Michael Nielsen Quotes

Public sharing is an important part of science.

Science should belong to scientists and not the publishers.

Instead of having to be a member of the Royal Society to do science, the way you had to be in England in the 17th, 18th, centuries today pretty much anybody who wants to do it can, and the information that they need to do it is there.

Further, science is a collaborative effort.

I often compare open source to science. To where science took this whole notion of developing ideas in the open and improving on other peoples' ideas and making it into what science is today and the incredible advances that we have had. And I compare that to witchcraft and alchemy, where openness was something you didn't do.

Secrecy in science does not work. Withholding information does more damage to us than to our competitors.

I perceive Sci-Hub as a practical side of my research.

The business of a scientific school is the dissemination of useful knowledge, and this is a noble enterprise and indispensable withal; society can not exist unless it goes on.

The increase of scientific knowledge lies not only in the occasional milestones of science, but in the efforts of the very large body of men who with love and devotion observe and study nature.

We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file-sharing networks.

Scientific research involves going beyond the well-trodden and well-tested ideas and theories that form the core of scientific knowledge. During the time scientists are working things out, some results will be right, and others will be wrong. Over time, the right results will emerge.

The goal is to give people a free encyclopedia to every person in the world, in their own language. Not just in a 'free beer' kind of way, but also in the free speech kind of way.

Despite the value of open data, most labs make no systematic effort to share data with other scientists.

Most scientific revelations happened after the pursuit of knowledge quit being secret and hermetic.

My efforts are focused on ensuring that CERN maintains a leading role in the fields of science, technology and education, and that it continues to be a place that unites scientists from around the world.

Our lab had always refrained from keeping our studies secret.

The people who work in the scientific field, they need help to convey what it's about.

Scientific experiments are expensive, and people are entitled to know about them if they want to. I think it is very difficult to convey ideas.

In general, science journalism concerns itself with what has been published in a handful of peer-reviewed journals - Nature, Cell, The New England Journal of Medicine - which set the agenda.

Scientific knowledge is a kind of discourse.

I think, ultimately, open always wins out. It wins out because you cannot lock data in; you can't lock people in. They will find a way out.

I really like that my work is getting more people interested in science.

Knowledge should be a public good, and I want my ideas to have as much exposure as possible.

We have to overthrow the idea that it's a diversion from 'real' work when scientists conduct high-quality research in the open. Publicly funded science should be open science. Improving the way that science is done means speeding us along in curing cancer, solving the problem of climate change and launching humanity permanently into space.

Knowledge in the Internet Age - networked knowledge - is becoming more like what knowledge has been in the past few hundreds years for scientists: it's provisional; it's a hypothesis that is waiting to be disproved.