We need a GitHub of Science
I'm a former biophysics postdoc myself. Now I work for an open-source software company.This post strikes me as charmingly naive. You have to love this guy. And yet any essay that discusses the incentive structure of science but doesn't use the word "grant" until the last sentence is beating around the bush. Follow the money, my friends.The publications are a side issue. To the extent that your count of top-tier publications matters when trying to get an academic job, it's because it's correlated with your ability to bring in money. (Money comes from peer review too, and what your peers want to read about is also what they want to fund.) What the hiring committees really want is grants. Grant money pays for labs and salaries. It pays for grad students and postdocs. And grant money literally buys prestige: Big projects come from big grants, and big grants require strong track records and a bunch of preliminary data, which in turn comes from smaller grants, or from the shared equipment that your neighbor bought with her grants.The fact that there aren't that many top-tier peer-reviewed journals is a side effect of the limited number of top scientists, and the number of scientists is limited by available resources, not by lack of knowledge or connections or education. I could literally pick up the phone and reach a dozen Ivy-educated postdocs who would be full-time scientists if they could afford it.Why can you find so much great software on Github? There are lots of reasons, but a fundamental one is: Moore's Law. Computer hardware has become so dirt cheap that you can be a programmer in your spare time. You can literally be a twelve-year-old kid with a $200 cast-off computer and yet do top-notch software work. If computers cost millions of dollars each, like they did in 1963, we wouldn't have Github. We'd have the drawer of a desk on the ninth floor of Tech Square. (After all, in the old days half the AI researchers in the world lived within a few miles of that drawer, and the others were just a phone call away.) That's how most advanced science works today: There's no need for more publishing infrastructure for scientific technique, because the available methods of getting the word out -- top journals, second-tier journals, email, the phone, bumping into people in the hallway at conferences -- scale well enough to meet the limited demand. Because just having the recipe for your very own scanning multiphoton microscope doesn't do you much good: You need a $150,000 laser, and a $200,000 microscope, and tens of thousands of dollars in lenses and filters and dyes, and a couple of trained optics experts to maintain the thing, and that's before you even have something to photograph.I wish there were a magical way to turn everyone's suburban basement into a cancer research lab, the way Github has turned everyone's couch into a potential CS research lab, but there's no magic bullet. A few technologies, like DNA sequencing, are sufficiently generic, useful, and automatable to be amenable to Moore's-Law-based solutions, so we probably will soon be able to (e.g.) drop leaves into the hopper of a $1000 box and get a readout of the tree's genetics. But something like cancer research is never going to be cheap. To study cancer you must first have a creature that has cancer. Mice are as cheap as those get, and mice are not cheap, especially if you know what the word mycoplasma means.