Regula Eichenberger: How are scientists around the world coordinated so as not to investigate something that has existed for a long time?
Martin Vetterli: Before the first languages were developed, people had to re-learn the basics with every generation. But with the invention of language and, above all, inscriptions on stone and scrolls, the acquired knowledge could be stored and transmitted for decades.
However, these first carriers of information were few and scattered throughout the planet. And so many scientific discoveries have been made several times, such as that there are spots on the sun or that the continents move. It was not until the first monasteries began to collect and record these disparate scraps of knowledge that the first local places of knowledge emerged in the form of modern libraries. The most famous example is probably the Library of Alexandria in Egypt, one of the most important libraries of the ancient world. It contained tens, if not hundreds of thousands of scrolls from most of history.
But the history of knowledge gathering has not always been so smooth. With the collapse of many empires, important texts were destroyed or became illegible as languages switched from ancient Greek to Latin, for example. By the way, many ancient texts had to be brought to Europe from Arabic and translated. In other words, without a backup in Arabic, we would hardly have the entire transmission of Plato’s knowledge today!
The invention of scientific journals about 300 years ago was another major step in the preservation of knowledge. In them, the collected knowledge is published, centralized and transferred, as well as classified and verified by other scientists. This culture is still very much alive in science today. And in addition to publication, journals also prepare abstracts so that each new generation can study a certain area from scratch.
So how do scientists learn about what has already been discovered? The answer is simple. Today, these journals are packaged into huge digital databases, much like libraries. Researchers can use keywords to find out what is already known or unknown in a particular area.
But there is a problem with this: access to journals is extremely expensive, and many universities pay huge sums of money to provide access to their researchers and students. Fortunately, in theory the answer to this problem is simple. It’s called “Open Science” and wants scientists and stakeholders to have free access to all articles, including data, code, and images – a bit like Wikipedia. This would provide truly democratic access to human knowledge. And minimizes the risk of discovering what has already been discovered. Unfortunately, we are still far from this reality.