Thomas Kuhn is well-known for his book The Structure Of Scientific Revolutions, in which he makes the case that scientific revolutions are matched by academic battles, where young researchers are threatened with becoming pariahs for arguing against the theories of their elders. So too today in the life sciences younger academics that want to speed up science by more open approaches have to contend with the peer-review academic publishing choke point, and they need someone outside that context to shake things up. Enter, Steven Friend.

Meredith Salisbury, Can Crowdsourcing Succeed in Life Sciences?

Peer review is an essential part of science, and influences developments throughout the field. A scientist’s ability to land a job, get tenure, win grant funding, or lead a laboratory hinges on how many papers and in what journals he or she has published. Because publication is so tightly woven into career success, the contents of those papers — the starting hypothesis, data generated, even the scientific problem being tackled — are highly valued, competitive assets. Until publication, which might happen months or even years after the experiments have been run, that information is guarded about as closely as a bank account password.

In this kind of environment, telling scientists that answers could come faster if the problem is opened up to thousands or millions of people doesn’t make much difference. Sure, scientists want answers faster; they also want viable careers.

That is where Stephen Friend comes in. He has spent years in the life sciences, directing cancer research at Merck, starting companies, and more. At the GET conference, he spoke about an interesting new initiative he’s working on called Synapse, which is run through a nonprofit organization and aims to be a GitHub for life sciences. (GitHub, for those not familiar, is an online community where programmers write and develop code together; activity there is used in the world of software engineering as a better proxy for someone’s skills and knowledge than a resume or CV.) Synapse is trying to buck the life sciences system by providing a framework where scientists can upload and share data, build on each others’ findings, and tag all information with history so that the people responsible get credit.

Synapse, still in its infancy, is unlikely to change the peer review process. After all, despite the advent of the Internet and its knack for sweeping away business models, peer review publishing still operates much as it did in the days of Newton or Galileo. But it’s encouraging to see that scientists themselves are trying to make progress and to find ways to maintain what’s needed for the scientific culture while improving how data is accessed, shared, and analyzed. We will need lots more innovation before we see real change, but Synapse is promising. Ultimately, it will lead to scientific problems getting solved faster.

Steven Friend is outside the context of academic pressure, so he can create a coworking community online and break with the go-slow ways of the past. I disagree with Salisbury’s conclusion, that Synapse is unlikely to change the peer-review process. That process is already being changed by sites like PLOS, a nonprofit organization dedicated to publishing scientific reports via open access. The slow-and-tight world of scientific publishing and academia is being wrenched into the postnormal, and nothing will be the same again.