In a delicious piece of irony[1], the paper that this post refers to appears to be behind a paywall, illustrating one of the causes of the problem. (Edit: since the post is erroring out, the link to the abstract is: http://pus.sagepub.com/content/19/1/115)
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.
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.
Things are changing. Now all publicly funded research in the USA and UK must lead to open access publications. This does not mean that the actual final version of the paper will be available to everybody though: normally it's the unedited copy, the manuscript as it was submitted to the journal before publication.
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?
In the US, you're probably thinking of the NIH's open access policy. The NIH is the largest research agency, with a more than $30 billion dollar budget, so this does cover a lot of US research, but it doesn't cover research from many other agencies.
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.
Thank you for the very detailed comment. Yes, NIH is what I had in mind. I was under the impression it wasn't going to be just NIH though, as it happens in fact in the UK.
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?
That may apply where you work, but it is not universal. I work at NASA and almost all the papers we generate are (regrettably) published behind paywalls. And the consequences are far worse than having to fork over a few (thousands of) dollars to read them--our scientists are contractually bound NOT to discuss their research during the blackout period prior to publication. It's stifling to research and the community.
Out of curiosity, which journals are these? The NASA scientists I know of that work in astrophysics seem to publish in the normal journals and put their papers on arXiv like everyone else.
The blackout period should be what we call "embargo" and it is a requirement of the publisher; as for the rest: I thought hard sciences had solved the OA problem long time ago with the adoption of arxiv. Why don't you use arxiv?
If arXiv started charging 5 bucks for everyone to post there, the only problem would be to make it hassle-free enough. The only people who would be discouraged are the crackpots.
Well, it's kinda like say you have University A and University B receiving funding. University A does some research that B wants to use, so B pays A for access. It's just shuffling taxpayer's money around between two different budgets. It never occurred to them that actual taxpayers - i.e. us - would also want to have access. So there needs to be a way to give that access, yet still preserve the cross-subsidy model between publicly funded institutions.
That's not my experience random walker. A huge number of papers are hidden inside journals, and sites like the ACM. I run into this problem constantly.
No, the publishers don't make it availble; you need to look for it on the authors' home pages. Most of the time, if you Google the title with "filetype:pdf", it'll show up.
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.
Computer science journals are pretty unique in that they let authors get away with that. In any other industry the papers are owned by the publisher, not the author, and putting a link to your own paper on your own website is a copyright violation they will take you to court for (or just blacklist you so you never publish again).
Not true. In astrophysics, at least, all journals I know of let you keep rights to noncommercial publication like putting the paper on arXiv and on your web page.
You have to look for personal or institute pages. For example, one of my papers is behind the ACM paywall [0], but you can also get the pdf at our institute website [1], where we publish everything [2].
And even if you have ACM digital library membership, sometimes the paper refered to in the ACM DL is hosted over at Springer or the like and you must pay 30$ or more to access the paper.
> 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.
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).
Good reason to have a couple friends at large universities that have institutional subscriptions to journals and the like who can hook you up when needed. Shhh. :x
There is a joke that goes: "On an average about a handful of people end up reading your thesis, and you hope your committee is among those few :-)"
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.
* 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 am a mathematician. My research concerns the distribution of discriminants of cubic fields. I doubt exceedingly that anyone without extensive training in math (other than my mom) would have any interest whatsoever in looking at my papers.
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.
If you were to start a blog where you provide links to your papers (when allowable) along with synopses for those of us with only an engineering-level math background, you might be pleasantly surprised at how much interest your work attracts--particularly on places like HN. Please let us know if you decide to do so, and I'll be sure to bookmark you.
If you have only an engineering-level math background, the blog will have to explain what a field is, what a cubic field is, and what a discriminant (of a field) is, in every post. And it will have to do it briefly enough that you stay interested, and accurately enough that what follows is meaningful. This sounds to me like an impossible task.
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.
If the goal were to make it so the layperson could read and understand the paper itself, then yes, that may well be an impossible task.
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.
Moving the explanations out of the blog posts into a separate page or pages makes the problem harder, not easier, because it keeps you from omitting parts of the background that aren't necessary to understand the relevance of some particular result.
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.)
Many people wouldn't stay interested; I'd say the vast majority wouldn't. But, after explaining those things to the extent that you thought was worthwhile, you ended up with 100 long term readers out of the x billion on the internet, I'd count that as a huge win, myself.
HN is a highly atypical community. People here usually care about learning.
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.
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.
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:
There are Science Cafes all over the world that have scientists give talks to laypersons: sciencecafes.org
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.
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.
And this silo, where even extensively trained mathematicians of other fields can barely understand each other is a large part of the problem. This is not aimed at you but a general problem. It is a real bottleneck. An inefficient use of resources resulting in inconsistent use and re-appropriation of notation, making each field have its own dialect and general slowing of the field. People keep rediscovering the same things in their fields that the other knew decades ago. Alot of data, much less information.
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.
Hello all, thanks for your interest. To answer some of the comments --
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!
I have to admit, I don't know that I'd be willing to put in the effort myself unless you first persuaded me why cubic field discriminant distributions were so much more interesting than the other thousand things I could spend the next hour reading about. (Or listening to you about.) This would indeed be much easier face-to-face.
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.
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.
Awesome project, I've been thinking a lot about how to open up research and get more researchers to collaborate. I wanted to drop you a note to talk some more, but not sure how as HN doesn't have a PM system (right?).
Awesome commenter is awesome! Thanks, there's still a lot that needs to be done but I'm getting there.
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?
Love this comment. I am all for democratizing research. I think researchers all to often have a sense of entitlement, or talk in there own language. Try reading a peer reviewed medical journal. We make as language as difficult as possible. Some if is on purpose, but ultimately it kills innovation. Most of the great ideas come from cross pollination of ideas from divergent fields (discovery of brain shunt) or collision of two hunches (internet, and the printing press)... Chance favors the connected mind. The challenge is how do we connect minds and get then to talk in the same language.
I'm somewhat confused why this is an issue. Who listens to anyone in a specific field? How many non-plumbers read up on issues that matter to plumbers? Most research publications are describing incremental advances in highly technical fields. Why the hell would the public care about (to take an example from my J Neuroscience rss feed) seratonin reuptake transporter function in C Elegans? They won't. However, when that breakthrough comes that makes it relevant to curing cancer or whatever, they'll hear about it.
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.
"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."
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.
I agree with this, but given that there's barely funding for research itself now, this task has fallen to nonprofits. Hopefully they can do a good job of it.
There's of course also the point that, duh, heavily focused work is mostly read by peers. It's equivalent to saying HN is only read by software engineers/startup types, so it's insular.
I'm not sure a comparison to mass media is necessarily appropriate. It's probably more important for engineers and entrepreneurs to bring relevant scientific knowledge to the market than it is for scientific papers to be published in mass media.
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.
Your response, I think, well illustrates my point. If your output is abstracts, reviews, and papers then you are not documenting as I have narrowly defined it above - you are working on materials for your own circle.
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.
What really torques me off about open access is how totally complicit the libraries are. The bigger their budgets, the more powerful they are. So they have no incentive to provide papers to the researchers who actually need them.
Scientists tend to publish papers that aren't yet peer-reviewed and are only available in publications that cost a lot of money to obtain.
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.
Scientific discovers that are news-worthy DO get published to the public.
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.
There are a few tricks to obtaining science publications without paying the journals.
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.
There is a small issue with your tricks and that is that the end user...you or I, knows about the paper in the first place and are trying to gain access to it.
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.
There is definitely a need for services that collect, categorize, and disseminate new scientific information in an easy to understand fashion. These types of services would be valuable both to the public and to researchers.
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.
> Scientists tend to publish papers that aren't yet peer-reviewed
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?
Most of this just not true. Read almost any journal of repute, from Nature to Science to JAMA to Algorithmica -- they're all peer reviewed.
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 read the back and forth on this controversy when it happened, and in general I agree with that article -- as it applies to fields such as medicine. It applies less to fields like CS (although there's data that proofs are frequently wrong).
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.
They're peer reviewed by the journal before publication. Journals receive a black eye when they publish something that turned out to be bad science and it affects their influence. There are plenty of bad journals that specialize in publishing pseudoscience, but no one pays attention to them.
The sad truth of your comment is that in many cases the scientific community by its very nature, is forced to ratify and review everything so that it can withstand the critical eye.
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.
Scientists tend to publish papers that aren't yet peer-reviewed
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,
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
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.