The Benefits of Sharing—Nice Guys and Girls do Finish First - Open-Source Lab: How to Build Your Own Hardware and Reduce Research Costs - page 13

CHAPTER 2

The Benefits of Sharing—Nice
Guys and Girls do Finish First

Abstract
This chapter explores five pragmatic advantages to joining the open-source scientific community for
both your research in general, and most importantly, your equipment and instrumentation: (1) massive
peer-review in the development of background material and experimental design, which leads to (2) im-
proved experimental design and hardware design (often with radically lower costs) and hardware with
superior performance, (3) increased visibility, citations and public relations, which leads to (4) increased
funding opportunities and improved student recruitment, and (5) improved student research-related
training and education. These examples are reinforced by broader theory about the human hard-wiring
for cooperation. Finally, the same theories are applied to industry to reveal the benefits for corporations
to embrace industrial-scale sharing and open-source hardware.

Keywords
Collaboration; Commons; Creative commons; Gift economy; Industrial symbiosis; Open source;
Sharing

2.1 Advantages of Aggressive Sharing for the

Academic
The primary purpose of universities is to spread knowledge, yet ironically, research faculty
members are often encouraged to restrict information sharing. Today at many universities,
there is enormous pressure to avoid having so-called intellectual property (IP) “scooped” by
patenting and/or commercializing research to prevent replication without the academic's em-
ployer benefiting financially [ 1 ] . As the well-documented influence of corporate thought on uni-
versities has spread [ 2 ] , this intellectual monopoly 1 view of research has now even iniltrated
the academic literature. As can be seen in many fields, normally the experimental section of
journal articles is the shortest and most opaque section of a manuscript. This makes it difficult to
replicate our peers' experiments and may even potentially “threaten the foundation of scientific
discourse” as Gelman argues [ 3 ]. Even the details that are provided are sometimes delayed. For
example, many universities encourage holding back key information, which is not released un-
til provisional patents have been filed, slowing the scientific enterprise down. In addition, most
experimental protocols that are standards are not open access and many require substantial fees
to even view (e.g. ASME standards). In addition, we are all familiar with the retarding force on
further and faster scientific development from the lack of universal open access to the literature