All scientific discoveries should be shared among all scientists all around the world；the government and businesses sould not keep any discoveries in secret.
Science is a sacred mysterious land worshiped by those outsiders. Here people devote their lives to probing questions they may never find answers to. Here people are driven not by money, but by noble goals such as changing the world, improving the human specie’s life quality, breaking through imaginary or realistic barriers, and, last but not least, the sheer joy of echoing intelligence and novel discoveries among people just like them. It was never meant to be a heavily guarded world. Openness and the spirit of sharing are top listed natures of all scientist s, second only to integrity. Even if the entities running scientific research are governments and businesses, they cannot go against the open nature of science to keep discoveries in secret.
Why is this open nature so critical to scientific research? Let's go through the structure of any decent scientific publication to better understand this. First there is the literature review. In this part the author summarizes all relevant findings in the topic area, explaining why the current work is needed. Then there is methodology, usually the authors employ methods created and proven by other scientists, adding modifications only if necessary. Then there are findings and discussions, in which they cast their results in the background of collective research opinions, state their own position, and invite further discussions. This simple description proves that no research work, not even a small part of it, can stand alone without the intellectual and research results from other scientists. Without openness and sharing, science wouldn't have progressed from Aristotle's age to the world-transforming power it is today. And even in Aristotle's age scientists wrote essays to share their work! Locking up one's results in a safe is like death sentence to one's research career, as a highly valued motto goes among scientists--publish or perish. No real scientists will choose to work for these governments or businesses if they were to keep their findings highly classified.
And we haven't touched upon the monetary part of science. Science is expensive, often prohibitively. To find out how differently old people use their brain to recall long term memories from the young, the researcher needs to test hundreds of subjects in a functional MRI machine, for which the price tag comes at 400 dollars an hour. Across the hall in the electrical engineering lab, researchers experiment using materials more expensive than gold in order to create ever smaller and faster chips. It is often governments with tax dollars or companies with R&D funds that can afford such endeavors. For government-tax-dollar-funded research, the algorism is simple that what's funded by the people should go back to the people. For businesses, the logic is a little different but the result remains the same. Businesses support research because they want to turn findings into products and products into profit. Often than not they also turn findings into patents and share them for profits. Charging a little premium, they let the research findings out and back into the scientific pool, so their scientists can happily mingle with their peers from other institutions to push the research work forward together. It makes no monetary sense for either governments or businesses to keep their discoveries in secret.
Overall, openness and sharing makes science what it is--a powerful ever evolving collection of
intelligence continuously working on transforming the world for better.。