Science is not an exclusive realm limited to people in white lab coats with Ph.D.s, but rather a way of thinking applied to everything from advanced computational simulations on nuclear material to brewing an award-winning beer. However, current scientific practices are undermining the very progress and innovation they were designed to stimulate, bringing us to the brink of a crisis. The lack of openness, access to data and methods, and opaque review processes have created a system that threatens the very foundation of scientific reasoning. However, there are many people and organizations working to prevent the collapse of the pillars science. The champions of the Open Science movement are passionately working to change the course of science and steer it back to its roots of reproducibility. In the process, the movement is also driving a new democratization of science that enables a much broader participation in scientific work and puts within the reach of the normal citizen the possibility of reproducing experiments and taking part in the scientific process. Science will fuel the future, if only we are all open to it. http://tedxalbany.org/talks/2013/marcus-hanwell

1. Saving Science
Open Up or Perish
Dr. Marcus D. Hanwell
TEDxAlbany
November 14, 2013

3. “Standing on the
Shoulders of
Giants”

4. Nullius in verba
Motto of the Royal Society, founded in 1660
“Take nobody’s word for it”

5. Trust, but verify

6. Trust, but verify

7. Trust, but verify

8. Trust, but verify

9. “Piled Higher and Deeper” by Jorge Cham www.phdcomics.com

10. Reproducibility

11. CC-BY-SA 3.0 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Kempelen_chess1.jpg

12. Showing What’s Inside the Box!
• Need everything to reproduce results
o
o
o
Raw data collected
§ How it was collected, conditions, versions
Steps to run calculations/analysis
§ Often source code
Analyzed results
SHOW YOUR WORK!

13. “Publishing Research
Without Data is Simply
Advertising, Not Science”
Graham Steel,
http://blog.okfn.org/2013/09/03/publishing-research-without-data-is-simply-advertising-not-science/

14. Reproducibility!

15. “Is the evidence for austerity
based on an Excel
spreadsheet error?”
Washington Post, April 2013
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/04/16/is-the-best-evidence-for-austeritybased-on-an-excel-spreadsheet-error/

16. What is Open???
• What does open mean, how open is open?
o
o
Everyone has the same access
No commercial, no derivatives is NOT OPEN
• Certain basic rights are granted to ALL
o
o
o
Share
Modify
Use

17. Only 6 out of 53 “landmark”
cancer studies could be
reproduced
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v483/n7391/full/483531a.html

18. Reproducibility Initiative
Receives $1.3M Grant to
Validate 50 Landmark
Cancer Studies
http://blog.scienceexchange.com/2013/10/reproducibility-initiative-receives-1-3m-grant-tovalidate-50-landmark-cancer-studies/

19. An Analogy: Making Beer
• I make great home brew!
o
Using 5 gallon bioreactors to make “sweet nectar”
o
I sing to my beer each evening as it ferments!
My assertion is:
§ It energizes the yeast, and makes sweeter beer...
I have graphs showing 9/10 people prefer it
Even did chemical analysis showing less esters!
• I discovered a technique to make it better!
o
o
o

20. CC-BY-SA, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Brewing-textless.png

21. Do I Really Need to Share More?
• The beer I sang to was next to my stool
o
o
It was in a colder part of my basement
§ I didn’t want to sit for hours in the hot part!
Yeast produce more esters when they are too hot
§ They needed to be in a control group
§ It didn’t matter if it got a little hotter over there
• Do I want to sell beer, or do science?
REPRODUCIBILITY!

23. CC-BY-SA:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:PiratesVsTemp%28en%29.svg

24. Correlation does
not equal
causation

26. GTO = ce
!! r 2
"i = " cµi"µ
µ
# ( r ) = "" Pµ! "µ"!
µ
!

27. Data
GTO = ce
!! r 2
"i = " cµi"µ
Equations
µ
# ( r ) = "" Pµ! "µ"!
µ
!
Source Code

29. Always Pushing the Boundaries
• Science is about learning new things
• Understanding the universe
• Communicating that understanding
• Adding to the sum of human knowledge
• It is not about
o
“selling ideas” or “promoting your work”

30. all
Show your work

31. Let’s make science
open again!