Science and the media: 29 January - 4 February
DOI: 10.1063/PT.4.0752
Steve Corneliussen’s topics this week:
- Poor countries’ loss of open access to scientific publications, as discussed at SciDev.Net and in The Lancet.
- Major newspapers’ coverage of NASA’s recent announcements concerning exoplanets.
- Some joshing of physicists in a New York Times letter to the editor.
- The Kepler satellite observatory’s search for exoplanets, as discussed on the New York Times front page.
- Support for science education in a recent column by the conservative George F. Will.
- Many high-school biology teachers’ lack of classroom forthrightness concerning evolution, as reported in Science magazine.
Commentary in The Lancet: Open access in the developing world, cont.
Though the general context is biomedicine, not physics, a commentary in The Lancet (free registration required) under the headline “Big publishers cut access to journals in poor countries” may merit attention from members of the physics community who follow the issue of open access in scientific publishing.
The 22 January commentary has already drawn attention at SciDev.Net , which calls itself “a not-for-profit organisation dedicated to providing reliable and authoritative information about science and technology for the developing world.” There, a brief recent summary reports that in 2001, “publishing companies that include Elsevier, Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, and Springer, signed up to the Health InterNetwork for Access to Research Initiative (HINARI),” which became “the main system providing free access to scientific journals in low-income countries.”
The SciDev.Net summary continues:
In a deal negotiated by the WHO, they agreed to remain part of the system until at least 2015.
HINARI was not intended to solve the problem of access to scientific knowledge. . . . Yet it transformed the work of institutions in the developing world, enabling researchers to contribute to the knowledge needed to improve public health and reduce poverty.
But earlier this year, researchers in Bangladesh were told they no longer have free access to 2,500 journals through the system. Institutions in Kenya and Nigeria received similar messages, while scientists in other countries report being unable to access some journals as far back as 2007. According to the WHO [World Health Organization], 28 low-income countries are now excluded from HINARI.
Giving free access to low-income countries costs publishers virtually nothing . . . but cutting access can damage their image and trigger a backlash. Crucially, [the Lancet commentary’s authors] say, it highlights that publishers are disconnected from the goals of governments and institutions working for development.
And indeed the full commentary piece in The Lancet begins, “The world’s main system for allowing free access to scientific journals in low-income countries seems to be falling apart as big publishers withdraw.” The authors, Tracey Pérez Koehlmoos and Richard Smith, call this development “a major step backwards for science, health, and development in low-income countries” and declare that “universal open access—to all journals in all countries—is the only long-term sustainable solution for access to scientific information in low-income and middle-income countries.”
The commentary reports that around “4800 institutions in 105 countries have had access to some 7000 journals, including all the most prestigious publications,” meaning “that institutions in poor countries had better access to journals than some leading universities in the rich world.”
The commentary authors hammer hard in this passage:
Our immediate response is that this is an ungracious and ill-advised move on behalf of the publishers, reminiscent of when Elsevier was exposed as running arms fairs and then had to quit the business. In exchange for a few dollars, these publishers risk creating a torrent of ill-will against them from the excluded countries, authors around the world, and quite possibly their own staff. Pharmaceutical companies have learned the hard way that buccaneering tactics in poor countries do not work and will not be tolerated, and the consequence is severe damage to their image, brands, and products. Unlike the drug industry, which does incur distribution costs, the big commercial publishers can give free access to low-income countries at virtually no cost to themselves, something that seems to have passed them by on the basis of this latest decision.
Near the end, the commentary invokes a wider view of open access:
The companies have also taken this step at a time when the not-for-profit open-access movement is gathering pace. The Public Library of Science will soon be publishing 2% of all science, technology, and medicine papers through PloS One, obliging the Nature Publishing Group and other publishers to start something similar. True open access is the long-term answer to access to scientific studies in low-income and middle-income countries in a way that HINARI can never be.
The authors note that some “critics have rejoiced at this blow to HINARI because they think, perhaps rightly, that it will hasten the arrival of universal open access.” In closing, they declare that they “share that aspiration, but temper our belief with the knowledge that universal open access is still something for the future.”
Exoplanets: New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal
Do American newspapers value important astronomy news? Here’s some anecdotal evidence: All three major East Coast national papers gave serious coverage to NASA’s Wednesday exoplanet announcements, with front-page stories in the New York Times and Washington Post , and with a page 3 Robert Lee Hotz writeup in the Wall Street Journal.
Dennis Overbye in the Times, continuing from his previously discussed front-page article about the exoplanet-discovering Kepler satellite observatory, begins by summarizing the news:
Astronomers have cracked the Milky Way like a piñata, and planets are now pouring out so fast that they do not know what to do with them all./blq
In a long-awaited announcement, scientists operating NASA’s Kepler planet-hunting satellite reported on Wednesday that they had identified 1,235 possible planets orbiting other stars, potentially tripling the number of known planets.
Of the new candidates, 68 are one and a quarter times the size of the Earth or smaller—smaller, that is, than any previously discovered planets outside the solar system, which are known as exoplanets. Fifty-four of the possible exoplanets are in the so-called habitable zones of stars dimmer and cooler than the Sun, where temperatures should be moderate enough for liquid water.
Both the Times and the Post quote the astronomer Debra Fischer from Yale, who was not a member of the Kepler team. She declared that Kepler has “blown the lid off everything we thought we knew about exoplanets.”
Here are some other quotations from the articles, beginning with this one from the WSJ:
“We are clearly finding out for sure now that smaller planets are more common than bigger planets,” said astrophysicist Jonathan Fortney at the University of California at Santa Cruz.
From the Times:
“It boggles the mind,” said the Kepler team’s leader, William Borucki, of the Ames Research Center in Northern California.
Also:
“For the first time in human history, we have a pool of potentially rocky habitable-zone planets,” said Sara Seager of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who works with Kepler. “This is the first big step forward to answering the ancient question, ‘How common are other Earths?’”
At a news conference at NASA headquarters in Washington on Wednesday, Mr. Borucki noted that the Keple telescope surveys only one four-hundredth of the sky. If it could see the whole sky, he said, “we would see 400,000 candidates.”
Yet another from the Times:
Summarizing the news from the cosmos, Geoffrey W. Marcy of the University of California, Berkeley, a veteran exoplanet hunter and a mainstay of the Kepler work, said, “There are so many messages here that it’s hard to know where to begin.”
He called the Borucki team’s announcement “an extraordinary planet windfall, a moment that will be written in textbooks. It will be thought of as watershed.”
From the Post:
“If Earth-sized planets are common, then it’s likely that life is common on the planets around their stars,” Borucki said. “This is really our first step in man’s exploration of surrounding galaxies in terms of life and the extent of life that might be there.”
Maybe it’s often necessary to fault the media for inadequate science coverage, but maybe these three papers have done pretty well by astronomy this time.
Astronomer, writer kid physicists in New York Times letter
In reply to a New York Times editorial about the demise of the Tevatron at Fermilab in Illinois, the astronomer Jay M. Pasachoff and the writer Naomi Pasachoff have published a letter to the editor observing that the closure is not only sad, but might also be unwise. They wrote:
When, in 1993, Congress shut off funds for the superconducting supercollider being built underground in Texas, many of the newly unemployed physicists found jobs on Wall Street. Wouldn’t you rather have the nation’s physicists smashing protons than designing and smashing collateralized debt obligations?
New York Times front page: Kepler observatory, “Goldilocks” planets
News about NASA’s Kepler satellite observatory appeared in Dennis Overbye’s front-page New York Times article “Gazing Afar for Other Earths, and Other Beings” on 31 January—in advance of astronomers’ scheduled 2 February release of a “closely kept list of 400 stars that are their brightest and best bets so far for harboring planets, some of which could turn out to be the smallest and most Earth-like worlds discovered out there to date.”
Overbye adds that the planets on this list “represent the first glimpse of riches to come in a quest that is as old as the imagination and as new as the iPad,” and that over “the next two or three years, as Kepler continues to stare and sift, astronomers say, it will be able to detect planets in the ‘Goldilocks’ zones, where it is neither too hot nor too cold for liquid water.”
In this lengthy article, heavily illustrated after the “jump” to an interior page, Overbye presents Kepler as only an early part of “a multidecade quest—employing ever more sophisticated and expensive spacecraft—for planets and life beyond Earth.” In what may be an example of excessive alarm in science news reporting, he suggests a special purpose for this quest: humanity “will eventually lose Earth as its home, whether because of global warming or the ultimate plague or a killer asteroid or the Sun’s inevitable demise. Before then, if we want the universe to remember us or even know we were here, we need to get away.”
He summarizes the history of exoplanet discovery since the first in 1995, and then describes Kepler‘s mission: “Its gaze is fixed on a patch of sky about 20 full moons across near the Northern Cross, in the constellations Cygnus and Lyra, containing about 4.5 million stars. . . . The job is simply to measure the brightness of 156,000 of those stars every half-hour, looking for the repeated dips caused by planet crossings, or ‘transits.’”
Overbye also explains the statistical nature of the findings: “Natalie Batalha of San Jose State University, the deputy science team leader for Kepler, said it could be that they will wind up with, say, 100 planets they are 80 percent sure of, which could translate to 80 planets—useful for a census, not so helpful if you’re looking for a place to live.”
Though it doesn’t come at the end, the quotation Overbye secured from the UC Berkeley astronomer Geoffrey Marcy could have served as the capper: “We will find Earth-size planets in habitable zones.”
George Will speaks up for STEM education
An earlier report described criticisms that followed George F. Will’s forceful advocacy of federal research spending and the principles of the Gathering Storm reports. Will’s Washington Post column’s rejection of the climate consensus, it was charged, not only disqualifies him from supporting science generally, but renders him a general proponent of anti-science.
Question: Will more such criticism follow his recent column echoing scientists’ alarm about education, in particular STEM education?
Will begins with a sardonic epigraph—a quotation from Norman Augustine, who led creation of the Gathering Storm reports: “Since 1995 the average mathematics score for fourth-graders jumped 11 points. At this rate we catch up with Singapore in a little over 80 years . . . assuming they don’t improve.” The column argues for greater state flexibility in meeting national educational goals—and for national metrics, since sometimes states define proficiency down. In the process, Will praises Secretary of Education Arne Duncan.
Also in the process, Will offers a three-paragraph-long litany of discouraging data of the kind familiar to all who follow the STEM issue. A sample sentence from this litany: “Among the 34 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development nations, only four (Mexico, Spain, Turkey and New Zealand) have dropout rates higher than America’s, whose 15-year-olds ranked 23rd in math and 25th in science in 2006.” Another: “A National Academy of Sciences report says that in 2000, more foreign students than American students were studying engineering and the physical sciences in US graduate schools.”
Whatever Will’s views on climate science, surely it’s useful for him to raise his conservative voice in support of improving STEM education.
Science magazine: Creationism not defeated after all?
The headline on a commentary in the 28 January issue of Science telegraphs the message from the authors, two Penn State political scientists: “Defeating Creationism in the Courtroom, But Not in the Classroom.”
Michael B. Berkman and Eric Plutzer begin by recalling the Pennsylvania court case Kitzmiller v. Dover, in which “creationists lost decisively” when a court held that intelligent design is “an effort to advance a religious view via public schools"—and is not science. However: “We suggest,” write Berkman and Plutzer, “that the cheering was premature and the victory incomplete.”
Under the subheading “Systematic Undermining of Science,” the authors continue:
Creationism has lost every major U.S. federal court case for the past 40 years, and state curricular standards have improved. But considerable research suggests that supporters of evolution, scientific methods, and reason itself are losing battles in America’s classrooms. . . . The data reveal a pervasive reluctance of teachers to forthrightly explain evolutionary biology. The data further expose a cycle of ignorance in which community antievolution attitudes are perpetuated by teaching that reinforces local community sentiment.
The authors “estimate that 28% of all biology teachers consistently implement the major recommendations and conclusions of the National Research Council: They unabashedly introduce evidence that evolution has occurred and craft lesson plans so that evolution is a theme that unifies disparate topics in biology.” They write also that at “the opposite extreme are 13% of the teachers surveyed who explicitly advocate creationism or intelligent design by spending at least 1 hour of class time presenting it in a positive light.” They continue:
But if mainstream science and the modern creationist movement each have their classroom allies, they still account for only about 40% of all high school biology teachers. What of the majority of teachers, the “cautious 60%,” who are neither strong advocates for evolutionary biology nor explicit endorsers of nonscientific alternatives? Our data show that these teachers understandably want to avoid controversy. Often they have not taken a course in evolution and they lack confidence in their ability to defend it.
The article reports three “especially common” strategies teachers use “for avoiding controversy,” and declare that “each has the effect of undermining science.” They explain, and then summarize this way:
The cautious 60% may play a far more important role in hindering scientific literacy in the United States than the smaller number of explicit creationists. The strategies of emphasizing microevolution, justifying the curriculum on the basis of state-wide tests, or “teaching the controversy” all undermine the legitimacy of findings that are well established by the combination of peer review and replication. These teachers fail to explain the nature of scientific inquiry, undermine the authority of established experts, and legitimize creationist arguments, even if unintentionally.
For this national situation in which, as the authors put it, many students “are not afforded a sound science education,” Berkman and Plutzer cite research to bolster suggestions for several countermeasures. These include “continued participation in federal law suits,” curricular and standard-establishing involvement by scientists and scientific organizations, and an “increased focus . . . on preservice teachers.” The authors predict that "[b]etter understanding of the field should provide [teachers] with more confidence to teach evolution forthrightly, even in communities where public opinion is sympathetic to creationism.”
They also suggest that "[m]ore effectively integrating evolution into the education of preservice biology teachers may also have the indirect effect of encouraging students who cannot accept evolution as a matter of faith to pursue other careers.” They elaborate:
Effective programs directed at preservice teachers can therefore both reduce the number of evolution deniers in the nation’s classrooms, increase the number who would gladly accept help in teaching evolution, and increase the number of cautious teachers who are nevertheless willing to embrace rigorous standards. This would reduce the supply of teachers who are especially attractive to the most conservative school districts, weakening the cycle of ignorance.
Berkman and Plutzer close by asserting that improved teacher training “offers our best chance of increasing the science literacy of future generations.”
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.
