This Wednesday, particle physicist Lisa Randall was invited on Jon Stewart's Daily Show whose topic was... science, its facets and its effects. To observe how science is perceived by some people (skip directly to 5:20) could be somehow depressing, but at the same time it is refreshing because it causes a lot of us scientists to leave for a few seconds our ivory towers (or our cardboard ones in France) where we feel clever and indispensable to humanity.

Nevertheless, this entry is rather about the ongoing shift in the way science is done and presented. Indeed, it is hard to imagine that so far, mainstream science has been hardly affected by the advent of the internet (although most publications are now available online). To put it a bit provocatively, science undergoes a long tradition of inertia and intrinsic resistance to change. And in today's world, this appears not only as paradoxical, since scientists are supposed to be ahead of their times, but also as quite suboptimal.

But this is changing. Is this evolution being documented? It was good news to be informed (through an e-mail apparently sent with alpine, which is, so to say, the icing on the cake) that Michael Nielsen, co-author with Isaac Chuang of Quantum computation and quantum information, has published a new book on open science, called Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science. It's unfortunate he couldn't entitle the book A new kind of science because that's already taken.

A few insights of what the book (which I didn't read -yet) is about can be found in this essay and in this TEDx talk. It seems that Michael Nielsen's aim is not to elaborate big theories about the beauty of openness, but rather to illustrate his point that open science is both important and ineluctable, with amusing or thought-provoking concrete cases of "open" experiments (e.g. arXiv, GenBank, or the journal of visualized experiments), including failures (e.g. online comments sites). A nice touch is that Michael Nielsen puts his brain where his pen is since he's working on "massively collaborative mathematics" projects like Polymath.

In particular, an important issue concerns the ways of discussing experiments and disclosing the results to peers. Traditionally this is done through expensive peer-reviewed journals, but of course their legitimacy has been questioned. Today, serious scientific discussions are being held in more and more informal ways, e.g. via weblogs and wikis. In the long term, it is likely that such journals won't be needed at all anymore (think of the majors in the music industry). Michael Nielsen prophetizes that future publishers will rather be technology-driven companies.

All in all, the future of science is more networked and more open. Let's be prepared for it, and better, let's be part of it.

Addition: Michael Nielsen TED talk on open science, November 2011

A new way of making science does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.

Max Planck (almost)