The methods of knowledge In order to survive, we must observe our environment, try to understand it, acquire resources we need, and plan actions in order to achieve our goals. Knowing what are the rules of the world, systematizing the knowledge and understanding how we can know better is useful to be better at surviving.
In a world that is dominated by competition and the universal perception is that resources are scarce, it is natural to choose a strategy of secrecy. Gathering knowledge in secret gives an advantage to those who can exploit it against others. A closed and well-guarded system of knowledge is a barrier that others have to overcome if they want to participate at the same level. At the same time, a closed and secret system is also vulnerable to be isolated and suffering its own mistakes in isolation. Not being able to share its learnings, a community relying on secrecy is bound to be repeating mistakes because their lessons cannot be shared. Medieval alchemists who were obsessed by the goal of transforming lead into gold were unlucky enough to believe that using mercury would help in this quest. Unfortunately mercury is poisonous. Any alchemist who learned this fact did it on their own, and suffered the consequences of this knowledge. The organization in secret societies blocked the possibility of learning from each other's mistakes, and the alchemists were bound to repeat them. In today's world still there is a lot of activity that is conducted similarly in secret. It is assumed that sharing it would weaken the position of those who compete for resources.
The scientific revolution that Galilei started not only represented a clearer understanding of how theory and experiments needed to be related, it also paved the way for a profound shift in how knowledge and information was collected, checked, and spread. Without it being a necessary part of the scientific method itself, open collaboration allowed groups and individuals who took advantage of it to more rapidly decide if a certain set of results was reliable. Open science is fundamentally superior to closed approaches of knowledge gathering. Collaboration among people who share the goals and passions of a given field is enhanced by a common language and tools. Publishing the results that one group achieves allows another group to run experiments against the new knowledge to confirm or disprove them. Interdisciplinary collaboration is enhanced by the ease with which practitioners outside of the group can approach it, building bridges of understanding that overcome specializations. Today a fertile field of study made possible by the increasing digitalization of science and scientific publishing is that of meta-studies. Comparing and analyzing a large number of publications in a given field, it is possible to derive results not individually contained in any single one of them. Statistical tools reveal significant trends, and enhance the possibility of catching and eventually correcting methodological errors in the work previously published. The world of science values facts, theories, verifiability, experiments, and the publication of results for sharing knowledge. As one of the main products of the scientist, if even not the sole one on which their advancement, capability to receive grants, and professorship are decided, scientific publications through the peer review system have been at the center of the development of science. The value of the scientific article is measured through the number of other publications citing it, and the importance of the journal in which it appears. This has been converted directly in economic value by the publishers of the scientific journals, which have created sizable enterprises through charging universities and research institutions for the subscriptions to their periodicals in which the articles of the scientists appear. The price of these subscriptions has increased enough that universities in low and middle income countries or even some in high income ones are unable to afford the subscription price. There is also a more fundamental issue that publicly funded research and its results are subsidizing the revenues and the business models of private corporations who are collecting the articles and end up being paid twice over. Open access publications have started to appear, and gain popularity and prestige, offering alternative models to scientific publication, where the reader of the articles in not charged either for single access or for a subscription to the journal. With the peer review system still in place for the quality control of the article, the author of the article is charged, and their institution, for the publication, a fee that is affordable and reasonable to be added as a simple line item to the budget of an experiment or the grant request. With characteristic ruthlessness, science is also re-evaluating the effectiveness of the peer review system itself, trying to measure it on one hand, and on the other searching for possible alternative ways of assuring high levels of quality for scientific publications. The structure of scientific experiments is being analyzed in order to maximize the probability that the published results can be double checked through independent reproduction and verification of the data. Making not only the scientific article itself, but lab notes and underlying raw data streams for further evaluation and aggregation has become the norm in several areas. With larger and larger data sets being generated in computer science, life science and many other fields, the analysis of the data has become a new burgeoning opportunity by itself. Big data and data science offer the possibility to aggregate and sublimate value out of large sets of structured or unstructured information. Their application is becoming better understood in genetics, the Internet of Things, sociology and other fields. Cities and governments can on one hand make the data streams they generate available openly for others to leverage, in a permissionless, unencumbered manner where innovation and creativity can strive, and on the other hand they can take advantage of the results to increase transparency, accountability and efficiency of their operations.
With the availability of increasing amounts of data, and the interconnectedness of the world and its experts, it is possible to be creative about the way that the pieces of the scientific puzzle are put together. In the traditional process of undergraduate, graduate, doctorate and post-doctorate studies, increasing levels of specialization characterize the work, leading almost universally to decreasing accessibility. An alternative to this depth-first process is the less developed and organizationally complex breadth-first approach where interdisciplinary collaboration and the cross-fertilization of various fields are receiving the attention for generating innovative results. In fields such as cosmology, where we only have one universe available, and the setup of the experiments is not under our control, it is possible to observe extremely high-energy phenomena that have deep connections to the theories of particle physics that would have possibly needed machines with energies that made them too large and expensive to be built on earth. Comparative studies that leverage the capability of open access publications, and of the elaboration of big data streams and of the unstructured text of the articles themselves, can highlight statistical confirmations or anomalies in studies through the years, across several research institutions and the work of many scientists. This metaknowledge can lead to valuable understanding of reproducibility, effectiveness, and promising areas of research in order to better allocate attention and resources. There is an increasing epistemological attention to the structure of theories, making sure that the excessive generative power of certain groups of theories is rightly questioned. String theory, a family of theories of particle physics, is able to pull out of its epistemological hat a theory that corresponds to any experimental result, given that it encompasses 10 to the 500 theories approximately (billions of billions of billions... of theories) with a questionable application of the sequence of theory, prediction, and verification. The human element of the structure of scientific theories and the way they evolve is being understood more deeply. The capacity of embracing new, risky areas of enquiry is naturally more likely at the beginning of the career of a scientist. The increasing lifespan of prestigious leaders of academic fields must go hand-in-hand with a scrutiny about how they retain their nimbleness and risk-taking as the resources are allocated to varied approaches, and to give voice to new entries and new ideas in their respective fields.