Thomas Edison had a famous approach to failure, using each unsuccessful experiment as something to build on and learn from in his attempts to innovate. It’s an approach that, whilst intuitive, has not really caught on in the corporate world. Companies may talk about failing fast and owning up to mistakes, but attempts to learn from the exhaust pipe of invention have largely hit the buffers.
One of the forerunners in this field was Quirky, an innovation community whereby a number of large corporations could open up their un-used intellectual property to inventors around the world to try and do something with it. Alas, what they were unfortunately most successful at was burning through some $200 million before going bankrupt in 2015.
In 2012, a similar venture was setup by Oxford University student Daniel Perez, called Marblar. The site aimed to provide a platform for large organizations to post their untapped IP, for the community to then attempt to turn that IP into something fit for market. Alas, Marblar also failed to take off, and shut its doors in 2014, although Perez has since created a successful medtech startup, called Hinge Health.
A data exhaust
Suffice to say, intellectual property is in many ways the tip of the iceberg in terms of innovation output. By the time something has reached a patentable state, you could reasonably argue that it is already fairly well developed. What about the data that doesn’t even make it that far? The data from failed experiments that often don’t even get published hold the key to preventing any number of mistakes from being repeated.
The desire to open up this data has seen the rise of so called ‘open notebook science’, whereby everything about a study is made freely available, including the data and published results. It’s an approach that is very much at the core of innovation startup MaterialsZone.
At the moment, roughly 5% of all research data gets published so that other researchers can build upon it. This is because the scientific world is heavily geared towards rewarding researchers only for their best work, and as a result the 10,000 ways Edison found that didn’t work are largely kept private.
Materials Zone believe that by creating a market, they will incentivize researchers to open up that data, and thus help other researchers from going over the same ground and making the same mistakes.
“Once the transactions starts flowing in the system, we are almost certain that people will share more data than they’re sharing in the regular open access, and the economics are going to play a key role in motivating researchers to share their data,” Dr Assaf Anderson, co-founder of MaterialsZone told me recently.
The platform aims to take care of all aspects of the process for you, including managing data transactions, protecting the data from being altered and ensuring that the IP remains in the hands of the creator(s).
Organizing the world’s research data
Given their mission to organize the world’s information, it’s perhaps not surprising that this is an area that Google are also interested in. They have recently launched a service, called Dataset Search, which aims to make searching for research data easier.
The platform is aiming to index any research data published online, whether from universities, governments or corporations. As with their indexing of other digital content, Google require metadata to be added to the webpages hosting the data to describe the data, including detailing who created it and when it was published.
“You’ll see data from NASA and NOAA, as well as from academic repositories such as Harvard’s Dataverse and Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR),” Google say.
The platform has a relatively limited range of data at the moment, covering just environmental, social sciences, official government data and that from news organizations. The team plan to scale this up should the service prove to be popular however, both in terms of institutions and scientists themselves making their data accessible, and those hoping to access the data.
An idea whose time has come
The notion of open science is one that is increasingly taking hold. The EU has developed the European Open Science Cloud, which aims to provide a socio-technical environment to make sure that science conducted in the EU is Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Re-usable (FAIR).
It’s a direction the United States is gradually going in too, as a recent paper by the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine illustrates. The authors believe that open science should be a fundamental part of any researchers work.
“Making research results openly available is not an afterthought when the project is over, but, rather, it is an effective way of doing the research itself. That is, in this way of doing science, making research results open is a by-product of the research process, and not a task that needs to be done when the researcher has already turned to the next project,” they say.
The report begins by highlighting the value open science brings in terms of transparency, reliability and the support for collaboration and subsequently discovery itself. The reliability issue is particularly important at a time when there are numerous concerns around replicability of research.
They also believe that open science helps to extract greater value from research by allowing data to be reused rather than duplicated. This openness allows for research to become much more collaborative, with researchers from various disciplines working together on a challenge.
It’s pleasing to see projects, such as those by Google and MaterialsZone attempting to take this concept out of think tanks and whitepapers and into something tangible that the research community can start to use.
