With it taking anything up to 15 years and the help of a multimillion-pound budget to bring a single product on to the market, pharmaceutical and biotech companies are understandably eager to ensure that their scientists receive the best R&D support possible. But as information professionals and researchers in R&D know only too well, the solution to a research problem cannot always be found in-house....
A crowdsourcer is a business that has created a global, web-based scientific community whose scientists and professionals can be challenged to solve other companies’ R&D problems. So far, chemicals and life sciences have been the main users of crowdsourcers, offering rewards of up to $1m if they are successful. Innocentive, set up by drug giant Eli Lilly in 2001, is one such crowdsourcer, and other sites, such as Nine Sigma and Yet2.com offer similar models.
There is no doubt that crowdsourcing has resulted in solutions to problems that would not have been found otherwise, but this is an evolving model that has to work hard to address concerns about commercial sensitivities, intellectual property rights and scientists’ need to build reputations, even open access to scientific collaboration....
In a report, entitled “The Value of Openness in Scientific Problem Solving”, Karim Lakhani, a lecturer in technology and innovation at MIT, found that the broadcast of problematic information to outside scientists resulted in a 29.5% resolution rate for scientific problems that had previously remained unsolved....
But there is a fear that financial incentive-based initiatives could end up diverting open scientific collaboration into closed communications....
Comment. OA research already takes full advantage of Linus' Law that, given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow. Non-OA research must settle for a lesser degree of this problem-solving power through limited and strategic sharing with motivated problem-solvers. As organized by Innocentive, it works well enough to attract some major corporations. But the better it works, the more we should remind ourselves how much better unfettered sharing can work.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 6/07/2007 05:21:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
