A call for open science student leaders
Crowdsourcing talent for project coordination, data management, communication and dissemination
After 17 years leading open source drug discovery ventures, Mat Todd is well accustomed to the benefits and challenges of sharing data openly.
‘Science is inherently quite secretive as a culture,’ explains Todd. ‘We [scientists] want to make sure that we are known for certain things. So, it’s about managing the two things: the need to share, because that’s better science, versus the need to be in control of what you are disseminating.’
Todd, who is professor of drug discovery at University College London, UK, founded several open source consortia, each aiming to find better medicines to treat diseases that disproportionately affect the world’s poor such as schistosomiasis, malaria, tuberculosis and mycetoma. The central philosophy of each consortium holds that by crowdsourcing contributions from researchers around the world and striving for transparency in all discussions, data and decisions, it might be possible to find new medicines more quickly and cheaply.