Back to Basics: How Technology and the Open Source Movement Can Save Science

Abstract

The recent debate arising from leaked emails from a UK‐based research group working on the issue of climate change is another in a long string of historical lapses that periodically threatens public confidence in the institutions and methods of science. As with other similar events, it did not have to happen. What should concern us is that the accepted methods and practices of science have once again to be shown to be too easily set aside, ignored, or broken due to human frailties. Years of research are now in question, publications must be viewed in a new, more skeptical light, and research programs that might have no direct relation with the one involved in the controversy are affected. One response to scandals like “ClimateGate” is to renew an oft‐repeated call for increased openness in the sciences. The apparent disappearance or alteration of data, and its implications for the trustworthiness of published results of ongoing research suggests strongly that a more transparent, open, and accessible system could have prevented personal inclinations or policy concerns, even if benevolently motivated, from undermining the indifferent and detached progress of climate science.