We need GitHub for science. But that's not enough. It needs to be combined with a mechanism for peer-review and publishing that funding agencies will find acceptable--that's the key.
There are academics interested in building journals on top of the arXiv. It's an idea that's been kicking around for a while. In math, Tim Gowers is one of the people who has been pushing for something like this.
If your background is in not-academia, you may well be forgiven for looking at the scene and seeing no progress. However, academia is more slow-moving and conservative in some aspects than other places. This is not a bad thing; not everyone has to move fast and break things. But at academia's normal pace, things are going pretty fast.
It's not only about funding agencies, though. Researchers need to be trained in the use of a GitHub like system - as a former graduate student, I knew NO ONE using Github. Furthermore, after working in scientific publishing where it was MS Office or bust, I doubt you will convince Elsevier and the publishing giants that GitHub for Science is the way to go. How do these huge companies make money if scientists are sharing their work for free online? Meanwhile, you have scientists themselves, many of whom are required to hit certain numbers of articles in certain "prestige tiers" of journals in order to get tenure. If you're an extremely busy junior faculty member who will be FIRED when tenure review comes up if you don't have 1 paper per year, will you risk it on a GitHub scheme? I doubt that.
These problems are not unique to science. Take any large group of humans, be it government, the military, a company, a set of companies: they will coalesce onto the use of a certain number of tools, and it will take a LOT of energy and work to switch tools. Getting an entire industry to switch tools is extremely hard, perhaps downright impossible, and I'm not sure if it can be done in the rather slow-moving world of academic science. It simply won't be possible to enact a huge change on the system with so much institutional momentum built up.
It seems to me the best solution is to make incremental changes toward a github like system, training new scientists in grad programs to have better practices. Maybe we can't get researchers to post their full data set for all the public, but perhaps it can be made available to non-competitors, those who researchers aren't actively competing with for the same grants. Maybe researchers can be required by journals to post the peer-review comments/responses, as well as the drafts of the article, alongside the article itself. Maybe we can have researchers posting extremely detailed code/methodological information alongside the article, without forcing them to give over the entire dataset to other researchers?
Finally, maybe the whole incentive structure of academic science needs to change: maybe articles/publishing metrics should be de-valued in favor of teaching skills, mentorship ability, and collaboration within and across disciplines?
I doubt you will convince Elsevier and the publishing giants
Who says we need to convince them? How about we leave them behind? They are rentiers, gatekeeping society's access to publicly funded scientific knowledge. I can't think of a reason why society should allow this hostage situation to continue.
OK, but you need to figure out a way to take over the universities then because scientists are also animals who need food and shelter etc. etc. and depend on grants, stipends, and salaries to buy those things.
I'm not saying this to be dismissive - I'm strongly in favor of faculties organizing to unseat administrators from their privileged positions. It's baffling to me that bright minds on campuses complain at length about the state of higher education but seem oddly averse to doing anything about it.
When did you do your PhD? When we collaborated for papers we used Subversion (at the start of my PhD) & git (towards the end) both for code and papers (in latex).
I assume you don't just means using Github for version control of scientific papers, because that sounds pretty pointless to me.
As far as tracking incremental improvements over time goes, I think it'll be hard to do better than our current method of including references to papers. It's impossible to track ideas the same way tracking code works (which itself is limited for similar reasons).
It would be nice if you could reference papers in a way that immediately allowed you to access them. And the technology to do so is there, but has limited use if papers aren't freely accessible from the internet.
But, given that the system of papers with references is essentially a DAG, I imagine someone will attempt to 'solve' the problem with blockchains before you can say 'initial coin offering'.
When you have a paper deadline in two weeks and four authors are furiously hacking in edits left and right, Git is absolutely invaluable when writing a paper. I can't fathom how people handled merges of written text without a version control system.
Some scientists are using github as github for science, including development done in the open. For instance, this is just one particle physics project I happen to be aware of https://github.com/DisplacedHiggs
Open development is a policy for these projects and part of the grant stipulations.
Of course, data sets are more closely guarded initially until the groups that created them can publish. After that, though, CERN /LHC has done a decent job of making data publicly available from my understanding (not as someone directly involved).
I would be interested to hear more from scientists involved in projects doing open science.
I think that's sort of what services like Texture [1], ShareLaTeX [2], and Authorea [3] are trying to become (at least for papers). For code GitHub for science is generally the same as GitHub for everyone else.
I would really like the Open Science Framework to become just that (with other tools like OpenML as needed). But it requires people to actually work on it to happen...
I really want to like OSF, but I feel like they sometimes waste time on pointless efforts that go nowhere instead of working on substantive features that scientists would actually use. In particular I found their effort to create badges for open science to be misdirected at best, since credentials of any kind don't really count for anything unless they're backed by an authority that's seen as legitimate universally in a field.
I also feel a bit weird about badging in science in general, since most of the most passionate people I know in science are intrinsically motivated enough that I could never really see them really concerning themselves with such carrots unless it meant that they'd get more funds to do more of what they find fun.
