Science and the media: 5 - 11 February
DOI: 10.1063/PT.4.0751
Steve Corneliussen’s topics this week:
- A Wall Street Journal discussion of research on individual versus group achievement in science.
- An initiative to revolutionize peer review and advance open-access scientific publishing, as discussed in a Colin Macilwain commentary.
- A science perspective on events in Egypt, as seen in a Wall Street Journal article.
- Another such science perspective, as seen in a scientist’s commentary and in a New York Times article.
- A national discussion of science fairs and STEM education in the Times and Washington Post
Quantifying trends: scientists’ lateness in blooming & increases in collaboration
Even though it’s not news that science, technology, and innovation rely increasingly on teamwork, Jonah Lehrer’s recent Wall Street Journal column “Sunset of the Solo Scientist” might merit attention—and so might the column’s academic source.
Lehrer bases the piece largely on research that seeks to quantify the trends. He seems to be referring to more than one of the papers cited on the research page of Benjamin Jones at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management.
Lehrer begins with the old news. He asks, rhetorically, if the reader can name “a current scientist as influential as Einstein or an inventor as famous as Edison.” He joins others who have declared that the “age of the great scientific thinker is over.”
Reporting on Jones’s work, Lehrer declares that the ideal creative age “for most scientists” has risen from the 20s and “is now closer to 40.” Mean ages have risen for Nobel laureates and inventors. “The reason is straightforward,” Lehrer writes. “Before we can transform a field, we need to master it, to learn the details of the domain. And there’s more to learn than ever before.”
Here’s the main quantification:
By analyzing 19.9 million peer-reviewed papers and 2.1 million patents, Mr. Jones and his colleagues at Northwestern were able to show that teamwork is a defining trend of modern research. Over the last 50 years, more than 99% of scientific subfields, from computer science to biochemistry, have experienced increased levels of teamwork, with the size of the average team increasing by about 20% per decade.
This shift is even more pronounced among influential papers. While the most cited studies in a field used to be the product of lone geniuses, Mr. Jones has shown that the best research now emerges from groups. It doesn’t matter if the scientists are studying particle physics or human genetics. Papers by multiple authors receive more than twice as many citations as those with one author. This trend is even more apparent when it comes to “home run papers"—those publications with at least 1,000 citations—which are more than six times as likely to come from a team.
Lehrer ends by commenting on the “death of the Renaissance man,” a phrase from the title of a 2009 paper by Jones.
Evolving peer review and open access, cont.
A recent issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education offered the Colin Macilwain article “‘Facebook of Science’ Seeks to Reshape Peer Review.” The thumbnail summary at the top said:
With his latest Internet experiment, a large network of scientists called the Faculty of 1000, Vitek Tracz hopes to transform papers from one-shot events owned by publishers into evolving discussions among researchers, authors, and readers.
A paywall sequesters this long piece. Here’s some information about the Faculty of 1000, followed by a summary of the article.
A web page at the Faculty of 1000 site describes the organization’s mission: “post-publication peer review” of “the most important articles in biology and medical research,” using “a peer-nominated global ‘Faculty’ of the world’s leading scientists and clinicians who rate the best of the articles they read and explain their importance.”
F1000 says that it has actually come to involve “more than 10 000 experts whose evaluations form a fully searchable resource identifying the best research available” and that “Faculty Members and their evaluations are organized into over 40 Faculties (subjects), which are further subdivided into over 300 Sections.” F1000 claims that on average, “1500 new evaluations are published each month,” corresponding “to approximately the top 2% of all published articles in the biological and medical sciences.”
Macilwain describes Tracz, the F1000 founder, as “a risk-taker” and a “publishing pioneer” with long and varied experience, who “put his money into open-access publishing when free Internet journals seemed like a long shot,” and who profited enormously from this risk-taking."Now,” writes Macilwain, Tracz “wants to reinvent the basics of scholarly communication” by turning the Faculty of 1000 “into what some call ‘the Facebook of science’ and a force that will change the nature of peer review.” Tracz pursues a vision not only of transforming papers “from one-shot events owned by publishers into evolving discussions among those researchers, authors, and readers,” but of ending the need for costly journal prescriptions.
One passage in particular illustrates Tracz’s background:
Sensing that the Internet would revolutionize publishing, and feeling hostile toward larger publishing rivals such as Elsevier, Mr. Tracz was the only commercial publisher to support [open-access publishing]. He offered all of the content of his own online journal, BioMed Central, for inclusion in PubMed Central, the digital archive set up by the National Institutes of Health in 2000.
In doing this, Mr. Tracz was backing a development that most other publishers regarded as about as welcome as the arrival of the bubonic plague. “He was incredible,” recalls David Lipman, director of the National Center for Biotechnology Information at the National Institutes of Health, who set up PubMed Central. “He put his own skin in—he just thought it was a good thing, and he risked a lot.”
Macilwain reports that Tracz believes “that the open-access battle has been won, with open journals now ensconced at Springer and the PLOS firmly established"—and that Tracz “takes issue with a suggestion that, with most of the up-to-date literature still lurking behind subscription walls for at least six months, the war is not over.” Macilwain quotes Tracz:
In a few years, all new papers are going to be open access and available for free. . . . Today it is six months—yesterday it was a year. I promise you, within a year or two, it will be zero, because it is not worth it. It is better for the publishers to make it immediate. They keep on trying to defend the subscription model, but it is collapsing around their ears.
So Tracz has a record and a vision. Will his Faculty of 1000 amount to anything big?
Macilwain reports some criticism: F1000 doesn’t have enough activity. Bruce Alberts, the editor of Science magazine, “argues that it is prone to dominance by particular individuals within subfields, limiting its usefulness as an arbiter of quality.” Alberts also worries that the project needs “a code of ethics . . . that would say, for example, if you’re asked by someone to review their paper, then you cannot review it.”
And Macilwain reports confidence in “those who know Mr. Tracz.” They “expect that his focus on transparency will help deal with” the problems, and they observe that Tracz is focusing his full attention on the project. Tracz has taken full control of The Scientist and has “rebranded it as the ‘magazine of F1000.’”
Macilwain emphasizes that Tracz’s ultimate objective is to upend the existing publishing system. Tracz sees “two big issues, for science and for publishing"—peer review and the publishing of data. Tracz says, “Except for a tiny little part at the top, where it is done seriously, peer review has become a joke. It is not done properly, it delays publication unnecessarily, it is open to abuse, and is being abused. It is seriously sick, and it has been for a while.”
Tracz’s remedy: F1000. His remedy for the “mountains of data,” much of which is “never published": separate publication. Macilwain continues:
Mr. Tracz says the way forward here is for “data” and “discussion” to be published separately, so that the former get due credit.
“At the moment, people dump data,” he says. So reams of DNA sequences end up in databases such as GenBank, where some are used heavily but many more are forgotten. “We want to change that and say, publish the data, put it in front of others, put it in some format that is visible, and people can use it.” When the author of an article refers to that data, he says, the data-producer would get credit “as a special type of co-author, a data co-author.”
Macilwain closes by quoting Lipman, who sums up Tracz this way: “He’s got artistic sensibilities—he wanted to be a writer, and he was a filmmaker. When you put together that sense of aesthetics with resourcefulness and business management skills, it’s a pretty powerful combination.”
Egypt and science I
Under the old, broad meaning of the word science as all of organized knowledge, please consider the science dimension of what’s happening in Egypt. Following is the first of two reports constituting a shamelessly anecdotal partial media tour, with stops at the Wall Street Journal and the International Herald Tribune and Nature (next report).
Carl Sagan, a scientist and polymath, once eloquently ranked the ancient, lost library at Alexandria, Egypt, with the best from human history.
Thomas Jefferson, a science-minded polymath, omitted political offices from his own self-composed epitaph, citing instead three achievements from the realm of ideas: the Declaration of Independence, the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom and his founding of the University of Virginia.
Maybe politicians are right who say that realpolitik allows only partial respect for the spirit animating what’s happening in Egypt. But even if so, it seems important to link remembrance of the polymaths Sagan and Jefferson with the 8 February Wall Street Journal article “A Symbol for the New Egypt.”
The story’s single illustration shows the interior of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, which opened in 2002 as the ancient, destroyed library’s replacement. Along with the headline, that illustration’s caption conveys the point: “The library was saved from damage last week during the violent unrest in Egypt after youths formed a human cordon around the building.”
Maybe those youths remember that incident in Afghanistan when barbarians, claiming religious justification, destroyed ancient mountainside statues.
Maybe the youths remember little or nothing about Sagan or Jefferson. Maybe they wouldn’t esteem those Americans anyway.
But plainly they remember the preciousness of ideas, and rationality, and learning, and the spirit of science itself.
The article begins by reporting that “the hypermodern successor to the ancient library of Alexandria stands out as a beacon of hope, efficiency and enlightenment among the crumbling buildings of Egypt’s second-largest city,” and later notes that it “has become a gathering place for scientists, literary figures and other thinkers from around the world.” The library contains “four museums, a planetarium, a children’s science center, a library for the blind and eight research institutes.”
Ismail Serageldin, a Harvard-educated former World Bank vice president, directs it. He asserts its centrality in “a battle for the hearts and minds” of Egyptians in that it spreads “the values of democracy, freedom of expression, tolerance, diversity and pluralism” that Serageldin hopes “are taking root in the young generation.”
The article reports that the “reincarnated library . . . holds some 1.6 million volumes,” with “access to 50 000 electronic journals,” and with “one of the few archives in the world of every web page on the Internet.” It quotes the chief librarian: “We taught a lot of these kids who are demonstrating how to use computers, how to use social media, and I’m glad to see it’s put to good use.”
Jefferson rose above established practice by deliberately founding the University of Virginia on scientific, not religious, principles. The article reports that Serageldin “has fought to keep the library a secular institution, rejecting calls from staff members to open a mosque on the premises.” It quotes Vartan Gregorian, a trustee of the library and president of the Carnegie Corporation, who formerly headed the New York Public Library: “Serageldin has been a marvelous defender of freedom and scientific thought.”
The article continues:
Debate at library events has been described by human-rights activists and Western diplomats as open and free-wheeling. Its Arab Reform Forum has held an annual conference to promote human rights and civil society, and runs a website to facilitate communication among Arab nongovernmental organizations. The library has also hosted meetings spotlighting corruption in the Egyptian government.
It’s easy, the article reports, to find Hitler’s Mein Kampf for sale in Alexandria. Yet the library has hosted screenings of movies that “vividly portray Jewish suffering during the Holocaust,” and Serageldin once “personally removed” a copy of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion from a library museum display, then “went on Egyptian television to denounce the notorious book as anti-Semitic hate literature and a fabrication.”
The article closes by quoting Serageldin:
Last week, about 50 of the library’s 2,000 staff members helped safeguard the interior along with another 50 volunteers forming “a moral force to remind people ‘This is the library, don’t touch it.’” On Sunday, all staff returned to work and gathered in the auditorium where Mr. Serageldin thanked them for protecting the institution. “I’m hoping to resume our functioning in society,” he said, “stronger than ever.”
Maybe many of those Egyptians who treasure science and freedom of mind don’t treasure Thomas Jefferson. And maybe Jefferson himself overcredited the American revolution’s importance in world history. Nevertheless it seems worth noting that in 1812, Jefferson wrote, ''I hope and firmly believe that the whole world will, sooner or later, feel benefit from the issue of our assertion of the rights of man.’'
Egypt and science II
Last week the chemistry Nobel laureate Ahmed Zewail, President Obama’s special science envoy to the Middle East, published the commentary “Egypt’s Next Steps” in the International Herald Tribune.
He offered four desiderata for Egypt: “a council of wise men and women” to “draft a new constitution based on liberty, human rights and the orderly transfer of power,” an independent judiciary, free and fair elections, and a “new transitional government of national unity.”
But Zewail also offered thoughts about education and science as fundamental to Egypt’s future:
Finally, the education system, which is central to every Egyptian household’s hopes of progress, has deteriorated into a sad state that is far below Egypt’s standing in the world. The system failed in a big way, especially when I compare it with the one I personally experienced as a student in Alexandria in the 1960s. Moreover, scientific research in Egypt, which was ahead of South Korea, has now fallen to the tail of global rankings over the 30 years of the regime’s governance.
Now that theme has found further visibility in an article in Nature: “Egypt’s youth ‘key to revival': Country’s future depends on democracy, education and research reform, say scientists.” The sidebar box “Scientists speak out” contains brief interview comments, with a link to longer versions .
The main article emphasizes that with the Mubarak regime “still in place . . . the most urgent priorities are to halt the regime’s crackdowns on protesters, and to ensure that the pro-democracy movement prevails,” but that “in the long term . . . Egypt’s education and science systems must be completely overhauled to help address the root causes of its social and economic woes.”
The article quotes Hassan Azzazy, a chemist at the American University in Cairo: “The current outdated government simply lacks the mindset and vision to strategically support scientific research and lead an innovation-based economy that can compete globally.” It goes on to mention Zewail’s commentary and to report that he has “returned to his home country . . . to join a group of prominent Egyptian intellectuals who are drawing up plans, including constitutional reforms, to try to engineer a peaceful transition to democracy.” It laments that in Egyptian universities, “budgets have remained flat, salaries have stagnated, and training of teachers and lecturers has been neglected,” such that the universities “do not foster productivity or innovation,” but, according to one scientist, are instead “simply assembly lines that produce thousands of unskilled graduates every year.”
The article also calls troublesome the fact that the “suppression of human rights, and the poor conditions for science, have also led to a brain drain to the West, and more recently to Gulf states that are investing in research.” Nature cites the Science Citation Index in reporting that “Egypt produced 5,140 scientific papers in 2010,” and that Harvard alone “published twice that number.” Moreover, “the unrest has . . . led to uncertainty about Egypt’s role in the SESAME synchrotron project in Jordan.”
Near the end, the article quotes Ismail Serageldin, director of the Library of Alexandria: “Building science is not just a question of money and projects, it is also about a whole climate of research, of freedom of enquiry, freedom of expression, education, the ability to question.” Then it adds this: “That the country’s youth is now standing up for these values gives reason for hope, [Serageldin] says.”
Holdren joins science fair discussion, advertises Obama STEM effortsPresident Obama’s state-of-the-union mention of science fairs has led to a public discussion that now involves John Holdren, the president’s science advisor.
In a front-page article , the New York Times reported that although the president “said that America should celebrate its science fair winners like . . . Super Bowl champions, or risk losing the nation’s competitive edge,” it appears that participation among high school students is declining. The article leveled a charge:
[M]any science teachers say the problem is not a lack of celebration, but the Obama administration’s own education policy, which holds schools accountable for math and reading scores at the expense of the kind of creative, independent exploration that science fair projects require.
The article frankly admitted that it lacked comprehensive quantitative data, but it did present anecdotal evidence that included numbers. For example:
“To say that we need engineers and ‘this is our Sputnik moment’ is meaningless if we have no time to teach students how to do science,” said Dean Gilbert, the president of the Los Angeles County Science Fair, referring to a line in President Obama’s State of the Union address last week. The Los Angeles fair, though still one of the nation’s largest, now has 185 schools participating, down from 244 a decade ago.
Another example:
In Indiana, high school participation in the state’s science fairs dropped 15 percent in the last three years. One fair organizer in Washington described last year’s fair there as “heartbreaking,” with few projects and not enough judges. The fair in St. Louis was in danger of folding this year when its major sponsor, Pfizer, moved its operations and dropped its sponsorship.
A few days after the Times article appeared, a journalist argued in a Washington Post op-ed that even though “denied the celebrity of the athlete, the true scholar learns to take the longer view,” that “most science-fair winners will never be as instantly celebrated as the winners of the Super Bowl,” and that “that’s probably as it should be.”
Then the Times devoted most of its 10 February letters page to six responses under the headline “The Decline of the Science Fair.” A high school student described his own “science fair career.” A science teacher called for considering a science fair an “exhibition, not a competition.” A researcher lamented the lack of funding for students to participate as interns in actual research. A professor decried the misplacing of priorities on sports instead of academics and science. Another writer said, “Your article reveals the essential weakness of an educational system based on standardized tests: standardized tests teach how to answer questions; a true education teaches the questions to ask.”
Finally, Holdren’s letter began by alluding to “deep budget challenges that many school districts are facing and problems with the Bush administration’s No Child Left Behind law,” and then noted that the article didn’t “mention much of the Obama administration’s extraordinary agenda for improving science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education in this country.” Holdren offered as examples “the commitment to prepare 100 000 new math and science teachers over the next 10 years, the $4 billion Race to the Top program’s support for innovation in teaching these important subjects, and the administration’s blueprint for updating the Elementary and Secondary Education Act this year.”
He continued:
Recognizing that government alone cannot be the answer, moreover, the president has also called upon the business community, foundations, professional societies and others to do more. Already, the president’s “Educate to Innovate” campaign has attracted more than $700 million in nongovernmental financial and in-kind support for science and math programs.
And more than 100 chief executives have responded to the president’s “all hands on deck” call to action by launching “Change the Equation,” an unprecedented program to scale up effective models for improving STEM education.
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.
