; open access is a solution.Increasing the impact of research. As John Wilbanks explains, the process for developing new knowledge about the world depends on the work of others. Thus, the more people with access to the journal articles and publications, the faster we can develop new knowledge as a society. One way to measure that process is to look at citation rates between publications. According to a majority of related studies, open access articles tend to have higher citation rates and exposure, indicating higher impact.Engaging patients in disease treatment. Chordoma Foundation's Josh Sommer was diagnosed with a malignant bone cancer called a chordoma. During his treatment, he read numerous scientific articles so he could talk to doctors about his care, and ended up helping to conduct research in the field. Had he not been a student at a university with subscription access, he wouldn't have been able to retrieve research about his disease. Today he’s an advocate for open access to research.Josh's experience is not unique. Patients, researchers, international institutions, companies, nonprofits, and government agencies are all negatively impacted by restricted access to science and research contained within journals. It's time governments use the carrot embodied in research grant budgets to change the culture of scientific research. A culture that values sharing, collaboration, and openness will have greater impact on people’s health, society, and the economy.Alex Kozak is a Policy Analyst at Google.

Arts, science, and reaching 10^X

Friday, April 13, 2012

It’s hard to comprehend the scale of the Internet. One hour of video uploaded to YouTube every second, 250 photos uploaded to Facebook every day, 440 blogs for each autobiography available on Amazon, and more than 1 trillion unique webpages on top of that.

But in the aggregate, what is the power of the Internet? What do all those numbers really mean?

This isn’t a new sort of question. Artists and scientists have worked together for a long time to try to make sense of the complexity in the world. One classic example is Powers of 10, the 1968 short film written and directed by Charles and Ray Eames that the Library of Congress has since selected for preservation for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant."Today, the film may seem odd. It’s not particularly magical to see a camera zoom 10^24 meters up and shrink down to the size of a proton in a carbon atom.

But at the time the film was released, its producers saw it differently. The filmmaker’s grandson had this to say about the intent of the film’s producer, International Business Machines Corporation (IBM): "IBM believed that if you educate society, you not only do a positive good, you also create a group of people who are better able to appreciate the work and products of IBM." In this case, “The film conveys a holistic vision of the universe and really helps people grasp the concept of 'scale' and its importance in understanding our world.”

IBM couldn’t explain scale just by writing an equation or drawing a diagram for people. Facts alone wouldn’t impact most people. They had to turn those facts into knowledge. They had to show people “a holistic vision of the universe,” not just tell them about it.

And IBM wasn’t alone. For instance, in 1966, Stewart Brand led a campaign to get NASA to release the very first photos of the Earth as seen from space, in hopes that the images would help people see the world differently.

IBM and Brand both believed that their blending of science and art could lead people to see themselves as part of a much bigger community, and that the collective action of that community would be more powerful than the sum of the individual parts.

So what could demonstrate the power of the internet community to itself? I don’t know, but if we can figure it out then the sum might be greater than the individual parts.

Posted by Derek Slater, Policy Manager

Citizen science tackles the galaxy

Friday, February 24, 2012

In many parts of science, we're not constrained by what data we can get, we're constrained by what we can do with the data we have. Citizen science is a very powerful way of solving that problem.

— Chris Lintott, Time, July 11, 2011

Elsevier boycottBipartisan Federal Research Public Access ActZooniverse.orgplanethunters.orgGalaxyZoo.org70,000 classificationsSloan Digital Sky SurveyarXiv.org
posted by Chris Lintott, Chair of the Citizen Science Alliance which runs the citizen science projects at zooniverse.org