New Delhi, Jan. 13 -- Science and technology have advanced most reliably when carried out in the open. Isaac Newton was only able to publish Principia Mathematica because he was able to "stand on the shoulders of giants," such as Galileo and Kepler, who had made their own work public.

But the very same Isaac Newton also dabbled in alchemy, a field in which practitioners were notoriously secretive about their experiments in transmuting base metal into gold. Given that he had no 'shoulders to stand on,' Newton was far less successful as an alchemist than as a scientist.

Innovators need an incentive to continue inventing. While science has traditionally flourished because of patronage, technology typically tends to succeed when it is profi...