March 2008 Archives
I'm flattered that Peter Suber picked up my last blog entry. He points out two errors I made:
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(1) He assumes that all OA journals charge publication fees. But most do not. (2) He assumes that OA archiving always requires embargoes. But the majority of green journals, or those allowing postprint archiving, allow it immediately upon publication.
He's right on both points, of course.1 I was wrong to leave the impression that all open access journals charge publication fees and that open access archiving always requires embargoes. But my larger point still stands.
Roughly 70% of the expenses associated with publishing mainline academic journals, even when published by not-for-profit professional societies,2 will remain even if print is entirely eliminated. Someone has to cover that cost. If it's not through up-front charges to authors, then it will be through charges to their institutions (the BioMedCentral model), or through restricting access for a some period so that publishers can recoup their costs before making materials available.
As I say in one of my early slides, “open access is an undeniable public good.” But as my friends in economics and political science point out, figuring out how to pay for public goods isn't easy. If it were, we wouldn't be arguing about the Kyoto protocol or global climate change.
I mentioned last week that I participated in the UConn Library's spring forum “Mandatory open access: friend or foe.” There will be videos of the whole two-hour event posted,1 and I'll provide a link here as soon as they're available.2 In the meantime, I've posted the PowerPoint slides I used with my presentation.
I had three main conclusions:
- Open access is an undeniable public good. (see Ingrid Robeyns on Crooked Timber for a discussion of how open access is particularly valuable to scholars in lesser developed countries and at smaller academic institutions everywhere)
- Publishing journals costs money, and only about 30% of the cost is accounted for by printing and distribution. Roughly 70% of the costs will remain, even with pure electronic distribution.3
- The challenge is to find an economic model that provides publishers with resources sufficient to keep publishing while providing the broadest possible access to published scholarly material.
Open access is a friend who deserves our help and support.
A couple of weeks ago Orac commented on the report at Brokenpipeline.org decrying five years of stagnant funding for NIH. Last weeks Nature points out another problem:
A whopping 200 scientists received six or more grants each from the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 2007, according to data analysed by Nature. One principal investigator was awarded 32 grants, the data reveal, and many others got eight or nine (see Table)....
Last month, advisory panels reviewing the NIH peer-review system recommended that researchers should devote at least 20% of their time to any project awarded a research grant (see Nature 451, 1035; 2008 ). This would limit the number of grants awarded per investigator to five.
Limiting the number of grants that a PI can hold simultaneously won't solve funding problems for biomedical researchers, but it would help to alleviate the pain. It would also be more intellectually honest. I'm probably prejudiced because of my meager funding history (just take a look at my CV), but I can't see how anyone could reasonably say that they were the principal investigator on more than four or five different projects. I can understand how someone could manage more. Those with conference grants in the table are an obvious example. But I can't see how anyone could be involved in decisions about experiments and observations, in analysis and interpretation of data, and in writing and preparation of papers derived from the work if they were involved in more than four or five projects.
Assume someone works 80-hour weeks and does nothing but work on funded projects. No reviewing, no editing, no committees, no teaching. Nothing but work on funded projects, including speaking about results. That's 16 hours a week per project. But take away 20% of the time for reviewing and editing, take away another 20% for committee work and administration (both probably conservative), and we're down to barely 9 1/2 hours a week per project – a short day for any of the graduate students or post-docs involved.
Capping the number of research projects on which a person can be a PI won't solve funding problems at NIH, but it would be a start.
Yesterday Chris Mooney wrote that he thinks the P.Z. Myers affair helps Ben Stein. I disagree.
Today Matt Nistbet agrees with Chris.. Commenter James F. explains why Matt's wrong1:
I would offer that while the public doesn't have a great understanding of science, they do understand hypocrisy. A person who went through the proper channels to view a film claiming to protest suppression of ideas - a film in which he appears - was barred from the screening and ordered to leave the premises. I certainly don't think this needs to be rehashed ad nauseum, but getting it out there shows the public the true colors of the producers of Expelled.
As I've written before,
I think Matt Nisbet's and Chris Mooney's observations on on framing are so important. Like it or not, human beings are cognitive misers. We use shortcuts in reasoning all the time. Only occasionally is an issue so vital that we're willing to reconsider everything from first principles. If we're confronted with an assertion that is counter to other deeply held beliefs, we're liable to dismiss it. If we think about it at all, we're liable to look for reasons why the assertion is wrong.
On this one though, I think Chris is wrong. The whole point of “Expelled”, as I understand it, is that we evil, narrow-minded scientists have excluded those who hold a contrary view without any justification. Greg Laden nails it in a comment on Chris' post:
That the ID people are hypocrites may not have been difficult to ascertain before, but not it is beyond doubt.
It's like Eliot Spitzer admitting he was client 9.
You may have heard about the movie “Expelled” that is being released this month. The movie's website1 has this two-sentence summary of its theme:
Big science has expelled smart new ideas from the classroom. What they forgot is that every generation has its rebel...Ben blows the horn on suppression.
I've pointed out repeatedly that creationism, including intelligent design creationism, has no place in science classrooms, because it isn't a scientific theory.
Proponents of creationism claim that they only want to “teach the controversy.” There are at least two problems with that claim. First, there isn't a scientific controversy to teach. Second, they're not interested in debate. They're interested in indoctrination. Want evidence that they're interested in indoctrination?
Read on.
I'm speaking at the UConn Libraries Spring Forum next week, and that's the forum's title. My answer to the question? “Yes and no.” We're going to be videotaped and the library will post a video. When they do, I'll post a link here.
In the meantime, if you're in the area and interested, please stop by. There's no admission fee1, and the forum is scheduled to run from 3-5pm in the Konover Auditorium of the Dodd Center. Refreshments will be available at 2:30. Here's a fllyer providing details, and here's a link to the the UConn President's blog that mentions it.
I'll post a few notes from the forum next Thursday or Friday.
I mentioned a couple of months ago that Yale University1 has reduced carbon emissions by 17% since 2005. I'm pleased to report that the President of UConn has just announced that UConn will join the American Colleges and University Presidents Climate Commitment.
Click through for the text of the announcement.
As I wrote then, “How candidates deal with issues where science is deeply involved tells us a lot about how they use evidence, how they evaluate expertise, and how they reach decisions, all critical features for a leader who cannot possibly know all of the technical details about any policy (s)he adopts.”
I don't think I'd call it a moral obligation for Clinton, McCain, and Obama to participate as they suggest in a recent post at sciencedebate2008.com, but I think it would be valuable if they do. Here's a video of a news conference at the Franklin Institute on Friday explaining why. (Here's a link to the ScienceDebate2008 page with the video, in case this version doesn't work.)
In fact, I shouldn't call it a milestone. I should call it an inch-pebble. In the grand scheme of things, my inch-pebble is minuscule. Even within the smaller circle of science blogs it's pretty damn small, but it's my inch-pebble.
I received an e-mail from Sitemeter today reporting the cumulative visits and page views Uncommon Ground has received since I joined. Here's what it said:
-- Site Summary ---
Visits
Total ....................... 10,051
Average per Day ................. 38
Average Visit Length .......... 1:17
This Week ...................... 266
Page Views
Total ....................... 13,985
Average per Day ................. 57
Average per Vit sit .............. 1.5
This Week ...................... 400
Passing 10,000 visits isn't much, but it is an inch-pebble I thought it was worth pointing out.
From Ken at The Early Days of a Better Nation
Evolution versus denial is no more a conflict between religion and atheism than it is a controversy within science. At one level, the controversy is within the various religions themselves. Most denominations follow such revered Christian thinkers as Origen and Augustine, and the mediaeval Jewish sage Maimonedes, in reading Genesis figuratively. Fundamentalists insist that if Genesis isn't completely historical, it's simply false. In this, ironically, they are on the same page as some militant atheists.
Elsewhere in the article, he points out that there's a temptation among many to respond to creationist stupidity by arguing that religious faith is equally stupid. That's a mistake, of both philosophy and politics.
Philosophy – Science can neither prove nor disprove the existence of god. If there is a god, (s)he lies outside the realm of observational or experimental science. To show that creationism is not a science it's enough to point out that it invokes explanations that cannot be tested by observation or experiment (see my post on epistemology).
Politics – Most religious traditions are compatible with a scientific understanding of evolution. We need to isolate the fringe, not antagonize the majority. Attacking belief in god is not a winning strategy. If forced to choose between science and their religious faith, most believers will choose faith. The choice isn't necessary, so we don't want them to make it.
I posted a map of the state by state distribution of Starbucks yesterday (shamelessy borrowed from Andrew Gelman's site). I noticed earlier this afternoon that Andrew has posted some updated maps and some new charts. Click through and check them out.
Human impact on the world's ocean ecosystems, including examples of heavy impact (insets b-d) and light impact (inset 3). (From Halpern et al.Science 319:948-952; 2008 – click on image for larger interactive map)You may know that Florida's State Board of Education recently adopted new science education standards that require students to learn about the “scientific theory of evolution.” (Here's a report from MSNBC.)
Here's how First Coast News (Jacksonville, FL) described it:
Adding the term “scientific theory” before the term "evolution" was a modified proposal at least one board member called a compromise, not standards proposed originally to the committee....
Terry Kemple, the executive director of the Community Issues Council in Tampa, opposed adding language “scientific theory” during public comments. In his group's opinion, he said, adding “scientific theory does not begin to even address the problems” with the standards, which were drafted over approximately the past year.
Wired's Brandon Klein sees the result this way:
The amendment's supporters called the language change a victory -- and it is, though not in the way they imagine.Not only will Florida's students learn about evolution; they'll also learn that the scientific definition of a theory is different from the everyday definition, referring not to wild-eyed speculation but to a vast body of observation and testing that confirms a hypothesis so strongly that it might as well be considered fact.
That struck me as overly optimistic at the time. Now there's a bill in the Florida State Senate: Senate 2692, Relating to Teaching Chemical and Biological Evolution.
Click on the image to see a map showing the distribution of WalMarts and a scatterplot illustrating the joint distribution at Andrew's site.A commenter on Andrew's site points out that you can find maps showing the locations of McDonald's, Burger King, Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, Wendy's, KFC, Jack in the Box, Hardee's, Carl's Jr., and In-N-Out at http://www.fastfoodmaps.com/static.html
