The Future of Science

What are important directions in science? Michael Nielsen tackles this question in The Future of Science. He considers the importance of openness in science, but provides a useful overview of why academics so often do not share resources and information: “These failures of science online are all examples where scientists show a surprising reluctance to share knowledge that could be useful to others. This is ironic, for the value of cultural openness was understood centuries ago by many of the founders of modern science; indeed, the journal system is perhaps the most open system for the transmission of knowledge that could be built with 17th century media…We should aim to create an open scientific culture where as much information as possible is moved out of people’s heads and labs, onto the network, and into tools which can help us structure and filter the information. This means everything - data, scientific opinions, questions, ideas, folk knowledge, workflows, and everything else - the works. Information not on the network can’t do any good.
Ideally, we’ll achieve a kind of extreme openness.”
I applaud the vision. I’m less convinced of the possible reality. Universities are still contributing significantly to development of new knowledge, but corporations are playing a greater and greater role. And Universities are aggressively building commercialization strategies for new inventions/patents. Some knowledge will be open. Much of it will be closed. Do we end up with a tiered system? Really important (however that’s defined) cutting-edge knowledge is closed, the less important stuff is open?