Nine ways scientists can help improve science journalism Genuine advances in the quality of science news will require both journalists and scientists to get their houses in order
So let’s get to know each better and destroy the “ivory tower” myth. 3. Be there
Email How many scientists make time to talk to journalists when a press release about their research is made public? We propose, in no particular order, nine possible ways scientists can improve science journalism and nine possible questions for science journalists. Ways scientists can improve science journalism: 1. Watch what you release In the balance between carefully reporting science and courting interest, we believe many press releases push the latter too far. We can help journalists by stating limitations and highlighting danger points in interpretation where an untrained eye might confuse correlation with causation, or absolute and relative risks. Doing so requires us to place public understanding of science above our own vanity and pressure to achieve impact. 2. Reach out For us this debate has highlighted the degree of separation between science and journalism, with neither world understanding in any detail the nature of the other.
How many of us ensure we know exactly when our press release will be made public and make time in our diaries for interviews? The reality is that if we are unavailable in the 48 hours following the press release then the ship may have sailed, or sunk. Science may grow like a bristlecone pine but most news stories are mayflies. 4. Be prepared Media training courses are important, but so is common sense. Key quotes can be prepared in advance of interviews. Advice from non-experts can help recognise and eliminate jargon. 5. Think big We must accept that accuracy is relative. Scientists already know that their own peer-reviewed articles routinely include what other scientists would regard as oversimplifications. Journalists need us to shift our mindset to the perspective of the layperson and question whether a particular detail or caveat is necessary to convey the broader importance of the work. For a vital caveat, be ready to explain clearly why it is part of the big picture. 6. Think blog
Blogs are often regarded as an alternative to PR and commercial media, but they may also be useful as extra resources for journalists. If a journalist doesn’t understand your press release or journal article and can’t get you on the phone, they could refer to your blog for detail and FAQs. As successful blogs show, this bridge can be highly valuable. We’ve tried this with an expanded version of the current article. 7. Make it public Scientists face unrelenting pressure to publish in the most respected journals, placing much science behind paywalls. The ethical concerns this raises, especially for publicly funded science, have been underlined at length (see for example here, here, and here). We can post our articles on our websites but a coordinated move to open access publishing may require changes in government policy . 8. Watch your neighbourhood When things go wrong, act. We must take the time to challenge misreporting of our own research and other work in our fields. Many scientists are apathetic about misreporting, either laughing it off or resenting it but then doing nothing about it. Equally important is to challenge pseudoscience or exaggerated claims in our own fields. Bad
science has no better ally than silence from good scientists. 9. Get the facts Argument is no substitute for evidence. Most scientists are not experts in journalism studies, but that shouldn’t stop us from teaming up with the experts and doing research on how our area of science is represented in the media. We have just embarked on research in our own field to assess the accuracy of press releases and news stories, and the attitudes of scientists toward them. We would encourage more scientists to do the same.
Questions for journalists: 1. If press releases contained more caveats and limitations, would it reduce their media uptake? Is this necessarily a bad thing? 2. Would journalists welcome clearer statements of limitations and interpretative danger points in press releases? 3. Would journalists welcome open days, internships or lab visits hosted by scientists? 4. Do science journalists feel constrained by the political or editorial agenda of their newspapers? If so, how do they deal with it? 5. Do science reporters believe that science news would be improved if the reporters were allowed to write their own headlines? How many do already? 6. Do science journalists (and generalist journalists covering science news) feel that their workload is too high? Would a newspaper suffer if it concentrated on fewer science stories? 7. Do specialist science journalists believe that interacting too closely with scientists detracts from their capacity to report objectively and critique science? 8. Would science journalists welcome a criterion-based quality stamp to aid in their news reporting, similar perhaps to the mechanism we propose in our submission to the Leveson Inquiry? Could such a system improve public understanding? 9. In science, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. It has been suggested that the opposite can apply in science journalism. Discuss. Dr Chris Chambers, Dr Petroc Sumner, Dr Fred Boy and Professor Jacky Boivin are at the School of Psychology, Cardiff University
Open access publishing should not favour those with deep pockets The leading model of open access publishing discriminates against academics unable to pay publication charges There's a risk that the costs of open access publishing will be met from funds otherwise available for research itself. The present academic publishing system obstructs the free communication of research findings. By erecting paywalls, commercial publishers prevent scientists from downloading research papers unless they pay substantial fees. Libraries similarly pay huge amounts (up to ÂŁ1m or more per annum) to give their readers access to online journals. There is general agreement that free and open access to scientific knowledge is desirable. The way this might be achieved has come to the fore in recent debates about the future of scientific and scholarly journals. The announcement by the UK government's universities and science minister, David Willetts, of free access to all publicly funded research findings, Jimmy Wales's appointment as a government adviser and Dame Janet Finch's working group set up to advise on open access, all reflect the importance of this issue. Nevertheless, we have a real concern that the process of opening up academic publication may exclude some key interests as a result of the methods used to achieve it. Our concern lies with the major proposed alternative to the current system. Under this arrangement, authors are expected to pay when they submit papers for publication in online journals: the so called "article processing cost" (APC). The fee can amount to anything between ÂŁ1,000 and ÂŁ2,000 per article, depending on the reputation of the journal. Although the fees may sometimes be waived, eligibility for exemption is decided by the publisher and such concessions have
no permanent status and can always be withdrawn or modified. The APC approach is increasingly favoured by funding bodies such as the Wellcome Trust. These funding bodies make provision in academic research grants to pay for publication charges for the research they fund. A major problem with the APC model is that it effectively shifts the costs of academic publishing from the reader to the author and therefore discriminates against those without access to the funds needed to meet these costs. Among those excluded are academics in, for example, the humanities and the social sciences whose research funding typically does not include publication charges, and independent researchers whose only means of paying the APC is from their own pockets. Academics in developing countries in particular face discrimination under APC because of their often very limited access to research funds. Not only is APC discriminatory, but within a finite research funding budget its costs are likely to be met from funds otherwise available for the research itself, thereby potentially penalising the whole research community. There is another approach that could be implemented for a fraction of the cost of commercial publishers' current journal subscriptions. "Access for all" (AFA) journals, which charge neither author nor reader, are committed to meeting publishing costs in other ways. We have been involved with the funding of a journal, Longitudinal and Life Course Studies (LLCS), which is free for authors and readers, and was initially established with the support of a three-year development grant from the Nuffield Foundation. We don't benefit financially from the journal, and the editorial and reviewing services are supplied free. The costs for an AFA journal include copy-editing,
layout, editorial meetings and journal management, including the peer review process, together with website hosting charges and publishing software support. For LLCS these amount to about ÂŁ15,000 per year for three issues and are met with the help of the Society for Longitudinal and Lifecourse Studies, independent research centres and a nominal readership registration fee. How can AFA be encouraged? We propose that university libraries set aside some of their journal acquisition funds, currently paid to commercial publishers through bulk arrangements, in the form of grant aid to support new or existing AFA journals. Allocations would take account of the many years it can take to build the readership and submissions base on which the journals' reputation and future viability will depend. Governance details would need to be decided and ideally would involve library consortia, universities, learned societies and research funders. What we need is some clear thinking about how online publishing should develop. In particular we strongly urge the Finch working group to give serious attention to the alternative AFA strategy for journal funding and for Willetts to adopt it within his vision for open access. We are not advocating a sudden major shift to this form of publication, rather a funding regime that would encourage its growth and explore how it might best be managed. Such a publication model would not only be cost-efficient, we believe that it would also find greater acceptance within the academic community as a legitimate return on the editorial and refereeing resources that are currently provided for free.
Open, free access to academic research? This will be a seismic shift Opening up access to academic research will put more data and power in the hands of the people who pay for it David Willetts guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 1 May 2012 21.00 BST Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales will be helping ensure that the publicly funded portal promotes collaboration and engagement. Photograph: Peter Macdiarmid/ Getty My department spends about £5bn each year funding academic research – and it is because we believe in the fundamental importance of this research that we have protected the science budget for the whole of this parliament. We fund this research because it furthers human knowledge and drives intellectual, social and economic progress. In line with our commitment to open information, tomorrow I will be announcing at the Publishers Association annual meeting that we will make publicly funded research accessible free of charge to readers. Giving people the right to roam freely over publicly funded research will usher in a new era of academic discovery and collaboration, and will put the UK at the forefront of open research. The challenge is how we get there without ruining the value added by academic publishers. The controversy about the status and reliability of reviews on TripAdvisor is a reminder of how precious genuine, objective peer review is. We still need to pay for such functions, which is why
one attractive model – known as gold – has the funders of research covering the costs. Another approach, known as green, includes a closed period before wider release during which journals can earn revenues. While opening up the fruits of research is a seismic shift for academic publishing, it is not a leap into the unknown. There are many good examples in medicine. For instance, the Wellcome Trust requires all the research it funds to be made freely available online. A report this year from the U.S. Committee for Economic Development has concluded that the US National Institute of Health's policy of open access has accelerated the transition from basic research to commercialisation, generated more follow-on research and reduced duplicate or dead-end lines of inquiry – so increasing the US government's return on its investment in research. And the researcher Philip Davis has found that, when publishers randomly make articles open access on journal websites, readership increases by up to 250%. Moving from an era in which taxpayer-funded academic articles are stuck behind paywalls for much of their life to one in which they are available free of charge will not be easy. There are clear trade-offs. If those funding research pay open-access journals in advance, where will this leave individual researchers who can't cover the cost? If we improve the world's access to British research, what might we get in response? Does a preference for open access mean different incentives for different disciplines?
These questions explain why I have asked Dame Janet Finch, one of the UK's most experienced and respected academics, to produce a report setting out the steps needed to fulfil our radical ambition. She is working with all interested parties and her report will appear before the summer. It is expected to chart a course towards a world where academic articles are freely and openly available at or around the time of publication. Twenty years ago it would have been impossible to imagine an encyclopedia written by millions, openly and freely collaborating via the internet. Today, Wikipedia is an important part of our lives and its co-founder, Jimmy Wales, will be advising us on the common standards that will have to be agreed and adopted for open access to be a success, and also helping to make sure that the new government-funded portal for accessing research really promotes collaboration and engagement. We want to harness new technologies to enable people to comment and rate published papers in ways that were not possible before, and we want to develop new online channels that enable researchers from around the world to collaborate and share data and build new research partnerships. With Jimmy Wales's help, I'm confident that we can achieve all this and much more. Our commitment to open up access to academic research will help strengthen this information revolution, and put more data and power in the hands of people. It's proof that there are still dividing lines in British politics – and that we are firmly on the side of openness.
Making research papers freely available is about much more than breaking the monopoly of rich academic publishers
enough.
moral responsibility to be as open as possible with the public. Second, the scientific method only works when analyses can be fully scrutinised and, if necessary, replicated by other researchers. In other words, to seek to prevent your data becoming freely available is plain unscientific.
Open access will be crucial to maintain public confidence in science If researchers don't break free from the current system, the already fragile relationship between science and society may disintegrate. Photograph: Ho/Reuters The Guardian's recent articles about the absurdities of the academic journal racket have brought out into the open some very important arguments that many academics, including myself, have been making for many years with little apparent effect.
Now this issue is receiving wider attention, I hope sufficient pressure will develop to force radical changes to the way research is communicated, not only between scientists but also between scientists and the public, because this is not just about the exorbitant cost of academic journals and the behaviour of the industry that publishes them. It's about the much wider issue of how science should operate in a democratic society. Research, especially scientific research, thrives in an atmosphere that allows the free exchange of ideas and information: open discussion and debate are essential if the scientific method is to operate properly. Before the arrival of the internet, academic publishers provided a valuable service that was a real benefit to the scientific community. Not any more.
Recent advances in digital technology should have made the publication and dissemination of research much cheaper. Instead of falling, however, journal subscription fees have rocketed, even for onlineonly editions. This has had the effect of locking out those researchers whose institutions can't afford to pay the extortionate access charges. The cost of supporting this parasitic industry is stifling science. Enough is
The publishing giant Elsevier (currently the subject of an academic boycott) is one of the worst offenders when it comes to hindering the progress of science. How times have changed. When Galileo, having been forced to recant by the Inquisition, wrote the Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences, he got the work published in non-Catholic Leiden, by a company called Elsevier … We also need to recognise the extent to which the Research Excellence Framework (REF) feeds the academic journal racket. The REF is a system of allocating research funding to university-based researchers based on the "quality" of their recent publications. To be considered for the REF, a paper has to be published in a recognised academic journal, which almost certainly means it will be hidden away behind an extremely expensive paywall.
The publishers must be rubbing their hands in glee at the mountain of papers researchers are being forced to generate in order to satisfy the demands of the REF panels. In my view, research funded by the taxpayer should be made available free of charge to whoever wants to read it, not handed over to outfits like Elsevier as a source of easy profit. If I had my way, in fact, the REF would reject any publication not freely available to the public. But open access isn't just about the end products of research. It's the entire process of scientific enquiry, including the collection and processing of data, scrutiny of the methods used in the analysis, questioning of assumptions, and discussion of alternative interpretations. In particular, it's about access to scientific data. I believe all data resulting from publicly funded research should be in the public domain, for two reasons. First, it's public money that funds us, so we scientists have a
If scientists are reluctant to share their data with other scientists it's very difficult to believe they will be happy to put it all in the public domain. But I think they should. And I don't mean just chucking terabytes of uncalibrated raw data onto a website in such a way that it's impossible to use for any practical purpose. I mean fully documented, carefully maintained databases containing raw data, analysis tools and processed data products. You might think this is all a bit Utopian, but the practice of sharing data is already widespread in my own field, astrophysics, and there are already many public databases of the type I've described. An exemplar is the excellent LAMBDA site which is a repository for data arising from research into the cosmic microwave background. Most astrophysical research publications from all around the world are also available, free of charge, at the arXiv. So astrophysics is already much more open than most other fields, to the extent that it has already made the traditional model of publication and dissemination virtually redundant. I hope other disciplines follow this lead, because if researchers can't find a way to break free from the shackles placed on them by the current system, the fragile relationship between science and society – already frayed by episodes like the University of East Anglia email scandal – may disintegrate entirely. Peter Coles is professor of theoretical astrophysics at Cardiff University
The home of conspiracy theories, creationism and climate scepticism is also a scientific powerhouse. Neil Denny is on a road trip to explore this contradiction Neil Denny Friday 11 May 2012 14.51 BST
apart. This was a revelation to me. At the risk of looking foolish, let me reiterate that I was in my midtwenties when this happened. From then on I obsessively devoured all of the popular science I could get my hands on. Through reading Sagan I also discovered the work of James Randi and the idea of organised scepticism.
world's top-rated universities. This contradiction has always interested me. So on 12 May I'm travelling to America and embarking on a month-long, 6,000 mile road trip, with the aim of making a series of podcasts that present a wide-ranging overview of science and scepticism from an American perspective. I'll be interviewing scientists working on groundbreaking, cutting-edge science, educators combatting the encroachment of anti-science and irrationality into politics and the classroom, and writers attempting to popularise amazing ideas and concepts to the wider public.
How rational is America?
This is the first of a short series of columns, so I'll begin with a brief introduction. I'm the producer and presenter of a radio show and podcast called Little Atoms. It's a talk show mainly concerned with popular science and rationalism, encompassing the "Sceptic" movement. We're interested in how science and culture, and often science and religion, rub up against each other.
I'm not a scientist by training, my interest in science and scepticism coming quite late in life. As a child in the 1970s I was obsessed by the space race, and I was a fan of the science fiction of the era, such as Star Wars and Close Encounters and Silent Running. I read a lot of post-apocalyptic science fiction. I'd therefore have claimed that I was interested in science, but what I would have really meant was weird phenomena: Bigfoot, UFOs, and the Bermuda Triangle.
I presumed all of these things to be, if not true exactly, then at least plausible and worthy of study by researchers. I certainly wouldn't have been able to tell you the difference between palaeontologists searching for ancient bones, and the search for the Loch Ness Monster. Then one day I accidentally bought Carl Sagan's masterpiece The Demon Haunted World, presuming from the title that it was another book about unexplained phenomena. And it was, just not in the way I was expecting. Sagan calmly explains in the book that there are natural physical phenomena that are provable, and others that are not, and that there exists in the scientific method a mechanism for telling this stuff
I've been an atheist as long as I can remember, and have been an observer of the UK sceptical movement for the best part of a decade. Having been introduced to that movement via the American version, I'm interested in the contrasts between sceptical and atheist campaigns in the UK and the US.
There is a familiar clichĂŠ in the UK media of an overtly religious, backward-looking, anti-intellectual and anti-science America, an America under sustained attack from the forces of irrationality. It's true that professing atheism in America is still considered to be a brave and transgressive act. American sceptics, atheists, scientists and science educators are engaged in numerous battles. Creationists continue to push for the teaching of "intelligent design" alongside evolution in science classes. Campaigners fight to protect the right to legal and safe abortion, for the use of stem cells in medical research, and against the growing anti-vaccination movement.
At the same time conspiracy theories about a wide range of events from 9/11 to the moon landings remain widespread, and climate change denial continues to be a significant political force. Yet it remains a fact that America was founded on explicitly Enlightenment principles, is a bona fide secular state, will remain for the foreseeable future the number one country for science research in the world and contains a significant proportion of the
I'm flying in to San Francisco and passing through Los Angeles, Tucson, Phoenix, Santa Fe, Roswell, Oklahoma City, St Louis, Chicago, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Washington DC, Durham, Asheville, Philadelphia, New York and Ithaca en route to Boston. I'm going to be visiting the Seti Institute, the BEYOND Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science, the Los Alamos National Laboratory and the American Museum of Natural History. I'll also be paying a visit to Kentucky's Creation Museum. I'll be spending a weekend at the annual conference of the Orange County Freethought Alliance, and attending the 5th World Science Festival in New York. And I'll be recording lots of interviews with scientists, a very short selection of which includes Leonard Susskind, Eugenie Scott, Sarah Hrdy, Kip Thorne, David Gross, Lucianne Walkowicz, Ann Druyan (Sagan's widow), George Church, Priya Natarayan, Paul Offit, Sara Seager and Steven Pinker. My trip has been made possible by a 2012 travelling fellowship from the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust. Each year the trust gives out around 110 travelling grants for worthwhile projects. The application process for 2012 opened this month.
How do we ensure science is reported in the public interest? Climate science is a relatively young field that lacks the infrastructure and cultural history of subjects like atomic physics or microbiology. Photograph: Corbis Earlier this month I chaired a debate at the Royal Institution entitled "Scientists and journalists need different things from science. Discuss". The debate can be seen on the Royal Institution's video channel here and here.
In my more cynical moments I note that climate change, unlike genetically modified organisms, nanotechnology or BSE, isn't about selling us anything. Quite the opposite, arguably. Hence a relative lack of support for communicating it to the public. How do we ensure science news is reported in the public interest?
his thoughts on this question and a survey of specialist journalists, aptly demonstrating in the process something I think all good journalists should do: bothering to go beyond the text you've been given and asking people what they think. I wonder if this debate is a bit of a distraction though. Maybe it's the notion of a scientific paper that's the problem, not the journalist. It's not really the most efficient way of sharing scholarship, is it? Maybe we could ask academics to share their cleverness in other ways. Again, the cynic in me kicks in, and I suspect the publishing industry is too powerful for meaningful change.
Questions scientists and journalists still need to answer
It's probably fair to say we ended the event with more questions than answers. That was to be expected, and was maybe for the best. We shouldn't con ourselves into thinking there are quick fixes here, or that the various actors and agendas of the science media are able to agree. So, rather than a summary of the event (one of the speakers, Cardiff University's Chris Chambers, wrote up his thoughts from the event on his blog), here are the questions that were still on my mind as I left that evening. Is climate change a different topic for debate because it is political?
Personally, I'd say it is different, but not simply because it's political. All science in the news is political, by way of being in the news if not simply for being scientific in the first place. Yes, there are networks of sceptics, merchants of doubt even, but climate science is also a youngish science, lacking the infrastructure and cultural history of subjects like atomic physics or microbiology. There are lots of ways in which climate science is different from other areas of science, just as genetics is different from materials science, or high-energy physics is different from physiology. Perhaps the ways in which climate science is political are different from other science media "hot topics" though, especially in terms of who and what its messages challenge politically.
We were a good half hour into our debate before anyone mentioned the "p word" (the public). Several people claimed to have spoken "in the public interest" but admitted that this was simply their own take on what the public might want or need. No one actually bothered to ask the public, or even reflect on what we might mean by this term. Although we talked briefly about opportunities for making science news more publicly accountable, I wanted to hear a greater sense of audiences as a group to be spoken to and protected when it came to science. I wanted to hear ideas about open news and open science, words like participation and listening, a sense of the public as a resource. So here's an alternative question: how might we involve the public more effectively in science news making? Should journalists read the scientific papers they write about? This question caused some heated debate on the night. Many felt strongly that journalists should not only read and understand papers they're reporting but work back through their references too. Others said that although this sort of research would be nice, it's unrealistic to imagine most journalists would have the time, or the specialist expertise. Some even said a journalist should be doing a bit more digging on the social and political context of the science; leave detailed explanations of the scientific ideas to popularisers and press officers. On Wednesday Guardian environment and science editor James Randerson posted
I also wonder who is going to pay for all the people-hours required. Sharing and keeping a check on the many facets of specialist expertise our society relies upon is hard graft. If we won't pay through taxes, TV licences or buying a newspaper, science communication either doesn't happen, gets rushed in volunteers' spare time or bankrolled by those with an interest in selling us stuff. Just look around at the adverts surrounding this post, or the list of sponsors for the recent Big Bang Fair. I'm not sure I feel comfortable with this. Projects like MATTER provide some hope. But only some. Thanks to Sunny Hundal, Bob Ward and Nicola Davis for provoking those questions, and everyone else who contributed to the debate at the Royal Institution. For more discussion on these issues, come along to the UK Conference of Science Journalists, which will run on 25 June at the Royal Society in London
When reporters sensationalise copy from agencies that already stretches research findings, something has gone badly wrong
or "peer review" on Twitter or in the comments below in an effort to rebut this, I will personally kill a kitten).
implication that a desk reporter sensationalised wire copy that was already stretching the findings of a paper to breaking point is more than a little troubling. It is the very opposite of what a journalist should be doing when reporting science: asking questions and deflating exaggeration.
Science journalists should be asking questions and deflating exaggeration
A Mail Online story, taken from wire copy, suggests that switching on the light during nocturnal visits to the toilet might cause cancer. Since July last year, I have written three posts for this blog on the nature of science journalism. The first championed investigative science journalism examining the confluence of science, business and politics. The second and third were more pointed, and attempted to draw a sharp line between science "journalism" (contextualising, investigating and, at times, challenging science) and science "communication" (a public relations exercise).
As a result of the three posts (particularly the latter two) I have been invited to participate in a public discussion at the Royal Institution on Tuesday 13 March, which will seek agreement between scientists and journalists on what both sides might do to improve the coverage of science. I am not entirely comfortable with the idea. Many of my colleagues are rather bored with the whole debate and I'm slightly nervous that I am going to be left dangling over a yapping pit of scientists baying for editorial blood (despite science writer Ed Yong's tweet, I take some comfort from the fact that he will be participating in the event).
I also have very little to say about bad journalism – partly because others already critique poor reporting much better than I possibly could. All that I will add here is that I have seen little evidence to suggest that reporting of science is particularly bad when compared with other fields of journalism or that it is bad because of some special property that science but no other discipline possesses (every time someone cites "the scientific method"
My interest, as the first post made clear, is in good science journalism. For good science journalism to happen, journalists must try to stay at arm's length from their sources and not, for example, run their story past their source prior to publication. Failing to remain at one-step-removed runs the risk of turning a piece of journalism into some drippy, flaccid piece of science communication. (For the record, I sometimes enjoy drippy, flaccid pieces of science communication).
So I am suspicious of calls to "fix" science journalism and feel that setting "benchmarks" can exclude some great reporting. And I am especially wary of pallying up with scientists – our sources – in order to reach a cosy consensus on the issue. Nonetheless, that is exactly what I am going to do. And I would like your help. Why?
His name is Paul Dacre. Giving evidence to the Leveson enquiry on 6 February, the Daily Mail's editor gamely defended a story that (wrongly) reported that switching on the light during a night-time lavatory visit might cause cancer. (By the way, if you haven't visited this website, you should). Dacre pointed out that the story was reworked wire copy from an agency that included a quote on the cancer link from one of the scientists involved in the study – which, incidentally, was on mice. He also suggests that a Daily Mail reporter might "unfortunately" have taken the key claim out of the scientist's quote and put it in the copy. Dacre is correct when he says that slapping agency copy onto the printed page is common practice. But he is wrong to imply that it constitutes acceptable journalistic practice. It does not. Worse, the
Dacre's evidence alone did not convince me of the need to participate in the Royal Institution discussion. But it was a timely reminder of the junk reporting that is out there. So I humbly ask journalists and the interested public to make practical suggestions about what reporters or editors responsible for producing a science story might do to improve the standard of coverage.
How a book about fish nearly sank Isaac Newton’s Principia
Poor sales of lavishly illustrated book forced Royal Society to go back on promise to finance publication of Newton's Principia View a gallery of images from the Royal Society's new online picture library
Ian Sample, science correspondent guardian.co.uk, Thursday 19 April An engraving of a flying fish, one of a set from Historia Piscium. Photograph: Richard Valencia/The Royal Society It was a salutary lesson for the Royal Society and made clear that the formidable intelligence of its scientific membership was no guarantee of sound business judgement.
The debacle played out in the 17th century when the country's most prestigious scientific organisation ploughed its money into the lavishly illustrated Historia Piscium, or History of Fishes, by John Ray and Francis Willughby. Though groundbreaking in 1686, the book flopped and nearly broke the bank, forcing the Royal Society to withdraw from its promise to finance the publication of Newton's Principia, one of the most important works in the history of science.
Today, digital images from Historia Piscium, including a stunning engraving of a flying fish, are made available with more than a thousand others in a new online picture archive launched by the Royal Society.
The images span the society's 350year history and include highlights from Robert Hooke's 17th century engravings of objects under the microscope; a committee member's doodle of Thomas Huxley from 1882; and the first sighting of a kangaroo, or perhaps a wallaby, by James Cook and the sailors aboard the Endeavour expedition in 1770. Notes accompanying the latter picture
state: "it was of a light mouse colour, and in size and shape very much resembling a greyhound." Among Hooke's illustrations are ink drawings of snowflakes, furrows in ice flakes, and patterns formed on the surface of frozen urine. Staff will continually add to the archive, so that a growing selection of the society's images becomes available online.
Though Ray and Willughby's masterpiece delayed the publication of Newton's Principia, it was saved from obscurity by Edmund Halley, then Clerk at the Royal Society, who raised the funds to publish the work, providing much of the money from his own pocket. The Principia was eventually published in 1687.
After publishing the work, the Royal Society told Halley it could no longer afford his salary and offered to pay him in unsold copies of the Historia Piscium instead. "While it may seem surprising to some people that the early fellows of the Royal Society nearly passed up the opportunity to publish Newton's Principia, we mustn't forget that Halley, Newton, Ray and Willughby were all working in the very earliest days of the scientific revolution," said Jonathan Ashmore, chair of the society's library committee. Ashmore added that he hoped people using the picture archive would appreciate why early fellows of the society were so impressed by Willughby's illustrations.
Britain's academy of the sciences marks anniversary with online archive including letters from Newton and Captain Cook
From young Mozart to black holes, 350 years of the Royal Society go online
Ian Sample, science correspondent The Guardian, Monday 30 November 2009
In 1769, when Mozart was eight, the naturalist Daines Barrington wrote to the Royal Society confirming that rigorous tests showed the composer to be a child genius. Photograph: Reuters Isaac Newton held a clear glass prism to the sunbeam that penetrated the shutters of his darkened room and watched in awe as the wall of his office danced with all the colours of the rainbow. The 28-year-old physicist at Trinity College, Cambridge, was the first to show that white light is a blend of primary colours, a discovery that explains why grass is green and the sky is blue.
His written account of the experiment in 1671 is among the oldest in a collection of scientific milestones described in Letters to the Royal Society, which are made public today to celebrate the 350th anniversary of Britain's academy of science. The documents are released through an online library project called Trailblazing, a name inspired by Newton's famous nod to the work of his predecessors in a note to his rival Robert Hooke: "If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."
The letters to the society record the march of science from the earliest blood transfusions, and attempts to capture lightning, to the confirmation of Einstein's theory of relativity, the discovery of DNA and Stephen Hawking's first musings on black holes. The letters reveal a history of failure eclipsed by success, and the maturation of science from a haphazard amateur pursuit to the systematised professionalism of today.
"At that time the only scientists who were in any sense professionals were astronomers and maybe medical doctors, and of the two, the astronomers were the only ones who probably did more good than harm," said Professor Martin Rees, the astronomer royal and president of the society. "If you look at these records, you can't help but notice the immense range of interests they had. They were motivated by curiosity."
In 1769, the English naturalist Daines Barrington wrote to the society after a barrage of tests confirmed that Mozart was indeed a child genius. Barrington visited the eight-yearold at his parents' home, and asked him to play scores he had never seen and to compose on the spot. "His execution was amazing, considering his little fingers could scarcely reach a 5th on the harpsichord," Barrington wrote on hearing one recital.
There is the letter from the chemist Robert Boyle, asking the physician Richard Lower about the consequences of transfusing blood from one animal into another. Does a dog lose its quirks after transfusion and gain those of the donor? Does blood from a big dog make a small dog grow? Can you safely replace a frog's blood with blood from a calf, and might that change one species into another? The answers were no, no, no and no.
He vouched for Mozart's age, by confirming birth certificate detail and documenting his behaviour. "Whilst he was playing to me, a favourite cat came in, upon which he immediately left his harpsichord, nor could we bring him back for a considerable time," he wrote. "He would also sometimes run about the room with a stick between his legs by way of horse."
That did not stop Lower moving on to human experiments, paying an "addle-brained" man 20 shillings to receive blood from a lamb. There were hopes it might cure the man's mental condition, but when Samuel Pepys, a president of the society, questioned the physician afterwards, Lower noted that his subject was still "a little cracked in the head". A letter from Benjamin Franklin from 1752 dispels the myth that lightning is a supernatural force. He recounts an experiment in Philadelphia that he was lucky to survive, involving a thunderstorm and a kite armed with a long metal spike.
Franklin had a keen eye for the appliance of science. On witnessing the Montgolfier brothers' hot air balloon flight, the polymath declared such a device might be strapped to one's errand boy, so he could hop over hedges more swiftly as he ran from house to house. Or, Franklin mused, it could carry wine to great altitude and keep it cool.
After a safe return to Britain aboard HMS Resolution, Captain James Cook wrote to the Royal Society in 1776 to disclose how he saved his crew from scurvy by filling the hold with "sweet-wort", sauerkraut, lemons and vegetables. One sailor died of an unrelated disease. "Two others were unfortunately drowned, and one killed by a fall; so of the whole number with which I set out from England I lost only four," Cook wrote.
Scientific progress brought inevitable clashes with scripture. The fossilised remains of elephants, tigers, rhinoceroses and hippopotamuses in Kirkdale, Yorkshire, were not washed there by a biblical flood, but showed life on Earth had existed for millions of years, noted the Rev William Buckland in 1822. To mark the anniversary, the society is calling leading researchers together to thrash out the biggest issues for modern science. Feeding the world and providing clean, green energy will doubtless feature, as will more basic questions on the nature of ageing and consciousness.
"Our world is completely transformed through the application of scientific concepts which could not even be conceived of at the time the society was founded," said Rees. "New questions come into focus as old ones are answered. The important thing about science is it's an unending quest." The rise of the 'invisible college' The Royal Society emerged from an "invisible college" of natural philosophers who met in London in the 1640s to discuss the ideas of Francis Bacon. It became a formal society at Gresham College in November 1660 and included prominent names of the time such as architect Christopher Wren, scientist Robert Boyle and John Wilkins, inventor of the metric system. The society held weekly meetings where experiments were described or performed before the audience. In a royal charter of 1663, the group was officially named as The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge. It is the world's oldest scientific academy in continuous existence, with more than 60 Nobel laureates among its 1,400 fellows and foreign members. Since 1967, it has occupied a row of buildings overlooking St James's Park in London. Every year, the society names 44 scientists as fellows in recognition of their scientific achievements. The accolade is the highest a scientist can have, short of a Nobel prize. Existing fellows include neuroscientist Dame Nancy Rothwell, astronomer Jocelyn Bell-Burnell and Cambridge cosmologist Stephen Hawking.