metascience

Current Biology is running a short editorial by Geoffrey North, wishy-washing its way through a non-opinion about the value of blogging in science ("Social Media Likes and Dislikes") [1]. North gives a brief synopsis of the arsenic-eating bacteria fiasco ("An arsenical profile", "Alien biology hype"), which he admits was a victory for the importance of blogging and the open science approach.

But he can't help worrying about all those people exercising their free speech in science:

But there is also, I think, a danger here, which lies in the very speed of response, and the way that blogs are essentially “vanity publications” which lack the constraints of more conventional publishing — they are not reviewed, and do not even have to pass the critical eye of any editor. In principle, anyone can write a blog and criticize anything — they do not have to have any specific expertise. And the criticism can be picked up, advertised and amplified, for example by Twitter, by those who feel a post supports their agenda.

Such criticism can of course be harmful — at the least there tends to be a “no smoke without fire” effect. And once a scientific reputation has been tainted, it can be hard to restore confidence.

I have little patience for the risk-averse culture of academics.

The bottom line is: People need to decide if they want to be heard, or if they want to be validated. I have long been an associate editor at PLoS ONE, and once I edited a paper that received a lot of critical commentary. That journal has a policy of open comment threads on papers, so I told disgruntled scientists to please write comments. The comments appear right with the article when anybody reads it, they appear immediately without any delay, and they can form a coherent exchange of views with authors of the article and other skeptical readers.

Some of the scientists didn't want to submit comments, they wanted to have formal letters brought through the editorial review process. "Why?" I wrote, when you could have your comments up immediately and read by anyone who is reading the research in the first place? If you want to make an impact, I wrote, you should put your ideas up there right now.

They replied, "How would you feel if someone published something wrong about Neandertals? Wouldn't you want to publish a formal reply?"

I wrote: "In that case, I would probably get a blog."

What is the difference between being heard and being validated? It's whether you are contributing to the solution or to the hindsight.

References

Paul Salopek has a story for National Geographic about the impact of Somali pirates on oceanographic science: "A Hidden Victim of Somali Pirates: Science". One of the most important scientific projects on the continental shelf off East Africa is drilling for sediment cores to examine ancient climates and volcanism. This helps us to understand the environmental context for early human evolution.

"This problem has been going on a long time and with virtually no public awareness," says Sarah Feakins, a researcher at the University of Southern California whose work on paleoclimates has been hijacked by piracy fears. "All kinds of efforts are made to keep the commercial sea lanes around Somalia open. Nobody talks about the lost science."

The later part of the article describes the loss of routine weather reports from ships, as they choose against broadcasting their locations to eavesdropping pirates.

A jeremiad from Henry Bourne: "Writing on the wall" [1].

Competition drives scientific discovery, but too much competition for scarce resources can block progress, and has done so. Thus, the growing flood of grant applications surpasses growth in NIH dollars, reduces the proportion of grants that are funded, and renders peer review increasingly arbitrary because a project ranked in the 20th percentile is often no less meritorious than one ranked in the 10th percentile (Berg, 2013).

Another problem is that we now have a ‘holding tank' of postdoctoral scholars that is overflowing with bright young scientists who are indentured to greying lab chiefs and are thus unable to break new ground as independent researchers (Bourne, 2012). The worst consequence, but harder to quantify, is that scientists avoid risky, creative projects in favour of ‘sure things’ more likely to be funded by conservative reviewers (Nicholson and Ioannidis, 2012).

Probably most people who have thought about these problems recognize the fundamental catch-22 represented by centralized funding of science. It would be more efficient of time, training, and human capital of all kinds to simply pick a limited number of "winners" early in their careers, provide adequate funding to a relatively small number of institutes, and turn excess talent away at the door. But large institutes often breed groupthink and complacency. There is no accurate indicator of "talent" that would allow selection of those who will achieve great scientific findings from the vast pool of undergraduates. And forcing people to compete every so often does provide a mechanism for cutting out deadwood. That is to say, the likeliest alternative to the current system has lots of obvious problems.

Yet as Bourne and many others say, granting agencies have become the main drivers of groupthink and complacency, we have set up a system where talented creative people are actively turned away from science careers, and no "deadwood" is ever actually cut out of the system because networks of greyhairs protect each other zealously.

I want to draw attention to the comment section of the essay, which has a series of thoughtful exchanges. This passage from Bourne deserves to be front-paged:

A more vexing and crucial problem is that even the faculty who agree with me remain silent and virtually inert. They worry constantly about difficulties getting grants funded, and (correctly) feel pressured to spend most of their time writing grant applications, scrambling to support students and postdocs, and wrangling with prestigious journals. These pressures combine with habituation (in earlier years) to a friendlier funding climate to impose a devastating inertia.

My instinct is that we need to democratize the process of science. A wider group of researchers should have power, not just a stake in the results.

References