
Who listens to scientists? Mostly just other scientists. - gronkie
http://theincidentaleconomist.com/wordpress/who-listens-to-scientists/
======
randomwalker
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.

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...](http://blogs.plos.org/everyone/2011/06/15/%E2%80%9Cwhy-the-net-
doesnt-work-for-science-and-how-to-fix-it%E2%80%9D-a-talk-by-michael-nielsen-
at-plos-san-francisco-hq-june-29th-at-6-pm/)

[1] Is it irony? The word is so overused I can't even tell anymore.

~~~
PaulHoule
Paywalls for scientific papers burn me up.

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/

~~~
crocowhile
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?

~~~
maaku
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.

~~~
lutorm
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.

------
bdhe
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.

* 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.

~~~
Lewisham
Here's a crack:

* 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.

------
impendia
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.

~~~
kevinskii
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.

~~~
kragen
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.

~~~
pessimizer
"[...]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."

At most once. Links are what the internet is for:)

~~~
kragen
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.

If you want links, here they are:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field_(mathematics)#Definition_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field_\(mathematics\)#Definition_and_illustration)

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubic_field>

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discriminant_of_an_algebraic_nu...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discriminant_of_an_algebraic_number_field)

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.)

~~~
pessimizer
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.

------
juretriglav
This is something that I'm trying to solve with a project of mine:
<http://www.tiris.org>

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.

~~~
repos
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?).

Take a look at this project which is similar to yours (not mine btw):
<http://annotatr.appspot.com/>

~~~
juretriglav
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?

~~~
nkurz
_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.

------
eykanal
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.

~~~
blahblahblah
"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.

~~~
eykanal
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.

------
groby_b
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.

Yes, it is. By design.

------
Goladus
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.

------
reasonattlm
The problem here is documentation.

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:

<https://www.opencures.org>

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.

~~~
eykanal
What a terrible way to describe it!

> 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.

~~~
reasonattlm
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.

~~~
eykanal
(Doggone HN noprocrast settings...)

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.

------
niels_olson
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.

------
jvdh
And this is bad why?

------
wccrawford
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.

This is really not an issue.

~~~
mechanical_fish
_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.

~~~
tensor
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.

~~~
orillian
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.

How about a ycombinator for scientific research?

o.

~~~
tensor
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.

