Who listens to scientists? Mostly just other scientists.
theincidentaleconomist.com
theincidentaleconomist.com
My field (computer science) and a few others at least don't have the problem of paywalls. Authors always make their works available; a few publishers have relaxed their copyright policies and others have an implicit promise not to sue. It's not ideal, but it's not too bad.
Public communication, however, remains quite bad. It is very unfortunate that in the current system, researchers have no incentive to communicate with the public or do anything except rack up publications and citations.
I write a blog about my research (http://33bits.org) and I've been pleasantly surprised by the level of public interest. In my ideal world, research grants would come with some strings attached to get scientists to fulfill some of their social responsibility.
In related news, if you're in the Bay Area there's an Open Science event next week with Michael Nielsen that I'm really excited about. http://blogs.plos.org/everyone/2011/06/15/%E2%80%9Cwhy-the-n...
[1] Is it irony? The word is so overused I can't even tell anymore.
As a last resort, mail to the authors.
[0] http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=1878921.1878926 [1] http://pp.info.uni-karlsruhe.de/publication.php?id=buchwald1... [2] http://pp.info.uni-karlsruhe.de/publications.php?orderby=1&#...
In the last several years there's been maybe half a dozen times that I failed to find a computer science paper online. I'd estimate that less than 1% of papers in the top conferences are unavailable freely online.
The US government pays at least $50,000 in grant money for each paper, but it can't find $5 to make it available for the public in perpetuity, as does the arXiv.org preprint server.
(arXiv.org looks, on the surface, to be a success, but always been functioning on operating budgets that are meant for something else... It's existence has hung on a thread more than once It still struggles to find a sustainable funding model, despite the fact that it costs 1/200-1/1000 as much to make papers available on arXiv.org as does a peer reviewed paper)
Frankly it seems to be an insult to the taxpayer that we pay for research and can't read it/
$50k/paper is about right. I was surprised to find that even my colleagues didn't know this figure. If only more people were aware of it, perhaps they'd take things more seriously.
The feeling of powerlessness as an individual trapped in the system is only exacerbated by the apparent callousness of those around you.
This is definitely the case with all bio/medical research; isn't like this in computer science and other sciences too? Is the publishers lobby so powerful?
I think this rule is specific to the funding agency.
For much more on the NIH policy, see the links in this article: http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007/12/oa-mandate-at-nih...
There has been a concerted (though not yet successful) effort to extend this type of open access mandate to all US federal agencies with budgets over 100 million. See, for example: http://www.arl.org/sparc/advocacy/frpaa/index.shtml
With a lot of work, I believe these efforts are likely to be successful. But there is real opposition, not just from some journal publishers, but also from some politicians. See, for example, the efforts by John Conyers (D-Mi) to roll back the NIH open access policy: http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/10-02-08.htm#n...
In the UK, all seven UK Research Councils have similar open access policies. The last one to adopt such a policy was the Physical Sciences and Engineering Council, which I believe is the one relevant to computer science research. That policy was adopted in 2009, I believe, and so we're only starting to see the effects now.
As for the opposition from politicians: isn't this a typical case of lobbies trying to hide behind some representative of choice to fight their battle?
This depends very much on the age of the paper. The older it is, the less likely that it is on the web. If anything it reinforces the profound cyclical amnesia of our industry (never mind academia).
The subject of scientific publishing is a very interesting topic. There are multiple issues at stake and I would be very happy if people point out to well written discourse on the following questions.
* The state of affairs of journals today, and the open journal movement. Why in the age of the internet, we're stuck in a relatively ancient publishing system.
* The gap between popular science and scientific research. This comic was very popular: http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1174
* Whether the onus on popularizing science lies on scientific researchers. In particular, does the public have to take more effort to understand science, or do the scientists have to take more effort to publish both for the community but also for public consumption. Do these skill sets overlap? Can there be scientific "popularizers" who are specialists at writing pop-sci that is accurate yet can be understood by a layperson.
* The state of affairs of journals today, and the open journal movement. Why in the age of the internet, we're stuck in a relatively ancient publishing system.*
If you're talking about "why do we have publishers?", then that is a question that you can search HN for, as we often have this discussion about IEEE/ACM. I'm strongly against publishers but not the system of publishing, because we need those peer-review systems.
* The gap between popular science and scientific research.*
There are multiple factors at work here.
1. Often, researchers are working on something that just can't be sold as popular science. That's why we call them researchers. Particularly in Computer Science, a lot of what you could call "popular science" really means "shipping products." If it's cool enough, it's cool enough to sell it.
2. Many, many universities are very poor at selling research. Exceedingly so. The schools you hear about all the time; MIT, Stanford, etc. are those which can afford big, able PR departments. These guys are also not interested in necessarily selling the facts. MIT are particularly guilty of this, often writing articles like "MIT researchers change the fundamentals of all AI" when its this little incremental step, that, while important, has not set the world on fire and comes with lots of caveats.
Popularizing science is not what researchers should be doing. There's this really terrible blame game that happens right now, where it's en vogue to blame scientists and just add more things to their job role. In a university, we're expecting them to: teach, find money for research, perform research, write papers and advise undergraduate/graduate students. Oh, and now they should be responsible for performing scientific outreach, otherwise they're all insular and elitist. That's why companies like Google and Microsoft are becoming so attractive, you get to just do research. That's what your trained for, that's what your career is.
If we want to worry about popularizing science and encouraging STEM takeup in young people and all this stuff that we keep hearing about, then you're going to have to hire people to do it. The NSF can start putting money in grants that are ring-fenced to funding a PR department that actually goes and does this stuff. Universities already take 50% out of all research grants anyway, putting them towards library fees and such. Expecting researchers to do it all is becoming more and more untenable.
I have heard it complained that we scientists don't "talk to the general public" enough. I would very much welcome specific suggestions for how to do this. I would cheerfully invest time and effort in this kind of thing if I felt like people would be interested.
Mathematicians do have the advantage that all their papers are open-access. If you're interested in math, you can cruise on over to arXiv and read 60 abstracts an hour.
At most once. Links are what the internet is for:)
If you want links, here they are:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field_(mathematics)#Definition_...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubic_field
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discriminant_of_an_algebraic_nu...
The thing is, those articles probably aren't brief enough for many people to stay interested, and they probably also don't go deep enough to make any particular one of impendia's results comprehensible. (And I'm also not sure if they're readable to people with only an engineering background in math.)
(In case you think I'm being snooty about engineers, I dropped out of college and have never published a theorem; instead, I have made my living writing software.)
But the OP's goal is simply to increase interest in his own work. Recurring concepts could be explained once somewhere and referred back to as needed, and the research and its implications could be elaborated on in far more detail than that given in the abstracts. This should not only be possible, but would likely be quite successful.
In my math classes, the engineers were the biggest whiners regarding mathematics. "I don't care about meanings, just tell me what function on my calculator to hit".
I've tried to read Terry Tao's blog; I like more advanced mathematics. His blog is very interesting, I'm sure, but the jargon level is so far beyond my knowledge it might as well be Russian for the level of meaning I draw from it.
That's very commendable. I am a nonmathematician who has become a mathematics teacher as part of figuring out why so few learners in the United States succeed in learning mathematics well. Here are some examples for you.
Good mathematicians (some Fields medalists) with readable blogs:
http://terrytao.wordpress.com/
http://www.arsmathematica.net/
http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/
http://scientopia.org/blogs/goodmath/
http://micromath.wordpress.com/
A list found by a Google search
http://www.onlinedegree.net/50-best-blogs-for-math-majors/
suggests more.
A few popular authors who are mathematicians write very approachable books about mathematics.
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=ntt_athr_dp_sr_1?_encoding=UTF8&...
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=ntt_athr_dp_sr_1?_encoding=UTF8&...
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=ntt_athr_dp_sr_1?_encoding=UTF8&...
Following links from links to the books by those authors will reveal other books by mathematicians who write for popular audiences.
Best wishes in gaining readers other than your mother (like me, for instance) as you communicate your interest in mathematics.
First of all, my interest is not so much to increase interest in my own work. My work is pretty modest compared to the likes of Tao and Gowers, so really I would be happy just to represent the mathematical community and discuss the field I work in as a whole.
I think kragen's comments are essentially correct. I could do a good job of explaining what I do, and why it is interesting, to someone with an engineering background in about five to ten pages. IMHO that is a lot of effort required to either write or read. Of course my impression of HN is that there are indeed people who would not begrudge the effort to read it!
The suggestions have revolved around blogging. I confess that I don't have so much of a taste for this -- I spend a lot of time at a computer as it is, and there are already outstanding math blogs online as pointed out by tokenadult. I would be much more excited to do something that involved face-to-face talk. So perhaps my request is more difficult than the initial impression I gave!
Thanks to all.
I don't think that means the work is unimportant, but I think of math as being primarily a recreation like painting or singing, and only secondarily something that needs to be of service or interest to others.
The kind of progress where an engineer or scientist takes what they need from that obviously useless piece of mathematics becomes harder and harder as the silos get deeper. But things are getting better. Stuff like mathoverflow, blogs by researchers, polymath are really helping bridge those gaps. Thats why these days people are really starting to see all this stuff that we thought unrelated are actually just different aspects of the same thing. I especially like whats going on with category theory, information theory, information geometry, entropy and bayesianism. Together they leave no subject untouched. Not one.
Nerd Nite does the same thing, but with beer: nerdnite.com
Be a guest speaker at high schools in your area. Mike Merzenich graciously came to speak to my Neuroscience students, and they found it informative and inspiring.
Vi Hart does some really really neat math videos: http://vihart.com/
Above all, practice talking math to non-mathies. Use lots and lots of analogies, and don't forget to tap into the enthusiasm that brought you to the field in the first place.
It's nice if you can build a relationship between your institution and a school so you can have a sort of standing gig every few years.
(Also note that some schools will totally love this and others might be unresponsive, so don't give up if the first one doesn't happen)
For example, you can comment on this paper right here: http://tiris.org/papers/15
If you are a user you can then follow what goes on with the paper (new comments, tags, etc.), you can follow the user who submitted it, seeing as he is likely to have similar interests, you can follow the tags the paper is tagged with and so on.
It is dream for Tiris to be embeddable into various scientific sites (blogs, project pages, etc.), with a system similar to Disqus, but with a knack for science (for example, latex is supported with $$ math $$).
We're slowly but surely getting there, if there is anyone reading this who feels passionate about opening up scientific communication, drop me a note.
Take a look at this project which is similar to yours (not mine btw): http://annotatr.appspot.com/
Annotatr looks somewhat similar yes. They too have some issues with getting to critical mass, but you have to start somewhere. I have to look into integrating more services into Tiris (pubget, citeulike, mendeley). I think the biggest difference will be when I implement the embeddable commenting system, which should enable easier access to Tiris.
About dropping me a note, hmm, yeah, that could be a bit difficult. Sorry about that. If you come to my site http://www.juretriglav.si - there is an email link right at the bottom of that page. Sorry I have no better way.
Off-topic: How does HN usually solve this lack of PM issue?
Many people put their email in the About field of their profile. You can obfuscate it if you wish, or just trust your spam filters.
Reading some posts below, people seem to think that just because public money is being spent on "science", everyone should be able to understand it. My answers to that:
(1) Your money is being spent trying to find advances in technology/physics/medicine/whatever. We are hard at work doing so. We will let you know when something happens.
(2) It took Us (us = the researchers you're accusing of being insulting and callous towards the public) many, many years to understand what the hell we're doing. Your expectation that you will understand it without the necessary background is misinformed and frankly amusing. That being said, the popular press is there to do exactly that; contact your favorite media source and ask that they cover more advances in "science". They get paid to do this sort of work for you.
In re-reading this, it sounds pretty callous. I guess that's because I've become jaded by the constant "Why can't you explain this stuff easily! you must be a bad scientist! I'm going to write letters asking not to fund you!" The better question should be, why does the press not cover this stuff? Maybe they think (rightly so) that no one actually cares about it. Go ahead, ask to have our funding cut and spent on your medicaid bills; don't come whining to me when me and all my scientist friends have left to country to work in a more science-friendly environment.
The problem is that the people assigned to cover science for the mainstream press generally don't understand what they are writing about and, I strongly suspect, because they operate under constant deadline pressure they never even read the scientific literature. They just interview the scientist who did the research and interview another scientist in the field for another perspective and report the most interesting "sound bites" from those two interviews along with a bunch of horribly naive (and often flatly wrong) conjectures about what it all means. You can't really blame them. They're journalists. Most of them majored in journalism, English literature, political science, or history in college and probably never took a science course above the 100-level at any time in their entire undergraduate program. What we need is more Richard Dawkinses, Michio Kakus, and Carl Sagans - academics who take on the task of explaining science to non-scientists. The way you get that is by creating the funding apparatus to make it happen. Academics are quite sensitive to the priorities of funding agencies - they rapidly become very interested in research topics for which funding exists. :) If funding exists for a professorship focused on enhancing the public understanding of science, there will inevitably be plenty of academics competing to fill that position.
Yes, it is. By design.
But it would be nice if peer-reviewed scientific papers were easier to obtain and read.
Consider: a field, from research to development to supporters and advocates is a series of concentric circles. The innermost is the smallest and most knowledgeable: cutting edge and long-standing researchers. The mid-circles are commercial developers. The outermost circle is largest and least knowledgeable: end users, advocates, etc.
The purpose of documentation in this model is to inform and educate the next circle out. The definition of documentation in this model is the process by which the next circle out is informed and educated.
Now the mid-circles are pretty good at documentation, but the inner circles, the researchers, are very, very bad at it. Institutionally bad. So bad, that the whole function of documentation to bridge the moat that has grown between researchers and developers is taken over by other groups where it is done vaguely well. Now in applied physics and mathematics, especially related to computation, you don't see much of that moat. Discoveries echo the world pretty rapidly: there are open communities and open publishing forums, and the interesting stuff is picked up pretty quickly - anyone out there who might want to develop in those areas has ample opportunity to learn about it and make the decision to participate. Think about memristors and quantum computing as good examples.
This is far from the case for the life sciences: the gulf there is huge and yawning, and there is no comparable open community large enough to close it (DIYbio and open biotech movements are still too small). That's one of the reasons I started Open Cures:
As I think there is a great deal to be done here to make biotech and the life sciences look much more like physics in their documentation - and here I mean documentation in the sense above, the propagation of information and learning from the circles of research to the circles of development.
> Now the mid-circles are pretty good at documentation, but the inner circles, the researchers, are very, very bad at it. Institutionally bad. So bad, that the whole function of documentation to bridge the moat that has grown between researchers and developers is taken over by other groups where it is done vaguely well.
Has it occurred to you that the problem is not that the groups are bad at it, but that you are too ill-informed to understand it? Sure, some are bad at "documentation" as you call it, but some (arguably more) are excellent. As a scientist, my job is to do research and advance the field. I will explain it as necessary to the very best of my ability to whoever cares. Please don't tell me that "I'm very, very bad at documenting" just because (1) you never asked me and (2) I haven't just done it by default, out of the goodness of my heart. Read my publications, read my (free) abstracts, read the summaries of my work available in numerous paid journals if you're that interested. But please don't insult me.
I think I'm realizing that the problem here is one of responsibility. To use your terminology, you are claiming that it is the responsibility of the researcher to document everything he (or she, whatever) does for every "circle", and I'm claiming to the contrary.
To that end, let me describe the firehose that is today's science publication. It's been two weeks since I last read through my science RSS feeds, which contain selected publications from about ten journals. In that time, there are around 1000 entries. That's just a small selection of the field... there are many more journals I'm choosing to ignore simply so that my sips from the firehose aren't completely overwhelming.
I will suggest that having every researcher document every finding for every circle is a tremendous waste of time, as the vast majority of that "documentation" would never be read, as no one in the outer circles has interest in it, even if it was written in an accessible manner. In that mindset, I don't think it's the responsibility of the researcher to document his work for the public. Furthermore, given the huge amount of research put out each week (like my RSS feed above shows), just surveying all of it regularly to find what's interesting to the "outer circles" and then writing up in appropriate terminology is close to a full-time job.
I know that in neuroscience, the field I'm currently working, we have the Society for Neuroscience (http://www.sfn.org/) which puts in a lot of work to make the general findings accessible to the public. They do a yeoman's job, I think, and if you browse their site you'll find a lot of very recent science written for the "outer circles", as you call them. If you're interested in a field, find that field's SfN and check out what they wrote; don't look to the experts themselves for regular updates.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Translational_research
"Translating" scientific discoveries into information that will be practical for doctors with actual patients.
Also, another layer of communication involves textbooks and classes.
Why am I not surprised that most of those papers aren't brought to the attention of the public at large? In fact, I'm not only surprised, I'm pleased. Many of them will be making outlandish claims that can't be backed up through peer review. The public would jump on them like they were fact, though, since a 'scientist' published it.
Scientific discovers that are news-worthy DO get published to the public.
This is really not an issue.
Now, I am not the biggest fan of peer review, but in my discipline, you can't publish a smile without peer review in any meaningful journal. Most good science never ends up in the press, cause media simply can't relate to it. I always think about PCR. If it was "discovered today", would something as profoundly important even get a whimper of attention?
Where by "the public" you mean "people who are willing to pay the Nature Publications Group $32 per article, or subscribe to Nature for a few hundred bucks per year per journal, or who happen to routinely take the time to travel to a library which subscribes to the Nature journals."
In other words, you mean: Other scientists. Which is what this study apparently tries to back up with actual statistics.
Scientific publications aren't secret, exactly. They're just orders of magnitude more obscure than everything else in our society. I can sit in a chair and read entire encyclopedias of trivia, download entire albums and movies, I can buy the complete works of various popular novelists and read them on my Kindle for ten bucks apiece, I can barely avoid learning about the various memes of the day, yet I can't read the average scientific article unless I'm paying tuition, working as a postdoc, physically sitting in MIT's library, or willing to pay the cost of a hardcover book.
1) Publications are increasingly easy to find via services such as google scholar, pubmed, and citeseer. Often times, these services will link to freely downloadable versions of the paper. However, should this not be the case, you still have two options.
2) Go to the author's website. It's very common for academics to put preprints or other free versions of their papers on their personal websites. You may need to check all the authors on the paper, but a good rule of thumb is to check the first listed author and the last listed author.
3) If the above isn't available and you really want to get access to the paper, you can always try emailing the authors and asking for a copy. As with personal copies on websites, giving out copies to those who ask is allowed by most journals.
4) As you point out, you can physically go to a library and use a public terminal. Most large cities have universities. Save up the hard to find references and make a weekly or monthly trip to the local university library.
In the far past, you used to have to go down into the "stacks" at a university and dig out a physical copy of a paper you wanted. These stacks were not always accessible to the public and did not always contain the journal you wanted. In comparison, academic material today is more accessible to the average member of the public than it has ever been.
The broader issue as I see it, is that for a layperson or a hobbyist in a scientific field it is near impossible to find papers that you did not hear about through the media or by being in proximity to the authors.
If you do happen upon them, it's usually by pure dumb luck and happenstance. More centralized and open locations for discourse are required.
How about a ycombinator for scientific research?
o.
The trouble is that services needs to be domain specific and it is likely a full time job to continually mine the journals for new content. User submissions are an excellent idea, but probably not sufficient on their own. For example, there is already HN-like site for biomed: http://hackermed.com/hot
There is opportunity here, especially in the areas like health and fitness which are more popular to the public.
Many discoveries in the past come from failed experiments. The failing to achive a desired result can have as much merit for future discovery as a successful enterprise.
The scientific community balks at learning from others mistakes and has a tendancy to ostracise those that failed.
I personally enjoy the insights into the mindsets and thoughs behind an avenue of research, successful or failed. I find it helps give me a glimps at what others feel is possible.
O.
And most scientific papers actually don't make outlandish claims. If anything they make rather mundane claims. For example, a new algorithm for Q-SAT that reduces the complexity in the presence of a K-Oracle from O(3.5^mn) to O(pi^m(3.5/pi)n).
I'd love to hear your comment on the suggestion
http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fj...
that most published research findings are false, despite peer review.
A common mistake is to do things such as mining for correlations. A stronger grounding in statistics would definitely help most scientists (and ppl in general -- one reason I support the push to replace calculus with statistics in HS math).
Although oddly, even if most finding are false they typically create the basis to do an actual real follow-up study, with actual hypothesis' which are much more likely to give real results. IOW, these false findings still accelerate the rate that science occurs. Although better science upfront would be more efficient still.
I see you are being severely downvoted, and disagreed with specifically on the quoted point. Did you perhaps mean "Scientists tend to issue press releases about studies that aren't yet peer-reviewed"? I can think of several examples of that, which have been posted here to HN. The most notorious recent example was the "arsenic-based life" example,
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/debate-over-arsenic-b...
the subject of several HN threads. Jumping the gun on the peer review process by issuing press releases before peer review does seem to be a common failing, and altogether too many submissions to HN on science issues are based on such press releases. But as mechanical_fish points out, it would help the situation for the general public (and journalists) if the actual peer-reviewed scientific literature, with all its faults
http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fj...
were readily available to members of the general public.