Organizing the World's Scientific Information by Date and Author is Making Mother Earth Sick

Google Tech Talk (more info below)
August 25, 2011

Presented by Kristen Marhaver.

ABSTRACT

Scientific information looks a lot like the news because it's printed on paper and built with sentences we believe to be true. But treating scientific papers as if they were a constant stream of news is dangerous because it gives even the most crucial discoveries about Earth's ecosystems only one day of public attention. This confuses the public by obscuring true scientific consensus and allows policymakers to avoid tough decisions.

In my talk, I'll explain why we should be organizing scientific discoveries as if they were products, using informal peer ratings to keep the most important work at the top of list for policymakers and the public to see. Such an effort requires us to consider factors like subscription walls, data access, political agendas, the nature of scientific debate and the deeply-entrenched habits of old academia. Despite the challenges of ranking a product as peculiar as the world's scientific information, I'll argue that a new approach is crucial if we are to make the tough decisions that will protect Mother Earth for the long term.

Speaker Info:

Kristen Marhaver, UC Merced.
Kristen is a Caribbean coral biologist who earned her Ph.D. at Scripps Institution of Oceanography and her bachelor's degree in biology at Georgia Tech. Trained by her fellow Techies to think like an engineer, she found that not only are the world's oceans dysfunctional, but so are the systems that scientists rely on to communicate these problems to the world. Speaking up on these issues, she won awards for her science writing on blogs and her presentations at conferences, but she was never able to win over the person who assigns the ocean-view offices at Scripps. She thus believes that that virtually every system could be further optimized.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• google tech talk
• environment
• science communication

[ulybaZZa]

The problem is mostly created by scientists themselves. If the articles were freely available on the internet and would reference other articles (which would also be freely available on the internet), google ranking algorithm would do the rest.

[cjmackay01]

If information needs to be shared for the common good, surely that information must become a public good. Really the issue is intellectual property rights. It would seem we face paradigm shifts in many of our ecosystems, it would be a shame if private property rights impede or obstruct necessary responses.

[121awesometim]

@ulybaZZa Yes, its lame. Some journals charge people $30 just to read a paper. And academic institutions have to pay tens of thousands of dollars to gain access. Publishing costs money for them...but not that much!

[121awesometim]

@ulybaZZa Unfortunately, no. Journal publications are the currency of academia & are effective ways to disseminate since they are indexed in sci databases. If you just put the document on your own website, for Ex, then you wouldn't have benefits of publishing in journals, namely the credibility that comes with it being peer-reviewed & "accepted" by other experts (*IF* its accepted) & the indexing in sci databases. Some scientists put summarized findings on their own websites for public

[ulybaZZa]

@121awesometim Perhaps I don't understand something, but publishing stuff on the web is pretty much for free. Isn't it?

[121awesometim]

@ulybaZZa short answer is: it is very expensive (thousands of dollars) to publish open access. There is actually a boycott of the worst publisher right now...let's hope it works so we can keep science out there for everyone!

[ulybaZZa]

@121awesometim If they'd rather have the articles be open access, why don't they publish them? Publishers are part of the problem, of course, but if scientists didn't work with the ones who lock down the information, everything would be open.

[121awesometim]

@ulybaZZa what do you mean its the scientists faults? Scientific Publishers are responsible for access issues....scientists would MUCH rather have their articles be open access.

[47f0]

Yeah, see, here's the deal. If you're dealing with the quality of Blatz Beer, there are a great many consumers available for rating one of many, many fairly low-cost items. When it comes to something like climate science, here's what happens - there just aren't that many climate scientists on the planet, there are only a handful of relevant policy makers, and... what happens when ExxonMobil makes a bunch of sock-puppet accounts to rate the climate science?

[cjmackay01]

A public good denied camelswithhammers FTB

[davyjames]

@cjmackay01 Intellectual property is not real property. That's where teh confusion comes in. Property rights are are good thing because they deal with scarce resources and thus need a way to be fairly allotted as they can't be used by everybody at the same time. Intellectual property, however, is just a legal fiction invented by government's and entrenched interests. Ideas, songs, words etc. are not property, they can be replicated without taking it away from another person.

[IvanMarinIvkovich]

Lol at Obama proposal. Like the control structure cares about it.