The New Zealand Herald Online has published a strongly-worded editorial from Australian cognitive scientist Stephan Lewandowsky on the nature of scientific debate and those who refuse to partake.

This follows closely on the heels of an article from Herald reporter Isaac Davison highlighting the less than enthusiastic response from scientists and other public figures who were invited to face off against Lord Christopher Monckton in public forums during his New Zealand visit.

An excerpt:

“Notwithstanding their refusal to participate in scientific debate, so-called climate “sceptics” crave attention and want to engage in phoney talkfests, preferably with real scientists, at their public showings. Equally, the media who give a denier’s opinions equal weight to that of an established climate scientist, need to re-examine the “balance” they purport to be representing. A review of the BBC’s treatment of science stories last month found that Britain’s state broadcaster had given too much air time to fringe views – particularly on the subject of climate change.

“Scientists simply live up to their responsibility to the public when they decline to participate in such charades, or when they consider Mr Monckton’s rhetorical exhibitions to be unworthy of an invitation by a university.

“No one is out to censor Mr Monckton or any other climate denier, no matter how ignorant or misleading their utterances might be. Anybody is free to air their views; however, scientists have a duty to inform the public honestly about who the “skeptics” really are. Exposing their techniques is not censorship. Neither is it censorship for a serious university to make choices about what information it seeks to promote, and which to identify as unscientific, in the same public interest.”

Read the editorial in full.

New Zealand climate scientist Dr Jim Salinger is among an international group of climate scientists quoted in emails obtained from the University of East Anglia’s climate research unit and leaked onto the internet.

The so-called “climategate” emails have been seized on by climate change sceptics who claim they show leading climate scientists have manipulated data and the peer-review journal system to fit their theory of global warming.

But the quoted researchers and others in the scientific community say the emails show nothing more than the frank discussion that goes on between scientists spread around the world and collaborating on research and journal papers.

Our colleagues at the Science Media Centre in London wrapped up reaction from UK-based scientists:

Dr Chris Huntingford, Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (CEH), said:

“Using the very comprehensive set of temperature measurements available to us, we do know that there has been significant warming over the last hundred years. These datasets have been compiled by independent research laboratories in both the UK and the USA.

“Computer model descriptions of the climate system are increasing in their predictive skill, and there are now very good reasons to believe that their output is accurate and can be trusted. These simulations provide compelling evidence of the link between global warming and increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide due to the burning of fossil fuels.

“Such state-of-the-art computer models of how the climate functions do also account for natural cycles in the Earth system. However, when the additional influence of humans is not considered, they are unable to explain the rapid rate of warming that has been observed over the last Century. The implication is that to a very high level of certainty, the warming observed in the last Century is not part of a natural cycle.

“Almost all current scientific understanding of how the climate system operates suggests that humankind is having an influence on our climate system.”

Professor John Burrows, Director of the Biogeochemistry Programme, Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (CEH), said:

“The peer review scientific process was created to try to avoid conspiracies from any side on an issue. Despite the adverse reaction in some quarters the current discussion is a perfect example that whilst it doesn’t always look perfect, an open debate, backed up by peer review,  is what science is all about.

“Whilst not ignoring “emailgate” we should not inadvertently move the public attention from the established scientific consensus to the attempt at character assassination being made by these climate change sceptics.

“The basic physics of global climate change has been known since Arrhenius at the end of the 19th century if not before. The four Assessment Reports from the IPCC are consistent, however, the data since 1990 seems to follow worst case scenarios. To me this is evidence that the scientific community is behaving responsibly and rather cautiously with respect to the science of climate change.”

Professor Piers Forster, School of Earth and Environment, University of Leeds, said:

“Scientists at the Climate Research Unit are leading experts in the world’s temperature record. They do an amazingly hard job of collecting data from lots of counties, looking at errors and putting the different datasets together. They have been under increasing pressure from a few individuals to respond to multiple FOI calls. Like all us scientists they are short of man-power and stretch their resources to the maximum to do as much new science as possible. The need to respond to FOI requests are often too large to make them feasibly achievable and whilst some of the emails show scientists to be all too human, nothing I have read makes me doubt the veracity of the peer review process or the general warming trend in the global temperature record. I know that when errors in their global temperature product have previously been found (e.g. Thomson et al., 2008, Nature), they responded as all scientists should, researching the source of the error with true scientific enthusiasm. ”

Dr Stephan Harrison, Associate Professor in Quaternary Science, School of Geography, University of Exeter, said:

“The emails from the Climatic Research Unit which have been published on the internet have been seized upon by climate change sceptics as evidence that scientists are involved in a global warming conspiracy, suppression of dissenting voices and making data up to support a global warming agenda.  We shouldn’t get too carried away, however. Irrespective of what may or may not have been said in some private emails, this doesn’t change the physical properties of carbon dioxide, and doesn’t change the fact that human activity is warming the planet.  There’s a lot of politics in all of this debate, but it is the science that has to drive policy.”

Kathy Maskell, Spokesperson, & Professor Rowan Sutton, Walker Institute, University of Reading, said:

“Throughout the Earth’s history there have been natural changes in climate caused by many factors, including variations in the Earth’s orbit around the Sun, volcanic eruptions, and changes in greenhouse gas concentrations. The scientific evidence now shows that people are changing the global climate.

“Climate scientists look at both natural factors that cause climate to change and they look at the effect that people are having on climate. There is no doubt that human activity, such as burning fossil fuels and agriculture, is increasing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. This increase in greenhouse gases is causing the globe to warm.

“The current warmth is unusual in the context of the last 1000 years (at least) and is not just part of a natural cycle. Past changes are also thought to have occurred much more slowly than the warming over the 20th century.

“The majority of scientists agree that much of the warming since the mid-20th century is very likely due to increasing greenhouse gases being produced by human activity. Scientists have looked at different possible causes for the warming. Natural changes (like changes in the Sun’s output) cannot explain 20th century warming. The only way to reproduce the warming over the 20th century is to include the effects that people are having on the climate.

“Over the 20th century as a whole there has been a warming trend of 0.7 degrees centigrade and the warming has accelerated since the mid-20th century. The warming has not been steady and there have been periods of cooling. This is exactly what climate scientists would expect. As well as increasing greenhouse gases, natural factors (such as volcanic eruptions and changes in sea surface temeprature in the Pacific called El Nino) are also affecting global temperature. So scientists would expect there to be short periods where there is less warming and even cooling, but overall the trend is towards higher global temperatures. ”

Bob Ward, policy and communications director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, London School of Economics and Political Science, said:

“Once appropriate action has been taken over the hacking, there has to be some process to assess the substance of the e-mail messages as well. The selective disclosure and dissemination of the messages has created the impression of impropriety, and the only way of clearing the air now would be through a rigorous investigation. I have sympathy for the climate researchers at the University of East Anglia and other institutions who have been the target of an aggressive campaign by so-called ‘sceptics’ over a number of years. But I fear that only a thorough investigation could now clear their names.

“There needs to be an assurance that these e-mail messages have not revealed inappropriate conduct in the preparation of journal articles and in dealing with requests from other researchers for access to data. This will probably require investigations both by the host institutions and by the relevant journals. There may also be a role for the UK Office of Research Integrity to advise on any investigation.

“The e-mail messages I have seen posted on ‘sceptics” websites do not cast doubt on the basic physical fact that the Earth is warming in response to rising concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. ‘Sceptics’ may seek to wrongly portray these e-mail messages as a smoking gun from a worldwide conspiracy to create a global warming hoax, but that is simply a ridiculous fantasy.”

Dr Andy Challinor, lecturer in Climate Change Modelling, University of Leeds, said:

“Scientists are frequently faced with choices about methods of presenting data. The aim is to represent the underlying facts clearly, and there is rarely a single correct way of doing this. The mechanisms for anthropogenic climate change are established science that is well-understood. The idea that the many scientists across the globe working on climate change could collude in misrepresenting the fundamentals of the science is ludicrous, since it would be both counter-cultural to science and logistically impossible.”

Dr Shaun Fitzgerald, Industrial Fellow, University of Cambridge BP Institute, said:

“The evidence base for climate change continues to be debated. However, what is disappointing is that there is less debate about what we should be doing morally regardless of the strength of the case for or against climate change being driven by mankind. Even if some people want to dismiss the evidence base, what do they think we should do as responsible citizens? Clearly we should be seeking ways of reducing our impact on the planet – this is irrefutable.

“Improving energy efficiency and switching to non/low-carbon energy sources are vital. In the case of improved energy efficiency, there are strong economic arguments today as to why this should be done now. In the case of switching to non/low carbon energy sources, the economic arguments are longer-term and may involve consideration of the cost of climate change as per the Stern report. In summary, I fail to understand why people want to debate the evidence base for climate change rather than debate what we should be doing anyway to reduce our impact on the planet. The technological advances in energy efficiency need to be adopted by more people, and more quickly, before we invest more time debating climate change! “

The Open Access (OA) movement has been around since the 1990s – not surprising, as one of its principal tenets is that information should be freely available online. More specifically, it generally refers to scientific information, and in particular the information generally found in scientific journals.  As we all know, this information is generally not freely accessible: rather, it is usually kept for access by journal subscribers, whether they be individuals or institutions.

The debate over whether scientific research should be freely accessible or not is a heated one, with very little sign of a resolution either way anytime soon.  Its proponents say that freely available scientific research advances the cause and progression of science.  Its detractors says that without journals (most of which are subscription-based), there would be no peer-review process, and hence no quality control.  It’s not that simple, however.

Click here to listen to the related podcast – Embargoes in science reporting: Friend or foe?

Perhaps a good place to start is with the inevitable.  Michael Nielsen has written a very clear article on the matter, entitled ‘Is scientific publishing about to be disrupted?’. In it, he argues very convincingly that scientific publishing (including journals) is about to experience the same upheaval that the newspaper/print industries have been experiencing.  At the hands of the same phenomenon: the internet. And, just like newspapers, there is relatively little that can be done about the situation.

One of the most important, and perhaps noticeable, agents of this change is scientific blogging: blogs written by scientists about their own and others’ work.

As Nielsen writes:

“Let’s look up close at one element of this flourishing ecosystem: the gradual rise of science blogs as a serious medium for research. It’s easy to miss the impact of blogs on research, because most science blogs focus on outreach. But more and more blogs contain high quality research content.”

They differ greatly from published articles in that they allow scientists to engage in an ongoing conversation about their work and its developments, and are also a valuable means of engaging other scientists in a conversation about their work.

The movement is catching on to such a degree that numerous highly respected scientists are blogging, including Terry Tao, Tim Gowers, and Richard Lipton (list supplied by Michael Nielsen).  On home ground, the New Zealand science blogging movement is also picking up pace: there are a number of blogs already in existence, and there are plans afoot to aggregate these bloggers’ work in a project called Sciblogs (based on ScienceBlogs).

“Scientific publishers should be terrified that some of the world’s best scientists, people at or near their research peak, people whose time is at a premium, are spending hundreds of hours each year creating original research content for their blogs, content that in many cases would be difficult or impossible to publish in a conventional journal. What we’re seeing here is a spectacular expansion in the range of the blog medium. By comparison, the journals are standing still.” (Nielsen)

A main feature of the Open Access movement, however, is not necessarily to dissuade scientists from publishing journals (more on that later), or to encourage them to write blogs.  Instead, it aims to encourage them to deposit copies of their published papers (pre or post-prints) in repositories which do give free access.  Of these, ArXiv is particularly prominent, and has a fantastic physics blog.

A recent issue of the Australian (OA) journal SCRIPTed looks at the issue in a paper entitled “Open Access to Journal Content as a Case Study in Unlocking IP’.  The paper examines the accessibility of reviewed, published papers from examples of the different types of science publishers, including PNAS, Elsevier and a major division of the US NRC.

Interestingly, the paper finds that the lack of access to published papers is not, as one might assume, solely the fault of publishers.  Instead, it found that the publishers’ copyright restrictions were (relatively) liberal, in many cases allowing researchers to place their work in repositories of one form or another.  The primary reason for the lack of forward momentum was due to the researchers themselves.  In the paper’s conclusion:

“The exploitation of the opportunity has lagged, because of impediments to adoption, especially the lack of any positive incentive to self-deposit, and downright apathy.  The outcomes to date are disappointing for proponents of OA and Unlocking IP…OA and Unlocking IP in the area of journal articles are at serious risk of being stillborn’.

No doubt, this last sentence is one which would thrill many journal publishers.  However, the OA movement and blogging are not the only movements which threaten journals.  These previous examples have opposed journals in a relatively passive way – they are (generally) quite happy to co-exist.

There is a far stronger movement which is lining up against journals.  This movement, written about in Times Higher Education’s recent article ‘A threat to scientific communication’ talks of growing unhappiness with publishing papers as the measure of a scientist’s success.  An increasing number of (well respected) scientists, including the former editor of the British Medical Journal, says the influence of being published in the ‘major’ journals is far too powerful, and that journal metrics such as the Journal Impact Factor are actually an impediment to scientific progress.

“”(Journal metrics) are the disease of our times,” says Sir John Sulston, chairman of the Institute for Science, Ethics and Innovation at the University of Manchester, and Nobel prizewinner in the physiology or medicine category in 2002.

“Sulston argues that the use of journal metrics is not only a flimsy guarantee of the best work (his prize-winning discovery was never published in a top journal), but he also believes that the system puts pressure on scientists to act in ways that adversely affect science – from claiming work is more novel than it actually is to over-hyping, over-interpreting and prematurely publishing it, splitting publications to get more credits and, in extreme situations, even committing fraud.”

A further comment:

“Noting that the medical journal articles that get the most citations are studies of randomised trials from rich countries, [Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet] speculates that if The Lancet published more work from Africa, its impact factor would go down.

“”The incentive for me is to cut off completely parts of the world that have the biggest health challenges … citations create a racist culture in journals’ decision-making and embody a system that is only about us (in the developed world).””

(Another problem cited is that the JIF, because it focuses only a few years, actually gives no indication of the long-term importance of scientific work.)

Embargoes are also coming under attack (see the recording at the bottom of this page), as it makes science seem more like an event than a linear series of incremental advances.  This reminds me quite a lot of Professor Sir Peter Gluckman’s recent comments on the NZ media: what he said very closely matches this criticism, in that he feels that the New Zealand media fails to show science as a gradual process, instead showing it as a series of leaps forward.  Which gave me cause to think: is it, then, actually the media’s fault?  Particularly here in New Zealand, where many journalists are not able to specialise in science issues, and thus gain an understanding of scientific research’s continuity?

But I digress.  In answer to the journals’ primary defense of their existence, the peer review process itself, there is also increased questioning of its use.  Journal publishers maintain that the peer review process is the only real means of quality assurance for scientific research.  The reactions to this include the following:

• That peer review itself is generally undertaken for free, meaning that journals are taking free work and, essentially, selling it back to scientists.
• The peer review process itself needs to have some of the following questions asked about: who actually does the reviewing?  How appropriate are they?  How strenuous is the process?  And, of course, timing is also an issue (the process can take months, greatly slowing the speed at which research becomes known about).
  • In fact, this latter point brings to mind the recent debate over a paper published recently by well-known climate change skeptics, which attributes over 70% of climate change to the El Nino/Southern Oscillation weather patterns.  While the paper was peer-reviewed, there have since been rebuttals (including this, yet-to-be-published paper) saying that the maths used was incorrect, and bringing into doubt the quality of the peer review undertaken on the original paper (I’m not commenting on either, please note).

Deep thought also has to be given to the tremendous amounts of research lost because it doesn’t come up with a result.  There are two types of experiments which have no end results (and I speak from personal experience here): they were poorly set up, performed or analysed, or there simply are no results to be had.

While the first group should absolutely be ignored, the second can be very important to scientists.  We used to say (in the market research consultancy at which I worked for a time) if our analysis turned up nothing that “it’s a learning in itself’.  And it often can be, either to prevent other scientists duplicating the same research (a huge waste of time and resources), or because there really is nothing there to see, which suggests that effort be focused in another direction.

The remedy for science publishing’s woes is unclear.  While everyone agrees that there is a problem, or at the very least a challenge, nobody is sure what shape the future of science publishing will take.

Michael Nielsen says that scientific publishers need to become technology-driven if they are to survive (he mentions Nature as one of the few publishers trying this), and that they must do so even if it means fundamentally changing the way they currently work.

“In ten to twenty years, scientific publishers will be technology companies. By this, I don’t just mean that they’ll be heavy users of technology, or employ a large IT staff. I mean they’ll be technology-driven companies in a similar way to, say, Google or Apple. That is, their foundation will be technological innovation, and most key decision-makers will be people with deep technological expertise. Those publishers that don’t become technology driven will die off.”

And while it seems that the peer review process is likely to stay, it will no doubt change in form.  It might well imitate what PLoS’s policy is, which is to check that the results can be substantiated by the methods and data, but not to worry about whether it is original or even important – this should be up to the world at large to decide.

Of course, something else to consider is this: if a paper is published in a repository or on a scientist’s own website/blog, and is then commented on by his peers…Is this not exactly what the peer review process is anyway?  In that case, why be concerned with publishing?

However one looks at it, the industry is in for a massive upheaval: while it is uncertain just how, we can be sure that those trying to innovate to stay ahead of it may survive, but those that stand still will, like their newspaper counterparts, face extinction.

Note: The Royal Society of New Zealand conducted some research in journal use/publication in 2004.  The results are here.