The Scientific Project

A life-changing book is rare and special. It's rare because it requires a perfect match between the ideas and prose of the writer and the experience and life circumstances of the reader. It's special because the right book at the right time can rewire a person's sense of what is possible. I have only encountered a handful. One of them was Michael Nielsen's Reinventing Discovery. Published in 2013, Nielsen laid out a vision of science that was unlike any I had heard before. It was a short book but a long story that put the scientific method in a wider context, with compelling evidence that the digital era of science was ushering in new ways to think about knowledge and discovery. We were — we are — amidst a major evolutionary jump in the scientific method. 

The book was full of optimism for what science could be and how it could operate in the 21st century. It was a future I wanted to help build, and there was excitement and curiosity among like-minded folks who were sensing something similar. That feeling heavily informed my work in the following years. Recent events and discussions reminded me of the book and moment. I have a renewed hope that a new, big vision for science is taking shape.

Reinventing Discovery was published during a heady time for the citizen science movement. I was part of that. As an outsider to academia, I had adopted the moniker of citizen scientist after hearing the term used to describe others beyond the ivory tower that were nonetheless contributing to science and exploration. My friend and I were building low-cost tools for ocean exploration. We were pursuing our own questions, but we were also excited to be part of the story of new tools that were democratizing curiosity. Nielsen helped put that effort into perspective by describing the more public citizen science projects, like Galaxy Zoo and Foldit, and giving them credit for their pioneering effort. 

Nielsen also wrote positively about the growing open science movement, which I understood as activism and leadership from within the academy to allow broader access to the fruits of scientific knowledge. Expensive journal paywalls and exclusive access didn't make rational sense in a world where digital reproduction was essentially free and the research was largely being funded by the tax-paying public. New ideas and efforts like arXiv and PLOS were glimpses of our open access future. 

In Reinventing Discovery, these trends of open and citizen science were woven together with others as a directional arrow towards what Nielsen called networked science. He laid out the evidence and the trend lines and left room for the reader, someone like me, to imagine how they might fit into this new world. 

In the following years, I kept waiting for these ideas to formally merge, but the discussions both focused inward. It was a learning experience for me: not to confuse a clear view for a short distance and that idealism has a short half-life as a fuel for progress. Both movements have settled into established practices and regimes of approval. I've attended multiple open science summits and citizen science conferences hoping to see the dialogues expanding with new people and techniques, but they've mostly devolved into long debates about definitions and protocols. There certainly has been progress, like the passage of the Crowdsourcing and Citizen Science Act of 2016 or the announcements by multiple funders that they'll only be funding open access work. The optimistic visions for a new kind of science have been replaced by a bureaucratic pragmatism.

But the next generation of dreamers are starting to color outside the lines. Sam Arbesman recently published the Overedge Catalog, a website "devoted to collecting the intriguing new types of organizations and institutions that lie at the intersection of the worlds of research and academia, non-profits, and tech startups."

The Overedge Catalog feels like an important first step towards connecting the common themes and ideas among these disparate groups. While I'm certain many of us (I say us, because he graciously included the Experiment Foundation) feel like outsiders, Arbesman's map shows us we're not alone. It’s motivating to see your effort associated with other pioneering organizations. It's both reassuring and exciting. 

I was seeing the same trends that Arbesman identified, and have been trying to gather them here on Science Better. In a recent conversation with Annalee Newitz, I asked them about their vision for the "Scientific Project," a term I first heard them describe at a Long Now talk. It's expansive and inclusive, across both time and discipline.

The definition gave me the same sort of excitement I had while reading Reinventing Discovery. It feels like something big and important is underway. As the open and citizen science discussions try to accomplish more with new definitions, like metascience or community science, I'm heading towards the optimists working on the larger scientific project.