Chapter Twelve Building a Community Modelling and Information Sharing Culture

Abstract

Free and open exchange of information in research endeavours is beneficial and can lead to much more rapid advances and important discoveries that might otherwise take much longer to achieve. Nevertheless, exchange of information is still restricted by patent law, as well as by institutional, cultural and traditional hurdles that create protective barriers hindering the free flow of this valuable commodity. By copying information from sources and distributing it to new destinations we do not lose information at the sources. Potentially we can only benefit from sharing information. The open-source paradigm provides an example of information sharing that can be readily applied to modelling. Collaborative, open source modelling still has limited application. There are cultural, traditional, institutional and bureaucratic reasons for this. The wide advent of Internet and web applications creates a new environment for information sharing that is likely to change the standards for academic success evaluation and promote a more collaborative and unified research field. We believe that one of the greatest challenges we face in creating a new open research paradigm will be building the community modelling and information sharing culture. How do we get engineers and scientists to put aside their traditional modes of doing business that discourage free and open exchange of data and ideas? How do we provide the incentives that will be required to make these changes happen? How do we get our colleagues to see that the benefits of sharing resources far outweigh the costs? We argue that timely sharing of data and information is not only in the best interest of the research community, but that it is also in the best interest of the scientist who is doing the sharing. © 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.