Inoculating science against potential pandemics and information hazards
Fig 3
Greater openness could accelerate progress and inoculate science against hazardous mistakes.
Current incentives encourage scientists to keep research plans to themselves until publication (top), which prevents others from suggesting improvements. Fields such as gene drive have moral reasons to shift towards a fully open model (right) in which anyone can share advice, but this may not be practical for all fields due to commercial incentives and the risk of disclosing research plans that would themselves be information hazards. An intermediate model (left) might adapt current grant evaluation systems or national boards to ensure that proposed projects are confidentially preregistered and peer-reviewed by experts from diverse fields who lack conflicts of interest, enabling them to suggest ways of mitigating potential hazards in advance of experiments. This approach might be usefully pioneered by the field of synthetic mammalian virology. In both open models, early advice from peers would likely accelerate discovery relative to the current closeted approach.