Digital publishing isn't enough: the case for ‘blueprints’ in scientific communication

Since the time of Newton and Galileo, the tools for capturing and communicating science have remained conceptually unchanged — in essence, they consist of observations on paper (or electronic variants), followed by a ‘letter’ to the community to report your findings. These age-old tools are inadequate for the complexity of today's scientific challenges. If modern software engineering worked like science, programmers would not share open source code; they would take notes on their work and then publish long-form articles about their software. Months or years later, their colleagues would attempt to reproduce the software based on the article. It sounds a bit silly, and yet even, this level of prose-based methodological discourse has deteriorated in science communication. Materials and Methods sections of papers are often a vaguely written afterthought, leaving researchers baffled when they try to repeat a published finding. It's time for a fundamental shift in scientific communication and sharing, a shift akin to the advent of computer-aided design and source code versioning. Science needs reusable ‘blueprints’ for experiments replete with the experiment designs, material flows, reaction parameters, data, and analytical procedures. Such an approach could establish the foundations for truly open source science where these scientific blueprints form the digital ‘source code’ for a supply chain of high-quality innovations and discoveries.