Paul Basken
November 1, 2016
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In a plain, brick, two-story office building near the University of Virginia, several dozen computer programmers are racing to define the future of science.
Members of the nonprofit Center for Open Science, they see a critical moment. Web-based services that researchers use to create, store, analyze, and share data are being rapidly built, bought, and sold by a handful of major publishing companies and their offspring.
If uninterrupted, the thinking goes, those cyber-consolidators could reinforce an expectation that scientific data is a private asset to be amassed and hoarded. But if redirected, they could enable a new world in which data is routinely and widely shared, speeding scientific discoveries and boosting their reliability.
