Science and the media: 9 - 15 April
DOI: 10.1063/PT.4.0300
Steve Corneliussen’s topics this week:
- The Washington Post joins the New York Times in examining whether the work e-mails of researchers at public universities are public property
- A Nobel Prize–winning physicist and one of the fathers of the internet pen different views on improving American competitiveness
- A research paper about open access in scientific publishing provoked a boisterous debate on the Physics World website
- A Wall Street Journal columnist argues that nuclear power causes fewer deaths and is less polluting than coal power
Public university researchers’ e-mail: private or not?
The e-mail of public university scholars and scientists—to what extent, if any, should law and society privilege it, grant it privacy, and sequester it from the rules for publicly owned information? In a recent conversation at the American Center for Physics, I asserted that this is one of those questions best left unasked.
It’s being asked.
In late March, a New York Times editorial and Times columnist Paul Krugman deplored Republican efforts to get access to a prominent and politically active historian’s e-mail messages. As reported here , both the editors and the columnist highlighted analogies to political contentiousness about climate science. Now this line of discussion has expanded in the Washington Post, still with implications for scientists at state colleges and universities.
The context is Wisconsin’s recent contentiousness over public-employee unions. The activist historian, William Cronon of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, serves as president of the American Historical Association. In blog postings and in a 22 March Times op-ed , he criticized Wisconsin Republicans for “seeking to reverse civic traditions that for more than a century have been among the most celebrated achievements not just of their state, but of their own party as well.” He charged that Wisconsin’s Republican governor, Scott Walker, “has provoked a level of divisiveness and bitter partisan hostility the likes of which have not been seen in this state since at least the Vietnam War.” He compared Walker to the late, and widely reviled, Wisconsin Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy.
Even before Cronon’s op-ed appeared, Wisconsin Republicans had filed a freedom-of-information request demanding access to certain of his university e-mail messages. Now the Mackinac Center for Public Policy in Midland, Michigan, has escalated things. It has begun what a Post editorial called “an even broader fishing expedition” in the form of “freedom-of-information requests with three Michigan universities with labor relations departments, seeking e-mails from all labor studies faculty relating to the union battle in Wisconsin.”
The Post editors telegraphed their position in their headline: “Using open-records laws to harass scholars.” The editorial began:
Transparency in government is important. Freedom-of-information laws are key to assuring it; they offer citizens a vehicle for finding out what their government is doing. But freedom-of-information requests can also be used in abusive ways, to intimidate political adversaries and chill free speech. That risk is especially high with open-records requests involving professors at public universities. By dint of their employment, these scholars are subject to open-government laws. By virtue of their educational roles, such requests can pose a particular threat to academic freedom.
The editors called the Wisconsin and Michigan efforts “disturbingly reminiscent of the misguided effort by Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli II to subpoena documents and e-mails relating to former University of Virginia climate science researcher Michael E. Mann.” They compared “Mr. Cuccinelli’s abuse of his prosecutorial subpoena power and the Wisconsin and Michigan groups’ abuse of their right as private parties to employ the public-records law.” They declared that “the risk is the same: scholars being targeted because of what they think or, in the Michigan case, might think.” They concluded: “This tactic is deeply disturbing. It must be vigorously resisted.”
A pair of Mackinac officials vigorously opposed that view a few days later in a Post op-ed headlined “Why it’s fair to use open-records laws to question academics’ political activism.” Joseph G. Lehman and Thomas S. Shull asserted that the “evidence shows that the Post has erred,” and declared that “the general rush to judgment about the use of open-records laws with public universities illustrates why defending the laws remains as challenging and important as ever.”
Their request, they wrote, targeted Wayne State University, Michigan State University, and the University of Michigan, and “was prompted primarily by a history of activity at Wayne State that seemed inappropriately political—and perhaps illegal—for a state educational institution.” They continued:
Until this week, the Web site of the university’s Labor Studies Center said that the department has “produced a comprehensive guide for activists for organizing living wage campaigns” and offered a paper on “Understanding and Preventing Privatization” of government services. It helped workers “research” their employers through numerous links to such online resources as the “Dirt Diggers Digest” and the Strategic Action Center, an organization “designed to assist progressive organizations with . . . campaign needs.”
That this use of a state university’s resources is questionable is as clear as it would be if the Web site were “designed to assist Tea Party organizations with campaign needs.” In fact, the problem appears clear to Wayne State. Since our public discussion of the Web site . . . Wayne State has removed the material.
The authors grant that it’s “possible to imagine open-records requests that are abusive,” but counter that “it is important for policymakers and the public to recall that there are checks on broad, hostile and purely speculative inquiries.” Here’s how they sum up their case:
Public universities in Michigan and elsewhere together spend billions of dollars annually. Professors and other university employees know there are constraints on spending this money, including prohibitions on political activity. Such rules are similar to those that private-sector employees face at work every day.
Nevertheless, professors, like public officials, may feel “harassed” when they are subject to inquiries. In some cases they may have a point, but the premature questioning of filers’ motives risks turning open-records requests into a popularity contest. In a time when popularity varies dramatically across partisan lines, this approach endangers political support for open government and encourages public universities to devolve into political action committees.
So is the headlined proposition valid? Is it indeed “fair to use open-records laws to question academics’ political activism”?
That’s not for this science-media analyst to answer. But it does lead to an obvious question: Doesn’t the proposition scant the possibility that scientific findings unavoidably carrying political implications will be misdefined, and attacked, as political activism?
Divergent pair of support-American-innovation commentaries
In this of all weeks, it was gratifying to see an unmatched pair of support-American-innovation commentaries in high-profile venues. But it was discouraging to see the one in the Wall Street Journal scant the contributions of research to the complex innovation mix.
Much of what’s in the WSJ piece can be inferred from the headline and the stand-first summary: “How to Fire Up US Innovation: We need more hands-on tech education for American children, but we also need to keep attracting the best talent from abroad.” Here’s how the author, Vinton G. Cerf of Google and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, conceives of the innovation process:
An innovation engine has many moving parts and all of them have to mesh properly for the engine to run smoothly. In Silicon Valley, and elsewhere in the United States, the engine requires sources of trained professionals (engineers, scientists, business people), sources of capital (venture capitalists, fluid stock markets), and new and existing companies that form a mutually reinforcing ecosystem.
Universities such as Stanford, the University of California at Berkeley and San Jose State supply a continuous flow of trained talent. Venture capital companies line Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, adjacent to legal firms midwifing the birth of new companies. Like small villages, everyone seems to know everyone else, and individuals move from company to company, or in and out of partnerships.
Cerf does then at least mention research as the source of the new knowledge that—along with capital, imagination, initiative, and hard work—energizes the process that he has described. He writes, “It is sometimes thought that research in universities or corporate laboratories produces technology that then transfers seamlessly into products and services. But technology doesn’t transfer on its own—it is the people who have the knowledge in their heads that do the transferring.”
Cerf wishes to see the most “successful scientists and engineers . . . made more visible and their voices heard more often” as part of an effort in “elevating interest in math and science” so that we can “foster the innovation and ingenuity that will move this nation forward into a better future.” I hope he includes Burton Richter, the Nobel laureate who formerly served as director of what’s now called the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory—and who published, in Politico, the second of the two support-American-innovation commentaries.
Unlike some scientists, Richter has never believed in merely adapting the bland tone and style of standard techno-bureaucratese for public commentaries. Instead, he incorporates a bit of blunt attitude. Here’s his opening paragraph: “The House version of the continuing resolution should be called ‘the China Innovation Advantage Act.’ It erodes our nation’s position as a high-tech leader while providing a major boost to our global competitors.”
Like Cerf, Richter uses the metaphor of the innovation engine—but unlike Cerf, he emphasizes the source of that engine’s fuel, the new knowledge that comes from government-funded research:
The bill makes large cuts in government-funded science and technology programs. It yields little deficit reduction; however, it does serious damage to the American innovation engine—the long-term driver of high-tech U.S. job creation. The main beneficiaries of H.R. 1 would be international competitors, who are already on our heels and would like to take the lead on innovation.
China, for example, has made huge investments in science research and innovation during the past decade, leaving the U.S. in the dust. Beijing’s investments in research and development grew by more than 20 percent annually between 1996 and 2007, according to the National Science Foundation’s 2010 “Science & Engineering Indicators Report,” compared with less than 6 percent annual growth in the United States.
This devastating scenario for U.S. innovation is likely to occur because Washington seems to have little understanding of the government and industry’s complementary roles in the innovation cycle—and the job creation that goes with it.
Advanced scientific technologies most often come from government-funded work, and many important new products have been created by what industry builds with them.
Consider Apple’s iPhone, one of the most iconic devices of the past few years. Every scientific technology behind the iPhone was developed with government funds: large-scale integrated circuits, the Internet, the browser, the global positioning system, and the touch screen.
At one point, Richter directly rebuts the assumption that infects Cerf’s piece. “Some conservative economists and politicians,” he writes, “say that if research and development are left to the market, the right innovative path will be chosen. Not so.” He continues
These days, industry, with very rare exceptions, devotes R&D budgets to things that can become products in three to five years. Industry doesn’t do risky, long-term research with its own money. Universities, government-funded labs and industries conduct research with government money—and the resulting benefits to the private sector, our economy and U.S. jobs are enormous.
Richter emphasizes that organizations on both the right and the left have affirmed the importance of the research that fuels the innovation engine.
And in his conclusion, he continues with the bluntness:
Consistency has never been the mark in Washington. But H.R. 1 is inconsistent with every recent analysis for its treatment of government-funded R&D—particularly its large cuts in the Energy Department’s science and energy budgets, the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the National Science Foundation.
If H.R. 1 becomes law, the long-term effects are likely to be profitable only to our competitors—particularly China.
Congress should stop wasting time over what is to be done for the rest of this fiscal year. Instead, policymakers should continue at current levels the science and technology programs at the Energy Department, the National Science Foundation, NIST and the National Institutes of Health.
If we want to build a better America, improve our energy security and sustain our high-tech leadership, we have to make science research and innovation a priority.
Open access, citation statistics, and the spread of knowledge
“Does free access to journal articles result in greater diffusion of scientific knowledge?” The Cornell University communication researcher Philip M. Davis, who participated in producing the January 2010 report of the Scholarly Publishing Roundtable, asked that question in the recent article “Open access, readership, citations: a randomized controlled trial of scientific journal publishing.”
This paper—in FASEB Journal (the journal of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology)—quickly became mildly controversial news in online reports at Physics World and at the developing world’s SciDev.Net .
Davis’s abstract continues from his opening question:
Using a randomized controlled trial of open access publishing, involving 36 participating journals in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities, we report on the effects of free access on article downloads and citations. Articles placed in the open access condition (n=712) received significantly more downloads and reached a broader audience within the first year, yet were cited no more frequently, nor earlier, than subscription-access control articles (n=2533) within 3 yr. These results may be explained by social stratification, a process that concentrates scientific authors at a small number of elite research universities with excellent access to the scientific literature. The real beneficiaries of open access publishing may not be the research community but communities of practice that consume, but rarely contribute to, the corpus of literature.
The paper “adds fuel to the debate over the advantages of open-access publishing,” reports Physics World. “If open access has an effect on article citations, its effects are much smaller than previously reported.” The Physics World article notes that although the “study did not cover any pure physics journals, the findings agree with a related study from 2007 co-authored by the Harvard University physicist Michael Kurtz, which considered papers published in the online version of Astrophysical Journal.” Physics World continues:
Both Davis and Kurtz come to the same conclusion to explain why there appears to be no citation advantage in making a paper open access. They believe that papers published in core journals are likely to come from the mainstream institutions that have comprehensive access to subscription journals. In other words, when it comes to getting their hands on research papers, it does not matter to the most prolific scientists whether the papers are open access or not.
However, not everyone agrees with this conclusion. Stevan Harnad, an information scientist at the University of Southampton in the UK, published a study last year in the journal PLoS One reaching the opposite conclusion—that open access does bring increased citations. Harnad criticises Davis’ new study partly on the grounds that the sample size is too small. He says that the published studies confirming the citation advantage outnumber those that do not by 8:1.
Davis defends the size of his sample, saying that his study’s strength lies in its ability to rule out external factors that determine which papers are made freely available, such as an author’s willingness to pay the open-access fees. “By implementing a true randomized controlled trial, we were able to more accurately isolate and estimate the effect of access from all other explanations,” he says.
Physics World also quotes Davis’s view that it “is unfortunate that some read our paper as an attack on open access, when it is not.” And indeed the SciDev.Net piece introduces voices expressing worries about such an attack:
“To suggest that open access articles do not lead to dissemination of scientific knowledge [within the scientific community] is disturbing,” Nasra Gathoni, president of the Association of Health Information and Libraries in Africa, told SciDev.Net.
“Most health institutions [in Africa] use these articles as tools of learning every day. To water down their usefulness, or even block access to them, would be a big letdown for us,” she added.
“What we need, perhaps, is to train people to [harness] the opportunity of open access more appropriately.”
Jeremiah Owiti, executive director of the Centre for Independent Research (CIR) in Nairobi, said that Kenyan researchers use articles from all over the world as comparisons or yardsticks.
“To be unable to access and compare would [mean] operating in a conceptual and methodological vacuum,” he said.
The SciDev.Net piece closes by reiterating Davis’s view that his article is actually “a very positive contribution to the cause of open access.”
Wall Street Journal columnist: “Coal Is More Dangerous Than Nuclear”
The Wall Street Journal columnist Holman W. Jenkins Jr is no kindred spirit for physicists who advocate the scientific consensus on human-caused climate disruption. But his 13 April column aggressively supports a headline that could have been written by any number of physicists: “Coal Is More Dangerous Than Nuclear: But don’t tell that to Greens getting elected to office on post-Fukushima fear-mongering.”
Most of the column builds up to that headline’s message by attempting to probe and question the subtleties, perplexities, and outright unknowns surrounding the linear no-threshold model. For a reminder of what LNT is, maybe the opening lines from its Wikipedia entry will suffice:
The linear no-threshold model (LNT) is a method for predicting the long term, biological damage caused by ionizing radiation and is based on the assumption that the risk is directly proportional to the dose at all dose levels. In other words, the sum of several very small exposures have [sic] the same effect as one larger exposure. The LNT model therefore predicts higher risks than the threshold model, which assumes that very small exposures are negligible. The radiation hormesis model predicts the least risk by assuming that radiation is beneficial in very low doses, while still recognizing that it is harmful in large doses. Because the current data is [sic] inconclusive, scientists disagree on which method should be used.
Jenkins opens by pointing to Baden-Württemberg politics in Germany:
For the first time, Germany’s Green Party will control one of the country’s state governments, just in time to decide the fate of several nuclear plants temporarily idled in response to the Japanese nuclear mess—the same mess that catapulted the Greens to unfamiliar success in state elections two weeks ago.
Were they to surrender to their inner Al Gore, their answer to the resulting electricity shortage would be for consumers to make do with much higher prices. But Green Party leader Winfried Kretschmann is unlikely to seek immediate return to the political wilderness. Forget the fantasy talk of wind and solar. The choice then is nuclear or coal.
Jenkins predicts, and laments, that there and elsewhere, coal will be chosen. “Countries all over the world,” he writes, “are making similar choices in light of Japan’s disaster, whose severity the government now puts on a par with Chernobyl (even if the radiation releases haven’t been remotely comparable).” He says that thanks to Fukushima, “officials everywhere will have to reacquaint themselves with one of the great noise-to-signal puzzles of modern science: How much harm does low-level radiation exposure do?” Then he offers many paragraphs of technical analysis attempting to show, as he puts it, that findings on this question “have been more politically vexing than scientifically satisfying.”
At one point Jenkins writes, “In a linear, no-threshold world, the Japanese government can never call a given level of exposure ‘safe’ even if the additional risk is statistically negligible for the average person. In fact, Japanese politics may be roiled for decades to come by insoluble arguments over small anomalies in the cancer rate and whether a given sufferer is a ‘victim of Fukushima.’”
Finally he sews things together with this closing:
Of course, the galloping irony for the Baden-Württemberg Greens is that the exact risk model doesn’t matter. However you slice it, coal is more dangerous than nuclear.
Start with deaths that aren’t the product of statistical imagination: Thousands more die in coal mining accidents each year (especially in China) than have been killed in all nuclear-related accidents since the beginning of time. What’s more, coal plants spew toxins like mercury and other metals—along with more radioactive thorium and uranium than a nuclear plant—which are no less amenable to linear, no-threshold thinking. In 2004, the EPA estimated that a new emissions standard then being promoted would, by itself, save 17,000 lives a year. [Italics in original.]
So the question is a no-brainer for the Baden-Württemberg Greens. Yep, you guessed it: They can be counted on to shut down the nukes anyway. Their anti-nuke stance is an article of faith not subject to review.
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.