I was just watching Tim Berners-Lee’s (the inventor of the world wide web) talk on the future of the internet. He’s calling for the data sources that underlie most websites to be opened up (”raw data NOW”). At the moment there are vast amounts of data not accessible to anyone. Obviously, making them available to everyone has great potential implications for science. Imagine if all research data of every article you read in every peer-reviewed journal was available to anyone to check. In theory this is the case in good quality research publications, but when was the last time you checked that the existence or integrity of the data an article reports on? If, like me, you answered ‘can’t remember’, then this shows you how much of what we build our language sciences on is only ‘peer-reviewed’ in a cursory way. Equally importantly, what if someone wanted to test a different hypothesis using the same data? Or combine their data with that from another study?

The implications are huge and potentially even bigger when you take into account the growing influence of other technological advances, especially in the way people communicate and share information through (social) networks. Researchers are now starting to make more use of such networks to generate ideas from not just one or two, but hundreds or even thousands of people, to get feedback on their work from people outside their cosy professional circles, tap into much larger data/participant pools, and to develop ideas across disciplines. All this is in its early stages, but it’s exciting.

Practically speaking what I would like to do is this:
1) publish all my research data on my website, available to anyone (alongside the actual publications, which are mostly already available)
2) ask (not require at this point) all contributors to our journal ‘Innovation in Language Learning and Teaching‘ to submit their raw data and make that available on the journal’s website
3) papers submitted to our symposium (CALL and the Learner) at the AILA conference in Beijing in 2011 to be ranked and selected through social peer-review (for example using Facebook, or - if it takes off, which I sincerely hope, Google’s Friend Connect).

Of course there are issues around ethics approvals and perhaps (not so much in our field) patents etc, but these are obstacles we can find a way around.
If we want to, that is…