The Knowledge Investment Curve

by Walt Warnick in National Impacts | Comments [5] Tags: knowledge world-wide-web worldwidescience.org

by Walt Warnick and David Wojick

Every scientist knows that science advances only if knowledge is shared. Mathematically, this statement implies that the advance of science is a function of both the sharing of research results, as well as doing the original research. In principle, therefore, decision makers face the problem of deciding how much to spend on original research and how much to spend on sharing the knowledge that comes out of research.

Consider the accompanying graph with the x-axis being the fraction of research resources expended on spreading knowledge. The scale would range from 0% to 100%. The y-axis is the pace of scientific discovery.

One can imagine a curve plotting the pace of discovery as a function of the fraction of resources expended on sharing knowledge.

When the fraction of resources is 0%, the pace of science advance is zero, as nothing is shared.

When the fraction of resources is 100%, the pace of advance is also zero, as nothing is spent on the research itself.

In between these endpoints, the plot will have a maximum. The plot is the Knowledge Investment Curve.

While we show a conceptualization of the Knowledge Investment Curve, we know very little about the actual form of this curve, or even how much is currently invested in sharing.

Most knowledge sharing activities are not funded directly as budget items. These include writing an estimated one million research papers and reports a year worldwide, as well as finding and reading them. It includes preparing for and participating in conferences, as well as writing and reading emails, blogs, etc. It also includes training postdocs and Ph.D. students, plus an untold number of colleague to colleague conversations.

These myriad activities are centuries old, as old as science itself. What each costs in the aggregate we have little idea. We do know that scientific journals cost several billion dollars a year, because they depend on a central infrastructure that has a visible price. We also know the budgets of organizations whose purpose is to share knowledge such as the Office of Scientific and Technical Information and sister organizations across the government such as Defense Technical Information Center, The National Library of Medicine, The National Agricultural Library and others.

We also know that the Internet, especially the World Wide Web, is changing the nature of the equation, because the unit cost of sharing is so much less than the traditional means. The Web has made sharing global, or at least potentially so. One of the thrusts of the Office of Scientific and Technical Information is to develop Web tools, like World Wide Science.org, to promote global discovery. Like the journals, the Web has a visible price in its portals.

We can ask then what the federal investment should be in Web-based science sharing? Conceptually, points on the Knowledge Investment Curve to the left of the optimum imply that the pace of science discovery would be accelerated by increasing the percentage of funding for sharing results. One thing we know is that the investment in sharing is highly uneven across the various sciences. The fraction of health science research funding dedicated to sharing knowledge is greater than for physical and energy sciences. The latter is unlikely to be near the optimum.

Walt Warnick

David Wojick

Comments:

The logic is sound but I'd love to know the shape of the curve. Getting to the shape of sharing is one thing but correlating sharing to "value" (who's value system?) would be more problematic. What is the curve of sharing to value...how mush sharing is needed to create maximum value. This may also be challenged in the technology commercialization space where sharing is challenged by exclusive licensing.

Posted by David Phipps on August 21, 2009 at 09:08 PM EDT #

You should contact Professor Daniel T. Byrd at Keck Graduate Institute. He has studied strategic networks and knowledge transfer/acquisition from a technological perspective. Of course, this involves corporations rather than research institutions, but he can direct you to the right literature. Your definition of "scientific advances" is vague.

Posted by Ben Pavlik on September 04, 2009 at 01:52 PM EDT #

I wonder if this is the right question? This may be setting up a false dichotomy - the suggestion is that a researcher is either creating knowledge or communicating it, when in fact these processes are very closely intertwined and can not be de-coupled or distinguished in the way the graph suggests.

Posted by Caroline Wagner on September 04, 2009 at 02:25 PM EDT #

We are sensitive to the concerns raised by Phipps and Wagner, indeed we have our own concerns about how far this model can be pressed. However, my feeling is that most of the vagueness is due to the lack of scientific analysis of the issue. In particular, we are working on a concept of "conservation of cognition," which is similar to the concept of bounded rationality in decision theory. The basic idea is that one can only perform one cognitive task at a time. Sharing-tasks include writing and reading, searching and navigating, talking and listening. These are typically very different from research-tasks like making observations or crunching data, or solitary thinking, at least in the physical sciences. Cognitive time and motion studies should have no trouble telling when a researcher is investing in which task, in specific cases, but that is a conjecture. Every scientific concept has fuzzy edges. Describing what one sees while taking observations, or getting an idea while discussing a problem, might be problematic. But some of this is counter intuitive. For example, for the purposes of this analysis I do not consider library research to be research, but rather a case of sharing. Building a library is likewise an investment in sharing. The same is true for some other so-called research infrastructure investments. Building a grid for moving data around is an investment in sharing. The point is that the research investment budget has to be divided into real research versus sharing, or we are flying blind. For example, note that the life and health sciences have the $350 million per year National Library of Medicine, while the physical and energy sciences have no comparable facility for sharing results. They would seem to be on very different places on the curve. As for measuring the pace of progress, that is clearly the most difficult challenge. But we know there is progress and we know our end points are zero so there is something real in the concept. The problem is that the standard scientometric measures do not capture the concept of progress, merely that of activity. Activity is not sensitive to changing the ratio between research and sharing. Everyone will keep busy in any case, so we are not measuring progress. This policy issue has only recently arisen because of the Internet, especially the Web, and the digital revolution generally. Policy always lags revolution. The challenge is to try to formulate new decision models that capture the revolution.

Posted by David Wojick on September 13, 2009 at 06:48 AM EDT #

I think the graph is about right. There must be room for both individual discovery and shared resources. It is all about when exactly to implement one, the other, or both.

Posted by Dental Plan on November 02, 2009 at 11:13 AM EST #