Some people believe that it is good to share as much information as possible in scientific research, business and the academic world. Others believe that some information is too important or too valuable to be shared freely. Discuss both these views and give your own opinion. v.18

Sharing of knowledge is seen as a boon and as a bane of many and in this essay, I plan to write about the associated advantages and disadvantages of the same and also voice my opinion of the former. In today's world, scientific research is at an all-time peak with new and exciting discoveries happening almost every day. In science, results pertaining to research are of prime importance and sharing the same with others in the same field is a subject that could lead to plausible conflicts. Hence, the announcement of advancements in a scientific field is highly moderated via online archival forums designed by Connell University and Harvard University. To elucidate the transparency of the process, consider the archives forum, which is an online forum where scientists upload articles that are prone to moderation by experts in their respective fields and a preliminary plagiarism scan of the article. The advantages of publishing on archives are twofold, firstly, the forum functions as a veil which filters off all the unnecessary and non-scientific results and secondly, an online archive of the article acts as a preliminary publication a priori to the actual one in a journal of repute. The latter point also helps provide an overview to the community of who did what first and credits the deserving author for their work. Plagiarism is a major concern in academia and moderated sharing can successfully prevent the same and also relieve the vicissitudes, one may face when their work goes unrecognized. The world of business however is a very different beast. The data are highly guarded and strategies are formulated to prevent leaking of the same to competitor companies. Thus, I do believe that since knowledge is equivalent to capital, companies believe that is not an advisable adventure they may venture into. However, there are cases such as the stock market or a major business corporation where insider information shared by certain whistle-blowers can benefit all and sundry and also, raise red flags which would eventually lead to that firm being monitored for malicious practice(s) by the government. There is another school of people who believe that information sharing is not advisable even when it undergoes moderation. The thought that information is too valuable to be shared was shared among many scientists and mathematicians in the 17th and 18th centuries, where the latter would encrypt their work and publish their articles in a coded-language which could only be understood with the ciphers that the authors possessed. Although this practice saw its demise with the foundation of the Royal Society, it seems to have crept into the modern society in a different form- allegation. A great example of the same would be the case of Gresha Perelman, the Fields prize winning mathematician from St. Petersburg, Russian who was successful in being able to obtain proof of the Poincare conjecture, one of the Millennium prize problems according to the Clay institute of mathematics. The conjecture saw many mathematicians, in the '70s and '80s, working towards a proof and along came Perelman who did it sans any assistance. Many research groups, especially a Chinese group accused Perelman of using prior published works of Hamilton and their own to churn out a proof. Although this was disproven, this entire fiasco saw Perelman quitting mathematics and leading a life of solitude. Although his contributions to differential geometry have significantly advanced the field of differential geometry and have provided us novel ideas for revolutionizing science in this century, the simple sharing of mathematical results leads to ego complications. This case study teaches us that the sharing in the modern era is strongly coupled to a more dynamic and complicated structure of bureaucracy in different fields such as science or business. The above example, may also apply to the highly guarded recipes of leading food chains, which don't transparently publish the products used and refuse to abide by the norms set by food standards. In conclusion and in light of the above stated, I strongly believe that although open sharing of information is a beast to be reckoned with, it has far more important implications that may benefit all of humankind.