Tag: Science Communication

Academics on the Internets

Via Scott Esposito, I read David Parry on why academics should write more for the general public:

Meanwhile, the general public perceives faculty members as isolated from reality, holding cushy jobs, and uninterested in open communication. The public has little access to the broad diversity of knowledge, experience, and background inside higher education, because those academics who do achieve broader platforms generally come from only the most elite universities. Although many of those public intellectuals are brilliant writers and speakers, they represent only a tiny percentage of the expertise available in the academic world.

This raises the question of what academics have to offer large online media outlets that is different from what excellent professional journalists offer. My first thought is sheer number: there aren’t enough excellent professional journalists who can write competently on certain specialized topics (e.g., we have a lot of great political and sports journalists writing even for smaller outlets, but fewer great science journalists); academics can help fight the good fight and take good opportunities that come their way. Continue reading “Academics on the Internets”

Online journals have not made publication dates irrelevant…

So why is it so hard to find the pub date in the HTML view of PLoS papers? The date needs immediately visible to be somewhere in this space:

PLOSGen

BTW, this is not my paper – it’s by the other, much more productive Michael A. White in whose shadow I’ve lived for years. I’ve never met him, but I have received his mail at one point.

Giving credit where credit is due

Earlier this week, the very popular Facebook science outreach site, I Fucking Love Science, came under fire for its seemingly systematic use of copyrighted material from a variety of artists without attribution or their permission. This sparked a “conversation” – most of which is depressing and not worth reading – about how content should be shared. Over at the Symbiartic blog at Scientific American, artist (and the guy you want to design your tattoo for you) Glendon Mellow has, in the words of Peter Edmonds, composed an “important, smart post” summarizing his thoughts on the issue.

As members of the online culture, we don’t have to accept that image theft will always be the dominant way of sharing visual information online: culture matures. Expectations change. But right now, large portions of science communication online are part of the problem. – Glendon Mellow, “Mash-Up This! Science Communication’s Image Problem”

*Hat tip to Peter Edmonds.

Retraction rate increases with impact factor – is this because of professional editors?

Folks have long noted the strong positive correlation between high impact factor and retraction rate. There are three primary theories I’ve run across that attempt explain why Nature, Science, Cell, etc. have substantially higher retraction rates than other journals:

1) Acceptable risk/fame and glory theory: High impact factor journals are willing to publish riskier, but potentially higher-impact claims ASAP – more retractions are the price for getting high-impact science out early. The more negative version of this theory is that high impact factor journals care more about a high impact factor than about the integrity of what they publish.

2) Heightened scrutiny theory: papers published in high visibility journals get more scrutiny and thus flaws/fraud are more likely to be detected, but fraud/errors happen roughly equally everywhere. An associated theory is the high-stakes fraud theory: if you’re going to commit fraud, you need to make the payoff worth the risk, so you’re going to submit to Nature and not BBA.

Anthony Bretscher, in an MBoC commentary on editors, proposes a new theory, which, based on personal experience, I believe accounts for most of the correlation between retraction rate and high impact factor journals:

Continue reading “Retraction rate increases with impact factor – is this because of professional editors?”

That, sir, is “craftism”; and “craftism” is wrong

On Wednesday, 16 January 2013, a group of intellectuals engaged in a legendary debate on the validity of “glitter” as an art supply, particularly as it related to science communication and science art. What follows may be the only record still in existence of this discussion…

Click for the full stor[if]y
Click for the full stor[if]y