Steve Corneliussen's topics this week:
- A letter in Nature urging scientists to replace reluctance with engagement concerning Wikipedia.
- A commentary in Slate scolding scientists for mishandling the problem of a disproportion of Democrats within science.
- James Fallows's blog posting cautioning about too much alarm over Chinese students' test scores.
- Chester Finn's Wall Street Journal op-ed sounding the alarm about Chinese students' test scores.
- A New York Review of Books commentary about the future of information, including open access in scientific publishing.
Time for science to embrace Wikipedia?
Wikipedia will be a decade old next month. What's its standing these days in the scientific community? Nature's editors this week gave a stage for answering to two scientists from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in the UK.
In Nature's 9 December Correspondence department—letters to the editor—the two proclaim that "the time has come for scientists to engage more actively with Wikipedia" and that its "user-friendly global reach offers an unprecedented opportunity for public engagement with science."
Wikipedia, they declare, has become "the first port of call for people seeking information on subjects that include scientific topics. Like it or not, other scientists and the public are using it to get an overview of your specialist area." For "society's sake," the two conclude, "scientists must overcome their reluctance to embrace this resource."
Daniel Sarewitz: "A democratic society needs Republican scientists"
Daniel Sarewitz codirects the Consortium for Science, Policy, and Outcomes at Arizona State University, writes a monthly column for Nature, and is based in Washington. This week in a commentary in Slate, he gave all of science a harsh political scolding.
Sarewitz charges the science community with gross, harmful inattention to side effects arising from science's huge partisan imbalance. He cites a Pew Research Center poll from July 2009: 55% of US scientists are Democrats, but only around 6% are Republicans.
Why this matters, he says, can be seen in the case of human-caused climate disruption, concerning which "beliefs are astonishingly polarized according to party affiliation and ideology," as shown in statistics that he recites. Sarewitz asks:
Does that mean that Democrats are more than twice as likely to accept and understand the scientific truth of the matter? And that Republicans are dominated by scientifically illiterate yahoos and corporate shills willing to sacrifice the planet for short-term economic and political gain? Or could it be that disagreements over climate change are essentially political—and that science is just carried along for the ride?
Sarewitz notes that for two decades, "evidence about global warming has been directly and explicitly linked to a set of policy responses demanding international governance regimes, large-scale social engineering, and the redistribution of wealth." Since most Republicans hate such policy responses, Sarewitz writes, "No wonder the Republicans are suspicious of the science."
He continues:
Think about it: The results of climate science, delivered by scientists who are overwhelmingly Democratic, are used over a period of decades to advance a political agenda that happens to align precisely with the ideological preferences of Democrats. Coincidence—or causation?
The scolding goes beyond the charge of gross, harmful inattention to side effects arising from the partisan imbalance. Sarewitz also charges that Democrats "seem to have convinced themselves that they are the keepers of the Enlightenment spirit, and that those who disagree with them on issues like climate change are fundamentally irrational."
But the scolding goes equal-opportunity when Sarewitz writes:
Meanwhile, many Republicans have come to believe that mainstream science is corrupted by ideology and amounts to no more than politics by another name. Attracted to fringe scientists like the small and vocal group of climate skeptics, Republicans appear to be alienated from a mainstream scientific community that by and large doesn't share their political beliefs. The climate debacle is only the most conspicuous example of these debilitating tendencies, which play out in issues as diverse as nuclear waste disposal, protection of endangered species, and regulation of pharmaceuticals.
Sarewitz's remedies include platitudes like these two suggestions: "foster greater confidence among Republican politicians about the legitimacy of mainstream science" and "cultivate more informed, creative, and challenging debates about the policy implications of scientific knowledge."
But he warns that the citizenry's generally high level of trust in science "could well be forfeit in the escalating fervor of national politics, given that most scientists are on one side of the partisan divide." If that trust is lost, he warns, "it would be a huge and perhaps unrecoverable loss for a democratic society."
At the end, Sarewitz offers another remedy: scientists should stop cherishing obsolete "myths of a pure science insulated from dirty partisanship." Moreover, it will do no good, he asserts, simply to issue more calls for improved science literacy. The issue "is legitimacy, not literacy. A democratic society needs Republican scientists."
James Fallows: "Don't go nuts" on Chinese test scores
James Fallows recently returned from a multiyear spell reporting in China about China. He's a national correspondent for the Atlantic, where one of his 7 December blog postings carries the headline "On Those 'Stunning' Shanghai Test Scores." Fallows cautions: Take "this seriously, and recognize that China is moving ahead in many, many ways. But recognize the fallibilities in this study, and don't go nuts."
Fallows emphasizes something that the New York Times front-page news story pointed out. As he puts it, the "5000+ students who were tested in China's biggest and most modern city may or may not be indicative of broader progress throughout the country. . . . Anyone who has had experience with schools and testing in China will want to know more about how these tests were administered, supervised, and scored."
He stipulates that he's "happy for people to be as startled as possible by these results" because anything "that will direct attention to American fundamentals—education, infrastructure, research, that sort of tedious thing" might spur useful action. "But on the merits," he asserts, "it's worth applying a version of Reagan's old 'trust, but verify' approach toward the Soviet Union."
He quotes at length "an overnight reaction from a scientist at a major U.S. university, who explains some detailed cautions against giving too much weight to the results." This unnamed scientist begins by calling the reaction of US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan "breathless" and "quite overblown." The scientist offers a technical analysis based on statistical principles, and at the end offers this:
Perhaps the real educational deficiency here is in the sophistication with which our chattering and leadership classes understand statistics and the limitation of standardized tests in measuring student, school, and national educational system achievement. Not to mention what constitutes a good education and how it serves broader goals of national development.
Chester Finn: Chinese students' test scores alarming
"We must face the fact that China is bent on surpassing us, and everyone else, in education," writes Chester E. Finn Jr in an 8 December Wall Street Journal op-ed. The headline: "A Sputnik Moment for US Education: China delivers another wake-up call to those who think American schools are globally competitive." Finn is a former US assistant secretary of education, a senior fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution, and president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.
The news peg, as Finn reports it, is that on "math, reading and science tests given to 15-year-olds in 65 countries last year, Shanghai's teenagers topped every other jurisdiction in all three subjects." The New York Times front-paged that news on the day before Finn's op-ed appeared. The Times story quoted Finn and described the test as the Program for International Student Assessment, known as PISA, administered by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The Times described OECD as "a Paris-based group that includes the world's major industrial powers."
Finn's op-ed begins, "Fifty-three years after Sputnik caused an earthquake in American education by giving us reason to believe that the Soviet Union had surpassed us, China has delivered another shock." He sustains that tone. Three excerpts:
Americans would be making a big mistake to suppose that Shanghai's result is some sort of aberration.If China can produce top PISA scorers in one city in 2009—Shanghai's population of 20 million is larger than that of many whole countries—it can do this in 10 cities in 2019 and 50 in 2029. Or maybe faster.
[The US is] not getting worse. But we're mostly flat, and our very modest gains were trumped by many other countries.
[U]ntil this week we could at least pretend that China wasn't one of those countries that was a threat. We could treat Hong Kong as a special case—the British legacy, combined with prosperity. We could allow ourselves to believe that China was only interested in building dams, buying our bonds, making fake Prada bags, underselling everybody else, and coating our kids' toys with toxic paint, while neglecting its education system. . . . [W]e could comfort ourselves that their curriculum emphasized discipline and rote learning, not analysis or creativity. Today that comfort has been stripped away.
Finn reports that OECD calls Shanghai a "leader in reform" and cites concrete reasons for the success: a "near universal education system, its competitiveness (measured by student admissions to universities and to the best secondary schools), a very high level of student engagement, a modern assessment system, an ambitious curriculum, and a program to intervene in weak schools."
He closes by wondering if the news will get America "beyond excuse-making, bickering over who should do what, and prioritizing adults over children."
Harvard's Darnton, open access, and the long view
As director of Harvard's library, Robert Darnton has a vantage point for taking the long view of the information age. What he perceives may well merit attention by anybody following the evolution of scientific publishing in general, and open access in particular. This week, on the free side of the subscription wall at the New York Review of Books, Darnton offers a long essay.
Nearly three years ago, the New York Times reported that Harvard would "soon begin posting research and articles produced by its faculty on the Internet free of charge." Arts and sciences professors had "voted overwhelmingly in favor of a resolution that would commit Harvard to open access—the movement to speed the exchange of knowledge by freely distributing research on the Web." (Are a formally published paper and its underlying research really identical? The Times didn't say.) The Times quoted an e-mail message from Darnton: "The chorus of 'yeas' was thunderous. I hope this marks a turning point in the way communications operate in the world of scholarship."
Four months ago, in a Times book review that amounted to a historical essay on the balance between intellectual property rights and the rights of the commons, Darnton framed his long view. He declared that if "we reassessed our history . . . we would reassert our citizenship in a Republic of Letters that was crucial to the creation of the American Republic—and that is more important than ever in the age of the Internet." He quoted Thomas Jefferson: "The field of knowledge is the common property of mankind." He quoted Benjamin Franklin: "That as we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours, and this we should do freely and generously."
Darnton has been developing a long view for a long time. His long NYRB essay details it. He covers a lot of territory.
He discusses Harvard's "general policy of opening up our library to the outside world and sharing our intellectual wealth" and research libraries as places "where rare books and e-books can be brought together."
He observes that more "printed books are produced each year than the year before," and that if "the history of books teaches anything, it is that one medium does not displace another, at least not in the short run," and that "it may be that the new technology used in print-on-demand will breathe new life" into the book.
He laments that "research libraries are going through hard times—times so hard that they are inflicting serious damage on the entire world of learning," and that between 1986 and 2005, "the prices for institutional subscriptions to journals rose 302 percent," while the consumer price index went up by only 68 percent.
He asks, "How many professors in chemistry can give you even a ballpark estimate of the cost of a year's subscription to Tetrahedron (currently $39,082)?" And: "What physicist can come up with a reasonable guess about the average price of a journal in physics ($3368) . . . ?"
Darnton never specifically acknowledges that some scientific publishing is nonprofit, but he criticizes scientific publishers generally. For example:
In 2009, Elsevier, the giant publisher of scholarly journals based in the Netherlands, made a $1.1 billion profit in its publishing division, yet 2009 was a disastrous year for library budgets. Harvard's seventy-three libraries cut their expenditures by more than 10 percent, and other libraries suffered even greater reductions, but the journal publishers were not impressed. Many of them raised their prices by 5 percent and sometimes more. This year, the publishers of the several Nature journals announced that they were increasing the cost of subscriptions for libraries in the University of California by 400 percent. Profit margins of journal publishers in the fields of science, technology, and medicine recently ran to 30–40 percent; yet those publishers add very little value to the research process, and most of the research is ultimately funded by American taxpayers through the National Institutes of Health and other organizations.
He energetically advocates the expansion of open access:
Professors expect services from their libraries, even if they never set foot in them and consult Tetrahedron or The Journal of Comparative Neurology from computers in their labs. A few, however, have stared the problem in the face and seized it by the horns. In 2001 scientists at Stanford and Berkeley circulated a petition calling for their colleagues to submit articles only to open-access journals—that is, journals that made them available from digital repositories free of charge, either immediately or after a delay.
The effectiveness of such journals had been proven by BioMed Central, a British enterprise, which had been publishing a whole series of them since 1999. Led by Harold Varmus, a Nobel laureate who is now director of the National Cancer Institute, American researchers allied with the Public Library of Science founded their own series, beginning with PLoS Biology in 2003. Foundations provided start-up funding, and ongoing publication costs were covered by the research grants received by the authors of the articles. Thanks to rigorous peer review and the prestige of the authors, the PLoS publications were a great success.
According to citation indexes and statistics of hits, open-access journals were consulted more frequently than most commercial publications. By 2008, when the National Institutes of Health required the recipients of its grants to make their work available through open access—although it permitted an embargo of up to twelve months—cracks were appearing everywhere in the commercial monopoly of publishing in the medical sciences.
Darnton goes on to assert that if "the monopolies of price-gouging publishers are to be broken, we need more than open-access repositories. We need open-access journals that will be self-sustaining." He calls for the reversing of "the economics of journal publishing by covering costs, rationally determined, at the production end instead of by paying for an exorbitant profit in addition to the production costs at the consumption end." He describes the Compact for Open-Access Publishing Equity (COPE) as a new "attempt to create a coalition of universities to push journal publishing" in the right direction.
Darnton also examines the legal wrangling over Google Book Search, and the implications. He asks, "Do we want to settle copyright questions by private litigation? And do we want to commercialize access to knowledge?"
He calls for a "Digital Public Library of America," or DPLA. Google, he says, has "demonstrated the possibility of transforming the intellectual riches of our libraries, books lying inert and underused on shelves, into an electronic database that could be tapped by anyone anywhere at any time." Darnton asks, "Why not adapt its formula for success to the public good—a digital library composed of virtually all the books in our greatest research libraries available free of charge to the entire citizenry, in fact, to everyone in the world?" He offers examples of smaller-scale initiatives that might suggest that a DPLA could succeed.
Darnton concludes with this summation of his long view:
Should the Google Book Search agreement not be upheld by the court, its unraveling would come at an extraordinary moment in the development of an information society. We have now reached a period of fluidity, uncertainty, and opportunity. Things have come undone, and they can be put together in new ways, subordinating private profit to the public good and providing everyone with access to a commonwealth of culture.
Would a Digital Public Library of America solve all the other problems—the inflation of journal prices, the economics of scholarly publishing, the unbalanced budgets of libraries, and the barriers to the careers of young scholars? No. Instead, it would open the way to a general transformation of the landscape in what we now call the information society. Rather than better business plans (not that they don't matter), we need a new ecology, one based on the public good instead of private gain. This may not be a satisfactory conclusion. It's not an answer to the problem of sustainability. It's an appeal to change the system.
Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. His reports to AIP are collected each Friday for "Science and the Media." He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA's history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.
