Incentivizing open scientific discussion

Coturnix’ "obligatory reading of the day" brought me to this interesting essay on open science. I think it catches most of the most important idiosyncracies of the modern science business and offers some very promising avenues for change.However, I think it treats one crucial, important point only in passing: there currently are too many incentives not to share ideas and critical comments with the rest of the scientific community. There is the very real risk of being scooped, of critical comments coming back to haunt you at your next peer-reviewed submission or of an important person in a search committee branding you as ’trouble maker’ because you criticized his paper on your blog. On top of that, there’s absolutely zero credit to be had for any such activities. On the contrary, writing a blog such as this one can be seen as time wasted better spent writing papers or doing experiments.Apart from the question of whether the perfect scientist is the one...