Session description: We will be talking about how the history of science and the history of the open-access movement have intersected. Steven Johnson touches on this theme in his latest book, The Invention of Air, in that 18th century British polymath Joseph Priestley was a strong advocate of publishing scientific data widely in order to create a greater dialogue between scientists. While Johnson only mentions this briefly in the case of Priestley, this theme runs strongly through the history of science and is what makes the debate over the patenting of genes or the availability of open-access journals such important topics today.
The session was led by John McKay and Eric Michael Johnson (@primatediaries).
Here’s the session wiki page.
Category Archives: Professional ethics
#scio10 aftermath: my tweets from “Talking Trash: Online Outreach from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch”.
Session description: Debris in the North Pacific Gyre received unprecedented attention in 2009 with voyages from the Algalita Marine Research Foundation, Project Kaisei, and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Each voyage integrated online outreach into its mission, but emphasized very different aspects of the problem. What are the challenges of creating a major outreach effort from one of the most isolated places on earth? How can scientists, journalists, and educators balance “exciting findings live from the field!” with “highly preliminary unpublished non-peer-reviewed data that our labwork might contradict”? And why is the public so interested in the issue of trash in the ocean, anyway?
The session was led by Miriam Goldstein (@oystersgarter), Lindsey Hoshaw (@thegarbagegirl), and Annie Crawley (@AnnieCrawley).
Here’s the session wiki page.
#scio10 aftermath: my tweets from “Rebooting Science Journalism in the Age of the Web”.
Session description: Our panel of journalist-blogger hybrids – Carl Zimmer, John Timmer, Ed Yimmer Yong, and David Dobbs- will discuss and debate the future of science journalism in the online world. Are blogs and mainstream media the bitter rivals that stereotypes would have us believe, or do the two sides have common threads and complementary strengths? How will the tools of the Internet change the art of reporting? How will the ongoing changes strengthen writing about science? How might these changes compromise or threaten writing about science? In a world where it’s possible for anyone to write about science, where does that leave professional science journalists? And who actually are these science journalists anyway?
The session was led by Ed Yong (@edyong209), Carl Zimmer (@carlzimmer), John Timmer (@j_timmer), and David Dobbs (@David_Dobbs).
Here’s the session wiki page
Some thoughts on ClimateGate.
It’s quite likely, if you’re reading anything else on the internets besides this blog for the past few weeks, that you’ve already gotten your fill of ClimateGate. But maybe you’ve been stuck in your Cave of Grading and missed the news that a bunch of emails from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) webserver at the University of East Anglia were stolen by hackers (or leaked by an insider, depending on who’s telling the story) and widely distributed. Or maybe you’re still sorting out what you think about the email messages in question and what they mean for their authors, the soundness of scientific consensus on climate change, or the responsible conduct of science more broadly.
Honestly, I’m still sorting out what I think, but here’s where I am at the moment:
‘My work has been plagiarized. Now what?’
I received an email from reader Doug Blank (who gave me permission to share it here and to identify him by name) about a perplexing situation:
Janet,
I thought I’d solicit your advice. Recently, I found an instance of parts of my thesis appearing in a journal article, and of the paper being presented at a conference. In fact, further exploration revealed that it had won a best paper prize! Why don’t I feel proud…
I’ve sent the following letter to the one and only email address that I found on the journal’s website, almost three weeks ago, but haven’t heard anything. I tried contacting the Editorial Advisory Board Chair (through that same email), but he doesn’t have any specific contact information anywhere available on the web, or elsewhere. He is emeritus at [name of university redacted], but they won’t tell me how to contact him. I asked a secretary there to forward my contact to him. I emailed website maintainers. Nothing yet.
Some questions from this: can one have a journal without having someone easily contactable for such issues? No telephone numbers? Who is responsible for catching this kind of thing? Reviewers? Could the community rise to the challenge? For example, could we build a site where papers that are ready for publishing get scrutinized for plagiarism? People would love that more than wikipedia!
Am I in any risk for even sending such accusatory emails? Should I contact the perp? What would he do? What can he do?
I hope to follow this through to the end. Feel free to use any of this as material. If you are interested, I’d be glad to update you. More importantly, I’d be glad to hear of advice.
Thanks!
-Doug
Doug appended the email message he sent to the elusive Editorial Advisory Board Chair (which I present here heavily redacted, just in case the guy turns up and makes an effort to set things right):
How to eliminate ‘any possible conflicts of interest’.
There is a story posted at ProPublica (and co-published with the Chicago Tribune) that examines a particular psychiatrist who was paid by a pharmaceutical company to travel around the U.S. to promote one of that company’s antipsychotic drugs. Meanwhile, the psychiatrist was writing thousands of prescriptions for that same antipsychotic drug for his patients on Medicaid.
You might think that there would be at least the appearance of a conflict of interest here. However, the psychiatrist in question seems certain that there is not:
Thoughts on university service.
Over at Uncertain Principles, Chad ponders faculty “service” in higher education. For those outside the ivy-covered bubble of academe, “service” usually means “committee work” or something like it.
The usual concern is that, although committees are necessary to accomplish significant bits of the work of a college or university, no one likes serving on them and every faculty member has some task that would be a better use of his or her time than being on a committee. And, because “service” is frequently a piece of the faculty member’s job performance that is regularly evaluated (for retention, tenure, and promotion decisions, for example), faculty members are on the lookout for “easy” committees with which to pad the service section of their CVs.
Chad suggests that these easy service options — and maybe some of the hard ones, too — could be a consequence of superfluous committees:
Anatomy of a scientific fraud: an interview with Eugenie Samuel Reich.
Eugenie Samuel Reich is a reporter whose work in the Boston Globe, Nature, and New Scientist will be well-known to those with an interest in scientific conduct (and misconduct). In Plastic Fantastic: How the Biggest Fraud in Physics Shook the Scientific World, she turns her skills as an investigative reporter to writing a book-length exploration of Jan Hendrik Schön’s frauds at Bell Labs, providing a detailed picture of the conditions that made it possible for him to get away with his fraud as long as he did.
Eugenie Samuel Reich agreed to answer some questions about Plastic Fantastic and the Schön case. My questions, and her answers, after the jump.
Tempering justice with mercy: the question of youthful offenders in the tribe of science.
Recently, I wrote a post about two researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) who were caught falsifying data in animal studies of immune suppressing drugs. In the post, I conveyed that this falsification was very bad indeed, and examined some of the harm it caused. I also noted that the Office of Research Integrity (ORI) meted out somewhat different penalties to the principal investigator (ten year voluntary exclusion from government funding and from serving in any advisory capacity with the PHS) and to her postdoc (three year voluntary exclusion from government funding and PHS advisory roles). Moreover, UAB had left open the possibility that the postdoc might work on other people’s research projects under very strict mentoring. (Owing to the ORI ruling, these research projects would have to be ones funded by someone other than the U.S. government, however.)
On that post, commenter Paul Browne disagreed with my suggestion that rehabilitation of the postdoc in this case might be an end worth seeking:
“While such an obvious departure from an experimental protocol — especially an in an experiment involving animal use — isn’t much of an ethical gray area, I think there’s something to be said for treating early-career scientists as potentially redeemable in the aftermath of such ethical screw-ups.”
You have got to be kidding.
We’re not talking about an honest mistake, or deviating from an approved protocol with the best of intentions, or excluding a few outliers from the analysis but rather a decade of repeatedly lying to their funders, their IACUC and to other scientists working in their field.
What they did almost makes me wish that science has a ceremony similar to the old military drumming out.
At the very least they should both be charged with fraud, and since they presumably included their previous falsified results in support of NIH grant applications it shouldn’t be too hard to get a conviction.
Believe me, I understand where Paul is coming from. Given the harm that cheaters can do to the body of shared knowledge on which the scientific community relies, and to the trust within the scientific community that makes coordination of effort possible, I understand the impulse to remove cheaters from the community once and for all.
But this impulse raises a big question: Can a scientist who has made an ethical misstep be rehabilitated and reintegrated as a productive member of the scientific community? Or is your first ethical blunder grounds for permanent expulsion from the community? In practice, this isn’t just a question about the person who commits the ethical violation. It’s also a question about what other scientists in the community can stomach in dealing with the offenders — especially when the offender turns out to be a close colleague or a trainee.
Manuscript review and the limits of your expertise.
At his lounge, the Lab Lemming poses an excellent hypothetical question about manuscript review:
Suppose you are reviewing a paper. Also assume, that like most papers these days, that it has multiple authors, each of whom applies his expertise to the problem at hand. And finally, assume that you are an expert in some, but not all of the fields used to solve the particular problem being reported in this paper.
What do you do if one of the key points in the paper that is not your area of expertise seems fishy. For example, if the paper is on your field area, what if some of the lab results seem fishy. Or if you are an analyst, what if the experimental setup seems odd.
Assuming that you are a successful researcher, you probably have long-time collaborators who are experts in these fields. So, what is the best way of accessing their expertise, given that some sort of confidence generally surrounds papers in review.
Let’s break down some of the relevant interests at work here: