At the #scienceatrisk meeting in DC last week, a colleague asked me how I would make money from open notebook science. I was very surprised to say the least and I wasn’t entirely sure of the intentions of the comment. Was I being set up? Was I feeding this person the information they needed to create a business from a passion of mine? Regardless those answers, I played the game but not in the way I was expected to play.
You know me… I like to bend the rules.
So how would I (or anyone for that matter) make money from open notebook science?
Read carefully…
YOU CAN’T!
Nor should you. But before I get into all that, let me first say that if someone proves me wrong I’d be happy to help them in their endeavor (and claim NONE of the monetary rewards!). Now let’s get on with it…
I say you shouldn’t make money from open notebook science. ONS is a concept, and not really a tangible thing. You can make money from ideas by creation/production. But with ONS there is no production. The only thing I could think of making money from is education. That is, teach people about ONS, how to do it, and what’s available right now for interested parties to use. But it wouldn’t be very open if I kept that information to myself. That mentality is what put science in the predicament that it is in today. So I teach others for free!
But aside from the ethics of profiteering from ONS, it seems pretty near impossible to make money from it anyway.
- You can’t charge people to use something they are already afraid to use. Correct me if I’m wrong, but any business that is built on making money from a product that has no market doesn’t survive very long. With open notebooks, scientists are already afraid of being open. They are already afraid of using online tools for research purposes. And a ton of research specific tools (including notebooks) have already failed. You just can’t say “Hey, I’ve got this awesome online notebook for you to use… it’s just $100 a month for your lab!” The culture is already opposed to the incentives offered by open science. Why stack the deck against it more? We need reasons for scientists to pursue open research, not make sure they never embrace it.
- An online/electronic notebook is not the same as a paper notebook.Physical notebooks and pens/pencils are cheap. I may have been in the cloud for too long, but a notebook and pen combination can’t be more than $3. There aren’t too many online services that request less than $5 a month. So there is no competition with pricing. Also the entire world today is raised with writing on paper with pen/pencil. That is not the same experience as typing on a computer. Currently, open notebooks rely on the model that scientists will write some information in their paper notebook and then rewrite all that in their online notebook. This has to change. Technology is improving so scientists can go straight from experiment to the cloud. In my case, it took a few months of reprogramming (my brain that is) and this culture shift needs to happen as well. ONS systems can’t use the same workflow as paper/pen. If it does there is no competition.
- Data comes in all shapes and sizes. Pictures, movies, text, code, numbers, spreadsheets, files, folders, measurements, etc. You may think you can develop a complete notebook platform, but you may just make a system so complete that you make it useful to only one person. Yourself. Maybe you get lucky and you make a notebook useful for a specific group of people, biologists. The point is, in today’s world data isn’t as cut and dry as it once was. And you would need to have a very flexible interface to make sure that more than one target group could use your system. As a graphic designer, a lot of my data is .ai files and .png files. As a biologist, a lot of my data is excel spreadsheets, .jpeg, and .avi. And as a physicist my data is written as code, equations, and connections. There isn’t a single tool on the internet that can easily handle all of that. And there may never be.
- The open notebook needs to be flexible. This is an extension of the previous point, but if data comes in many varieties, then surely information does too. What about thought processes? Workflows? Outputs? There are too many variables and there isn’t one system that does it all well. We can’t even handle social media! Facebook, Twitter, Google+ all do the same job and all reach different audiences. The same will be said for ONS. Biologists, physicists, computer engineers, mathematicians, etc all execute research via differing methods. Should these scientists (and other fields of research not labeled in STEM) pursue open notebook science, they will require different types of notebook platforms. There is simply no way to plan and design a notebook system to meet the needs of everyone.
With all that said, why force scientists to use one platform, or force them to choose between a few options? Why not let scientists determine their own needs and be creative with how they share their science? If ONS is going to be the future of scientific research documentation, then it has to be as free flowing as possible.
Right now there are plenty of free and easy to use tools that are perfect for notebooks. And now is not the time to stifle a new movement by profiting off of it. But perhaps one day in the future (a looong time from now) there will be room to create an open notebook platform that people would WANT to pay for. And when that day comes, I’ll be excited for two reasons: (1) the culture of science has evolved for the better, and (2) I was there to get the ball rolling.