Towards Another Scientific Revolution

Sönke Bartling and Sascha Friesike

But even within those limits, the openness I am advocating

would be a giant cultural shift in how science is done, a second
Open Science revolution extending and completing the first
Open Science revolution, of the 17th and 18th centuries.
—Michael Nielsen

Abstract In this introductory chapter we establish a common understanding of

what are and what drives current changes in research and science. The concepts of
Science 2.0 and Open Science will be introduced. As such we provide a short
introduction to the history of science and knowledge dissemination. We explain
the origins of our scientific culture which evolved around publication methods.
Interdependencies of current concepts will be elucidated and it will be stated that
the transition towards Open Science is a complex cultural change. Reasons as to
why the change is slow are discussed and the main obstacles are identified. Next,
we explain the recent changes in scientific workflows and how these cause changes
in the system as a whole. Furthermore, we provide an overview on the entire book
and explain what can be found in each chapter.

Nicole Forster’s goal as a researcher is to enhance cancer treatment. That is why

she and her colleagues in the laboratory of Leif W. Ellisen at Massachusetts
General Hospital Cancer Center in Boston, Massachusetts, study tumors on indi-
vidual levels and search for cancer causes. In March 2012 Forster was trying to
isolate ribonucleic acid (RNA)—the genetic blueprint for proteins within the
cell—within mouse cells. To prepare the cells for her experiment she mixed them
with a special gel that provided them with all the nutrients to grow and proliferate,
even outside the body, for a short period of time. Yet in the following step, she had
to get rid of the gel to get to the information she needed: the RNA. And therein lay

S. Bartling (&)
German Cancer Research Center, Heidelberg, Germany
e-mail: [email protected]
S. Bartling
Institute for Clinical Radiology and Nuclear Medicine, Mannheim University
Medical Center, Heidelberg University, Mannheim, Germany
S. Friesike
Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society, Berlin, Germany
e-mail: [email protected]

S. Bartling and S. Friesike (eds.), Opening Science, 3

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-00026-8_1,  The Author(s) 2014
4 S. Bartling and S. Friesike

her problem. She had never done that specific isolation before and hence did not
know how to do it. Her colleagues did not know, either. No one in my lab or even
on my floor of the Cancer Center was doing such experiments, said Forster.
She was stuck. Then Forster thought of turning to the community of ResearchGate.
ResearchGate is a social network (Boyd & Ellison 2007) for scientists to exchange
ideas, publications, and to discuss research. Forster had first signed up to
ResearchGate in 2009. She had heard about the network at a conference in Boston
and was intrigued: I thought that sharing research experience and discussing
topics that you always wanted to discuss with someone would be a great oppor-
tunity. I like that it is a professional network where you can help other people and
be helped. Since then she had answered multiple questions from fellow
ResearchGate members and now it was her turn to ask the community for help.
Within 24 h Forster had a solution. Two researchers replied to her post and sug-
gested different methods. She tried one and it worked. You don’t have to search for
the best approach via Google or go through all of these publications, Forster says.
A social network for scientists helped Forster to solve a problem that she had
bugged colleagues about for several weeks within a single day. Forster’s case is far
from uncommon. Researchers all over the world use modern communication tools
such as social networks, blogs, or Wikipedia to enhance their scientific expertise,
meet experts, and discuss ideas with people that face similar challenges. They do
not abandon classical means of scientific communication such as publications or
conferences, but rather they complement them. Today we can see that these novel
communication methods are becoming more and more established in the lives of
researchers; we argue that they may become a significant part of the future of
research. We undertook this book in order to highlight the different developments
that are currently arising in the world of knowledge creation. We do not know
whether all of these developments will prevail, yet we are certain that institutional
knowledge creation will change drastically over the next decade. Naturally, any-
one involved in research does well to inform themselves about these develop-
ments. There is no perfect way by which research will be carried out in the future.
Every researcher has to decide for themselves which technologies and methods
they will include in their work. This, however,—as anything in research—starts
with informing oneself about what is already out there; it is our goal to provide that
information with this book.

Knowledge Creation and Dissemination: A Brief History

In an early draft-version of this book, the present section was called ‘A Brief
History of Science’. Yet, we ran into several problems with this heading. Firstly,
there is a singularity in the English language that differentiates between knowledge
creation that is concerned with the rules of the natural world (science) and
knowledge creation that is concerned with the human condition (humanities).
Throughout the preparation of this book we constantly ran into this dilemma and
Towards Another Scientific Revolution 5

we would like to take the opportunity to tell you that whenever we talk about
science we mean any organized form of knowledge creation (see chapter Open
Science and the Three Cultures: Expanding Open Science to all Domains of
Knowledge Creation). Secondly, science is often understood as the product created
by a scientists. And a scientists is understood as someone with a full-time job at a
university or a research institute. Yet, new forms of collaboration reach far beyond
our institutional understanding of doing research, which brings us to certain
dissent.
As such we labeled the section ‘Knowledge Creation and Dissemination’.
Knowledge creation and its dissemination are two sides of the same coin—
knowledge does not impact on society if it is unable to disseminate (Merton 1993).
Throughout history we can see that breakthroughs in knowledge creation went
hand in hand with breakthroughs in its dissemination. In turn, dissemination is not
only bound to technological changes but also societal changes such as freedom of
speech or the Renaissance. In large, the present book is a compendium that pre-
sents current changes that we see in knowledge creation and dissemination.
Actually, many chapters of this book challenge our traditional understanding of
how scientific knowledge should be disseminated. Moreover, as of today,
researchers’ views on how knowledge creation is changing differ drastically in
many aspects. And it is likely that our understanding differs from your under-
standing. As such, all we want to offer in this book is a comprehensive overview
on what is changing in the world of knowledge creation, which foundations are
being laid today, and what might become essential in the future.
The history of human knowledge is closely linked to the history of civiliza-
tion—one could even argue that the history of civilization is in large parts based on
knowledge creation and its dissemination. In prehistoric times, knowledge was
passed from one generation to the next one orally or by showing certain tech-
niques. This mainly applied to basic everyday tasks such as hunting, fire making,
manufacturing clothes, or gathering nutritious foods. The creation of this knowl-
edge was not yet structured and it was not recorded, except for occasional
drawings like cave paintings. The drastic change in knowledge creation was the
invention of a writing system. Roughly at the same time, agriculture came to life.
These two inventions combined laid the groundwork for what we today consider
civilization. Civilization allowed for the division of labor and hence individuals
began to specialize—knowledge creation accelerated. The researcher as a pro-
fession concerned with the creation of knowledge made his debut in ancient
Greece. Scientists like Plato, Aristotle, Pythagoras, Socrates, or Archimedes wrote
their observations down, taught others, and created knowledge that is still relevant
roughly 2,500 years later. Disciplines as we know them today formed many
centuries later and as such ancient scientists were usually philosophers, mathe-
maticians, and physicists in one. Similar developments were noticeable in other
societies as well. In China for instance thinkers like Confucius, Laozi, or Sun Tzu
were concerned with question similar to those raised in ancient Greece.
During the following centuries, religion played a major role in the development
of knowledge creation. Beliefs about certain essential questions such as how was
6 S. Bartling and S. Friesike

the earth created? where do diseases come from? or what happens after death?
impeded scientific advances in many fields and as such slowed down overall
knowledge creation. Not very surprisingly, the middle Ages are often considered
to be a dark age, in which rational thinking was prohibited. With the invention of
the printing press and the beginning of the Renaissance in the 17th century,
research slowly emancipated itself from religion. Slowly meaning that it took the
church until 1992 to rehabilitate Galileo for his outrageous claim that the sun
might be the center of our universe.
During the Renaissance, considerable amounts of knowledge were created by a
few polymaths—more or less a small group of outstanding thinkers involved in all
kinds of questions ranging from biology, to art, to engineering—hence the label
‘Renaissance man’. Da Vinci, for instance, developed machines related to today’s
helicopters, analyzed water, clouds, and rain, painted some of the most important
paintings of mankind, and did considerable research on anatomy. Goethe wrote,
did research in botany, and was in dispute with Newton over questions concerning
optics and color.
What we consider modern science came to life in the 17th century when
knowledge creation was both, professionalized and institutionalized. The number
of scientists started to skyrocket—from a few polymath during the renaissance to
over a million scientists in 1850. This growth did not slow down over the fol-
lowing 150 years and today we can globally count roughly 100 million people
involved in science. More and more disciplines formed and scientists became
professional specialists in tiny fields rather than experts in general knowledge.

Professionalization of Knowledge Creation:

The First Scientific Revolution

The professionalization of knowledge creation is often called the first scientific

revolution. Indeed it is this revolution that laid the groundwork for many principles
that guide scientific work today. Academic disciplines as we today know them
formed during the first scientific revolution, as did our publishing system. The
professionalization of knowledge creation required means of assessing the value of
a contribution, so that incentives for successful research could be provided.
Lacking a sufficient system for these incentives, 17th century researchers were
secretive in their discoveries. Without a scientific publication system they claimed
inventorship by sending out anagrams to fellow researchers that did not make
sense without knowledge of the discovery.1 This method prevented other scientists
from claiming inventorship, and was still a form of publishing. When the
knowledge in question began to spread and the anagrams could be made sense of,
future research funding was hopefully already secured. Today, this sounds

1
http://www.mathpages.com/home/kmath151/kmath151.htm
Towards Another Scientific Revolution 7

downright preposterous, as we all agree upon the notion that research is always
based upon other research and as such that research results should be available to
those interested in them.
It was the development of a journal publication system that drastically changed
publishing in research and gave appropriate credits to researchers. The first journal
purely dedicated to science was Philosophical Transactions which has been
published ever since [e.g. one of the first scientific articles (Hook 1665)]. Pub-
lishing scientific journal articles became a pivotal building block of modern sci-
ence. Researchers developed a common understanding that it is in the common
interest for research results to be openly available to all other researchers (David
2004). This understanding of the necessity for openness in science … led to the
modern journal system, a system that is perhaps the most open system for the
transmission of knowledge that could be built with seventeenth-century media
(Nielsen 2011). Based on this core concept of publishing, myriads of partially
institutionalized, partially commercialized structures grew. These structures
developed constitute the cultural, political, and fundamental background in which
academic knowledge creation works till today. The entire system is inherently
based upon journals printed on paper. Almost every scientific publication we see
today is created as if it is meant to be printed. Articles come in very predefined
forms and are usually downloaded as printout-like PDFs. There is no fundamental
reason to stick to this principle—other than our scientific heritage.
Currently, we can see a transition in knowledge dissemination set off by the
Internet that enables scientists to publish in forms unimaginable only a few years
ago. In all kinds of disciplines these new methods pop up, be it in the humanities
under the term ‘digital humanities’, from a Web 2.0 angle under the term ‘Science
2.0’, or from those fighting for free knowledge under the term ‘open research’ and
‘Open Science’. The Internet offers new answers to many challenges which the
first scientific revolution overcame hundreds of years ago. And it is the task of
today’s researchers to assess and evaluate those newly created options, to bridge
the legacy gap, and to lay a path towards the second scientific revolution.

Legacy Gap: The Background of the Second

Scientific Revolution

The journal system developed at a time when written or printed letters and a few
books were the only means of transferring knowledge. Before printing and dis-
seminating a piece of knowledge, it had to be in a complete and correct form,
otherwise it was not worth paying for the costly publication process (Fig. 1).
Publishers derived control over scientific content by controlling the printing and
dissemination of scientific results. Accordingly, the assessment of scientific impact
developed around the journal system.
However, paper is no longer the only media of choice. Publishing costs
diminished and from a technical viewpoint preliminary results or idea snippets
8 S. Bartling and S. Friesike

Fig. 1 The first scientific revolution happened when the publishing of scientific papers became
the prevailing means of disseminating scientific knowledge. Our scientific culture developed
around this. Today the Internet provides novel means of publishing and we are in the ‘legacy gap’
between the availability of these tools and their profound integration into the scientific culture
(second scientific revolution)

could be published, edited, and commented on. Yet, research as a whole is affected
by the culture it has developed; it is affected by a the journal system created when
results simply had to be printed on paper. We are currently in a ‘‘legacy gap’’
(Fig. 1) and everything points to the fact that we are on the brink of a new
scientific revolution. Yet, how this revolution actually will be played out remains
one of the most interesting questions in modern science.

The Second Scientific Revolution

Picture a situation in which scientists would be able to publish all their thoughts,
results, conclusions, data, and such as they occur, openly and widely available to
everybody. The Internet already provides tools that could make this possible
(microblogs, blogs, wikis, etc.). Moreover, picture a scientific culture in which
researchers could be in the situation of doing so with the assurance that they will
be credited appropriately. Imagine the potential for interactions between
researchers. Knowledge could flow quickly, regardless of institutions and personal
networks. Research results could be published as they occur. There would be no
need to wait until results are complete enough to support a full paper. Similarly, if
Towards Another Scientific Revolution 9

Fig. 2 Today, research projects are conducted until results justify a full-blown paper. In the future,
scientists might openly share ideas, preliminary results, and negative results at much earlier stages
of their research using the novel publication methods that became available with the Internet

projects were to be stopped, negative or small findings could be published in blog

posts or other low threshold publications. These findings could therefore still
contribute to the scientific knowledge process. Today, negative results are often
dismissed and thus the entire knowledge created in such a research project is not
available to others. Someone else might start a similar project running into the
same problem that stopped the first project simply because the first project never
published an explanation of its failure (Fig. 2).
The advantages of such a scientific culture are multifaceted. We would see
faster knowledge exchange, prevention of unnecessarily repeated experiments, and
a more vivid discussion (Fig. 3). However, in order to use these novel publication
formats, they must be appropriately credited by other scientists and—maybe more
importantly—by granting authorities, which is not yet the case.

Naming the New: Science 2.0, Open Science, eScience,

Mode2, Open Research

Terms like Science 2.0, Open Science, Digital Humanities, eScience, Mode2, or
Open Research are all umbrella terms that formed over the past few years and that
emphasize various aspects of the second scientific revolution.
10 S. Bartling and S. Friesike

Fig. 3 The research culture of the future possibly supports an open and wide communication
beyond institutes and personal networks by providing novel, credited means of disseminating
knowledge between researchers. Negative as well as positive findings will contribute to other
research projects much sooner after the findings occur

All of these umbrella terms struggle to find a clear definition and people often
use them interchangeably when talking about current changes in scientific pursuits.
We sought after defining each and every one of these terms in order to establish a
coherent picture of how the change in knowledge creation is seen from different
angles. Yet, what each of the terms means and how exactly it differs from the
others is often unclear. If you ask five people how Mode 2 and Science 2.0 are
associated you can be certain to get five different and possibly contradictory
answers. All terms are somewhat born of the necessity that a term for the present
changes was needed. Knowledge creation is a wide field and thus several terms
emerged, whereof we would like to define only two—mainly in order to use them
in the discussions contained within this book.
• Science 2.0 refers to all scientific culture, incl. scientific communication, which
employs features enabled by Web 2.0 and the Internet (in contrast to Science 1.0
which represents a scientific culture that does not take advantage of the
Internet).
• Open Science refers to a scientific culture that is characterized by its openness.
Scientists share results almost immediately and with a very wide audience.
Towards Another Scientific Revolution 11

Fig. 4 Since the first scientific revolution, science and knowledge creation was open—as open as
the methods of the seventeenth century allowed it to be. The Internet has brought about novel
methods, thus allowing science to be more open

Strictly speaking, since the first scientific revolution, science has been open
(Fig. 4). Through the Internet and Web 2.0 science can become ‘more Open
Science’, meaning that researchers share results, ideas, and data much earlier
and much more extensively to the public than they do at the moment.
Science 2.0 enables Open Science, but Science 2.0 does not necessarily have to
happen in an Open Science fashion, since scientists can still employ features of the
Internet, but stay very much put in terms of publishing their results. This might be
due to cultural and legal restrictions.

The Second Scientific Revolution:

Road to a Great New Future?

Many stakeholders serve the current scientific culture. They brought research, and
with it society, quite far. Yet now, we have to face the challenges that come with
all the novel developments and with the second scientific revolution. History
shows that knowledge creation has always adopted new opportunities. In turn, it
certainly will do so this time, too. Yet the question remains as to who will be the
drivers and the stakeholders of tomorrow. In the best case, the biggest benefactor
will be the scientific knowledge generating process—and with it research itself.
Many researchers show considerable concern in respect to the novel concepts of
the second scientific revolution. From these concerns vivid discussions should
arise and useful conclusions should be found that steer the second scientific rev-
olution in the right direction. This is especially true since significant input should
come from within the active research community itself.
12 S. Bartling and S. Friesike

Another question is whether future openness and onlineness will set optimal
incentives for the creation of knowledge. Many wrong paths could be picked and
may result in dead-ends. It is important that stakeholders are flexible and honest
enough to be able to leave dead-end streets.
Some voices discuss the current transition of research as a revolutionizing
process that might overcome current shortcomings in scientific conduct. Short-
comings are among many others: questionable proof generating means (such as
wrongly applied statistics (Ioannidis 2005; Sterne 2001), intolerance against
uncommon theses and approaches, citation-based ‘truth generation’, and inflexible
cultures of scientific approaches within disciplines. Furthermore, publication-bias
through rejection of negative results or rejection of non-confirming studies (Turner
et al. 2008; Begley & Ellis 2012) and questionable incentives that are set by the
current methods to assess scientific quality (see chapter Excellence by Nonsense:
The Competition for Publications in Modern Science) are also factors. The tran-
sition towards the second scientific revolution can help to solve these problems,
but it does not necessarily have to. It can be a way to make science more open,
liberal, and fair, but it can also result in the opposite.
To conclude, much will depend upon whether researchers become the leading
force within this transition, or whether they play a passive role driven by other
stakeholders of the research process. In order to prevent the latter, researchers
should be deeply involved in this process and they should be aware of the potential
consequences. This book is meant to support scientists in becoming a constructing
factor in the designing process of the second scientific revolution.

The Second Scientific Revolution is Based on Many Novel

Aspects and Tools

Despite their separation, the key aspects of the second scientific revolution are
interconnected (Fig. 5). Open Access (see chapter Open Access: A State of the Art),
for instance, needs new forms of copyright concepts (see Creative Commons
Licences). Reference managers (see Reference Management) are a great addition to
social networks for scientists (see chapter Academia Goes Facebook? The Potential
of Social Network Sites in the Scholarly Realm). Assessing the scientific impact of
novel publications such as blog posts (see (Micro)Blogging Science? Notes on
Potentials and Constraints of New Forms of Scholarly Communication) needs novel
impact measurement factors—altmetrics (see chapter Altmetrics and Other Novel
Measures for Scientific Impact), which might be based on unambiguous researcher
IDs (see chapter Unique Identifiers for Researchers). Altmetrics, at the same time,
can be integrated into social networks. There is no single most important factor: it is
more a multitude of facets that jointly change how research works.
Towards Another Scientific Revolution 13

Fig. 5 It is important to understand that many tools of the second scientific revolution will only
make sense if others are also implemented. For example, alternative impact measurement systems
such as altmetrics only make sense if researchers can be uniquely identified—either with a
Unique Researcher ID or within a social network

How This Book Works: Artificially Dissecting the Second

Scientific Revolution

This book brings together the enabling concepts that shape the current discussion
on our changing research environment. We divided the book into three parts in
order to make its content easily accessible.
• The first part of the book is called Basics; here we cover topics that highlight the
overall shift in scientific thinking. It begins with the chapter ‘‘Open Science:
One Term, Five Schools of Thought’’ in which Benedikt Fecher and editor
Sascha Friesike explain the many meanings which have been given to the term
Open Science. This is followed by Mathias Binswanger’s ‘‘Excellence by
Nonsense: The Competition for Publications in Modern Science’’ in which he
highlights some of the downsides in today publication driven scientific envi-
ronments. Alexander Gerber’s article titled ‘‘Science Caught Flat-footed: How
Academia Struggles with Open Science Communication’’ follows; here the
author explains why social media are adopted quite slowly by the research
community, especially in Europe. The last article in the section was written by
Michelle Sidler and is entitled ‘‘Open Science and the Three Cultures:
14 S. Bartling and S. Friesike

Expanding Open Science to All Domains of Knowledge Creation’’; in it the

author highlights a core weakness that the terms Open Science and Science 2.0
share: the fact that all of the implied concepts are valid for researchers outside
the sciences as well, yet the name might scare them away.
• The second part of the book is called Tools and deals with implementations that
already work today. Cornelius Puschmann starts the section with his piece on
blogging and microblogging among researches called ‘‘(Micro) blogging
Science? Notes on Potentials and Constraints of New Forms of Scholarly
Communication’’. He is followed by Michael Nentwich and René König’s article
‘‘Academia Goes Facebook? The Potential of Social Network Sites in the
Scholarly Realm’’. ‘‘Reference Management’’ by Martin Fenner, Kaja Scheliga,
and editor Sönke Bartling is the next chapter. It is succeeded by ‘‘Open Access:
A State of the Art’’ by Dagmar Sitek and Roland Bertelmann, and James
MacGregor, Kevin Stranack, and John Willinsky’s ‘‘The Public Knowledge
Project: Open Source Tools for Open Access to Scholarly Communication’’.
• The third part named Vision takes a more long term view on the issue and thus
explains how single aspects of research might develop over the next decade or
two. The section begins with an article by Martin Fenner named ‘‘Altmetrics
and Other Novel Measures for Scientific Impact’’ and an article by Lambert
Heller, Ronald The, and Sönke Bartling called ‘‘Dynamic Publication Formats
and Collaborative Authoring’’. It follows ‘‘Open Research Data: From Vision to
Practice’’ by Heinz Pampel and Sünje Dallmeier-Tiessen, and ‘‘Intellectual
Property and Computational Science’’ by Victoria Stodden. The next chapter is
called ‘‘Research Funding in Science 2.0’’ and was written by Jörg Eisfeld-
Reschke, Ulrich Herb, and Karsten Wenzlaff. The last chapter of the book was
written by ThomasSchildhauer and Hilger Voss and is entitled ‘‘Open
Innovation and Crowdsourcing in the Sciences’’.
• The book closes with a collection of cases which highlight in a rather brief
manner some aspects of the Open Science movement. Here the authors focus on
specific aspects and projects, give advice, or present their experience

Open Access This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution
Noncommercial License, which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in
any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.

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