PLoS founders Brown, Eisen, and Varmus. CREDIT: MARTY KATZ/WASHINGTONPHOTOGRAPHER.COM
From Jocelyn Kaiser in Science:
A decade ago, three U.S. biomedical scientists vowed to start a revolution in science publishing. They wanted to persuade publishers to share research papers normally available only to paying customers in a free online library. The trio threw their weight behind a radical idea: charge authors a fee, give them copyright, and post their peer-reviewed papers on the Internet immediately for anyone to read.
The scientists called their venture the Public Library of Science (PLoS), echoing a frustration among librarians over the escalating cost of journals. They argued that taxpayers shouldn’t have to buy subscriptions to see the results of research they had already paid for. Making the world’s research papers freely available would “vastly increase the accessibility and utility of the scientific literature, enhance scientific productivity,” and bring together disparate communities in biomedicine, wrote PLoS’s founders, including Harold Varmus, the former director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) who now heads the National Cancer Institute.
Today, the so-called open-access movement is claiming success. Publishers big and small are producing hundreds of free-to-read, peer-reviewed online journals that charge authors fees ranging from about $500 to $3000 per paper. (By various measures, between 7% and 11% of the world’s peer-reviewed scientific journals are now open access.) The most prominent publisher, the nonprofit organization PLoS, launched its first journal in 2003. This year, PLoS is on track to make a small profit—a “landmark for PLoS, but also for open-access publishing as a whole,” testified Catherine Nancarrow, a managing editor of PLoS, at a U.S. congressional hearing last month.
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From John M. Broder in the New York Times:
For months, climate scientists have taken a vicious beating in the media and on the Internet, accused of hiding data, covering up errors and suppressing alternate views. Their response until now has been largely to assert the legitimacy of the vast body of climate science and to mock their critics as cranks and know-nothings.
But the volume of criticism and the depth of doubt have only grown, and many scientists now realize they are facing a crisis of public confidence and have to fight back. Tentatively and grudgingly, they are beginning to engage their critics, admit mistakes, open up their data and reshape the way they conduct their work.
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“We have to do a better job of explaining that there is always more to learn, always uncertainties to be addressed,” said John P. Holdren, an environmental scientist and the White House science adviser. “But we also need to remind people that the occasions where a large consensus is overturned by a scientific heretic are very, very rare.”
For the article…
From Steven Shapin in the London Review of Books:
It has been history’s biggest birthday party. On or around 12 February 2009 alone – the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth, ‘Darwin Day’ – there were more than 750 commemorative events in at least 45 countries, and, on or around 24 November, there was another spate of celebrations to mark the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or, the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. In Mysore, Darwin Day was observed by an exhibition ‘proclaiming the importance of the day and the greatness of the scientist’. In Charlotte, North Carolina, there were performances of a one-man musical, Charles Darwin: Live & in Concert (‘Twas adaptive radiation that produced the mighty whale;/His hands have grown to flippers/And he has a fishy tail’). At Harvard, the celebrations included ‘free drinks, science-themed rock bands, cake, decor and a dancing gorilla’ (stuffed with a relay of biology students). Circulating around the university, student and faculty volunteers declaimed the entire text of the Origin.
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The very idea of paying homage to the great scientists of the past is problematic. Scientists are not widely supposed either to be heroes or to have heroes. Modern sensibilities insist on scientists’ moral equivalence to anyone else, and notions of an impersonal Scientific Method, which have gained official dominance over older ideas of scientific genius, make the personalities of scientists irrelevant in principle. Honouring past scientists is therefore a different sort of thing from, say, paying homage to history’s generals, politicians or, indeed, imaginative artists. You don’t need to subscribe to a strict form of Pascal’s theory of history (had Cleopatra’s nose …) to accept, in one way or another, that individuals and circumstances can make a difference to the course of events. Had Lincoln not been president, the Civil War would quite probably have had a different trajectory and outcome; had Bush and Cheney not run the show, it’s plausible that Iraq would have not been invaded as a response to 9/11 or that an invasion would have turned out differently; and had Mozart not lived there would have been no Figaro. But it’s hard to accept that if Watson and Crick – clever and ambitious though they were – had not found the double helical structure of DNA, no one else would have done so.
For the full article…
From Eric Benson and Justin Nobel in Guernica / a magazine of art and politics:
While the aerospace community waits for February when President Obama will announce the 2011 budget, effectively setting NASA’s direction for the near future, aerospace engineer Robert Zubrin agitates for a manned mission to Mars.
On a Saturday last August just outside the nation’s capital, Dr. Robert Zubrin saw his ambitions come crashing back to Earth—or, more accurately, back to the moon. Chris McKay, a NASA astrobiologist, had just delivered a speech to the Mars Society in which he proposed a human space exploration program based around a permanent lunar base. A trip to Mars, he said, should be delayed for several decades as humanity learns to live on our closest celestial body. “I grew up with Star Trek—the original series,” McKay said, “and the slogan was ‘to boldly go.’ Going is easy… we need to boldly stay.”
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John Markoff reviews W. Brian Arthur’s The Nature of Technology in the New York Times,
The popular view is that technology is the handmaiden of science — less pure, more commercial. But in “The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves,” W. Brian Arthur, an economist, reframes the relationship between science and technology as part of an effort to come up with a comprehensive theory of innovation. In Dr. Arthur’s view, the relationship between science and technology is more symbiotic than is generally conceded. Science and technology move forward together in a kind of co-evolution. And science does not lead.
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Dr. Arthur tries to explain the emergence of radical new technologies from jet engines to GPS. He correctly points out that the jet engine did not arise from the steady accretion of small improvements in piston engines nor did the modern computer burst forth as the next generation of mechanical calculator.
He points to the human propensity to solve problems as the force that leads to new generations of technology through recombination of existing technologies. Technology is “alive” in the sense that a coral reef is alive. The reef is an ecological system with many species, and technology in the broadest sense is an elaborate and constantly changing structure made up of thousands of discrete technologies, themselves composed of separate technologies.
For the complete review…
A news report in Science magazine for 13 November 2009 describes the US State Department’s goal of “bolster[ing] the department’s science capacity across the board.” The event that brought this goal to public notice was the appointment of three leading scientists to be special envoys with an assignment to foster scientific relationships with Muslim-majority nations.
Speaking in Morocco on 3 November, Clinton said the new envoys will help “to fulfill President Obama’s mandate to foster scientific and technological collaboration” and to “develop the capacity to meet economic, social, and ecological challenges.” She announced the selection of Egyptian-born Ahmed H. Zewail, a chemistry Nobelist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena; Algerian-born Elias Zerhouni, a radiologist who stepped down last fall as director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH); and biochemist Bruce Alberts, former president of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (NAS) and current editor-in-chief of Science. Clinton said that the State Department is also bolstering its scientific and environmental expertise at embassies around the world.
Science Magazine Cover, 6 November 2009
The 6 November 2009 issue of Science announced the theme for the February 2010 annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
This issue of Science includes the program of the 2010 AAAS Annual Meeting. The theme of the AAAS Annual Meeting in San Diego, 18 to 22 February 2010, is “Bridging Science and Society,” and calls on all scientists and engineers to make their work both beneficial and understandable.
A PDF of the program as it appears in this issue is available here; for more information on the meeting (including registration forms and information on accommodations), please visit www.aaas.org/meetings/.
Science for 23 October 2009 prints an editorial entitled Europe Rethinks Education by Pierre Léna discussing the importance of strengthening science education. Among the topics discussed is the Rocard Report on Science Education and efforts now underway to respond to it.
For societies to understand the consequences of vital issues such as climate change, education—especially science education—will play a critical role. Improving the quality of science education in primary and secondary schools is a challenge faced by nearly all countries. Europe has finally recongnized for a trans-European effort to rejuvenate the scientific education of all students, promising efforts are now under way.
The New York Review of Books (Volume 56, Number 5 · March 26, 2009) has published a review of by H. Allen Orr of Steven Shapin’s book The Scientific Life: A Moral History of a Late Modern Vocation (University of Chicago Press, 468 pp., $29.00). The full review is not available online, but the magazine provides the following excerpt:
Since science is the defining intellectual enterprise of our age, it would seem worth understanding who the scientist is. This is the task Steven Shapin takes on in his latest book, The Scientific Life. Shapin’s book represents something of a departure from his previous efforts. The Franklin L. Ford Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University, Shapin is perhaps best known for two works on seventeenth-century science, A Social History of Truth (1994) and The Scientific Revolution (1996). He is also coauthor, with Simon Schaffer, of Leviathan and the Air-Pump (1985), a fascinating account of debates between Robert Boyle and Thomas Hobbes over the legitimacy and proper interpretation of experimental manipulation in science. In his new book, Shapin ventures beyond the strict boundaries of the history of science. While he spends some time on the evolution of the scientific vocation, he’s also concerned with how scientists live and work now.
We cannot live by scepticism alone* is the title of a Nature essay by Harry Collins calling for a “third wave” in science studies. the editors introduce it thusly:
Scientists have been too dogmatic about scientific truth and sociologists have fostered too much scepticism — social scientists must now elect to put science back at the core of society….
*Nature 458, 30 (5 March 2009) | doi:10.1038/458030a; Published online 4 March 2009
