An open and shut case? Debating the purposes of open science is an mp3 download of a recent Royal Society PolicyLab meeting. The Society holds PolicyLab meetings regularly to bring together policymakers and scientists to discuss current topics.

The first speaker, Michael Nielsen, helped pioneer the field of quantum computation. His forthcoming book Reinventing Discovery argues that the information revolution is part of a major shift in how scientific discoveries are made. The second speaker, Geoffrey Boulton FRS, offers his perspective on the purposes of opening up science. Among other things, he contends that, since no journal could spare the space to publish the avalanche of data points that large-scale scientific experiments produce, the published paper has become more of an "advertisement" and the "science sits in the underlying data".

Boulton is currently leading the Royal Society's project, 'Science as a Public Enterprise'. "This project aims to identify the principles, opportunities and problems of sharing and disclosing scientific information and asks how scientific information should be managed to support innovative and productive research that reflects public values."