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Independent Science

In a post earlier in the year I talked about the independent scientist and how very experienced people were stepping out of their careers with sufficient income to engage in science as independents, assuming that they could find ways to reproduce the networks and tools that they needed. In a somewhat plaintive cry from a commenter, I was asked how that might work if you didn’t have a made-up pension or other income following a well paid career but wanted to continue working in research. Roughly translated, I think that means “this may work for you old gits, but what about us that still have our hair and eyesight”. Having confidently said I would reply soon, it has taken me 5 months to think of an answer. Hubris.

Because I am not sure you can. At least, I can see ways to make an independent living as a young scientist, but it may not be end up being research and it may mean that you do a lot of things that you don’t want to do. It depends a lot on what your research area is, what motivates you and how committed you are. So how could you do this?


Beyond the Pale

Enthusiasts for open science come from many backgrounds and see different advantages. For me, open science is what science is supposed to be. Open publishing of results and data in such a way that the “educated layman” can repeat the work, check its validity and potentially come to alternative conclusions. After all science is the process, the debate, not the corpus. The corpus changes with new data, new interpretations and new theories, it’s the continuity of debate which is constant. Not all scientific research should be open. It requires confidentiality to take research through to a commercial product, but if there is an expectation of gaining credit from the work, then it should be. The other argument is that open data and open publishing create radically new opportunities for mining information and realising the potential of the semantic web in building new kinds of scientific understanding.

All of these are noble goals and scientists that go open, publish their data, software methods and conclusions, especially if they do it “live” as in Open Notebook Science are pioneers in an exciting new world of collaborative, transparent scientific discovery. One such pioneer is Steve McIntyre, whose blog I link to here, who operates fully “live” in the open publishing and archiving of data, his software and interpretations as he does the work and leaving himself open to continuous peer review by all comers at his blog as well as elsewhere, If he makes a mistake (which is unusual) it is quickly challenged. There are many good examples of his work to see on his blog and a recent analysis of his is representative. As an experiment in the sociology of open science and a window into what open science might look like, I find it fascinating to observe.

However, despite his site winning the Science blog of the year in 2008, his pioneering of open notebook science and his blog’s very high traffic, I don’t see any recognition of what he does in open science “circles”or in the mainstream scientific debate about open publishing. I don’t know why that is, because I see the same comments on his site about the importance of open data, transparency and rigorous analysis as elsewhere. What’s more he doesn’t just talk about it, he does it for real and does it well. I can’t help wondering whether this is because he is a climate change denier, someone whose scientific analysis undermines the basis of claims for man-made global warming. As such it is possible he is largely ignored because he is seen as “Beyond the Pale” and excluded from the respect I think he (and others) are due for their courage in working openly and publishing live.
I agree he is “Beyond the Pale”, but not in the modern sense of being outside what should be regarded as acceptable to polite society. Rather, I think he is Beyond the Pale as in its original meaning and if interpreted in that way, what he does, how he works and the reaction he gets has very important lessons for any scientist, whether working in the open or not.


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