Incentives

In the comments, Franklin writes on the subject of open source research:

On the other side of the coin, what would be the incentives for contributing to other people’s research?

This is an excellent question. Generalizing, any proposed change to how people do research, collaborate, or publish necessarily must face the question: what are the incentives to participate in the change? One must find a migration path which provides positive incentives at each step of the way, or else the migration is doomed to failure. I am proposing very significant changes to how research is done, and so the incentives along the migration path necessarily require considerable thought. Addressing these issues systematically is one of the main reasons I’ve written a book.