To My Esteemed Critics

Here at The Scientific Activist, we welcome criticism--intelligent criticism, that is (as opposed to unintelligible dribble like this). Besides, when it comes to boosting traffic stats, any link is a good link, so I thought I should give a shout out to some of the nice folks who linked to me over the last couple of days, even though they basically disagreed with everything I wrote.

First up is Dr. Jim Hu--a professor of biochemistry at my alma mater, Texas A&M University--who runs a blog called Blogs for Industry. Although we are at odds on pretty much any every political issue, he's still been a big supporter. Yesterday, he wrote a retort to my post on the Miller amendment on scientific integrity:

One should always consider how rules would work if roles were reversed, and I don't think he's considered the mischief this law could create in protecting cranks, since the critierion is only that the employee "reasonably believes" in whatever garbage they're spouting...and "any employee" goes all the way to protecting the idiot whose exposure propelled Nick to his 15 minutes of fame.

That's right, Nick. If your buddy George Deutsch had restricted himself to merely injecting his Creationist views into NASA science briefs instead of also complaining about others not doing so, Miller's amendment arguably would have protected him from being fired. Do you want to bet on making a case that his beliefs are not "reasonably" believed in front of a judge appointed by Republicans?

The Miller amendment gives any employee of the Administration more protection than a tenured faculty member. While it's hard to fire us, there are personnel actions (esp. in the "fail to take" category, like failure to recommend raises or promotions) that can be justified no matter how sincere our beliefs are. And the employees protected by the Miller amendment are not, as far as I can tell, required to go through the multiyear probationary period and outside review that goes with tenure.

Although I appreciate Dr. Hu trying to watch my back (and looking out for my 15 minutes of fame!), I have to disagree. Dr. Hu cites a passage later on in the amendment to justify his statements, but the very first clause in the amendment reads as follows:

An employee of the Administration may not engage in any of the following:
(i) Tampering with the conduct of Federally funded scientific research or analysis.
(ii) Censorship of findings of Federally funded scientific research or analysis.
(iii) Directing the dissemination of scientific information known by the directing employee to be false or misleading.

That clearly covers what George Deutsch was doing at NASA, so hopefully that should clear up Dr. Hu's concerns. Either way, make sure you check out his blog to read his thoughts on science, politics, Texas A&M, and, well, just about anything else you can thing of.

Moving right along, I also had some great informed criticism coming from fellow ScienceBlogger Jake Young over at Pure Pedantry today. After going through a surprisingly accurate and thorough summary of my arguments in my post on open access, Young counters many of my points and in the end comes to a mixed conclusion on the issue. In turn, I'll address a few of his points.

In response to my assertion that open access would solve the current problem of university libraries having to pick and choose which journals they can afford to subscribe to, Young writes:

I would argue that libraries themselves are already becoming less and less necessary. This going to relate to a solution that I propose later on, but I think that the necessity of carrying vast holding of print journals is rapidly going by the wayside. Frankly I don't remember the last time I even went to a library. The function of the "library" on campus is rapidly accelerating to the Office of Individuals Who Possess Site Licenses.

Although I think he's probably right, he might be missing the point. It doesn't matter whether you call it a "library" or "Nick's super sexy scientific literature extravaganza": some entity at a given university is going to have to subscribe to scientific journals for the scientists to have access to them. I agree that print journals are becoming obsolete, and I think that's a situation that will actually make open access publishing more viable (since online publishing greatly reduces operational costs). Either way, open access makes the middleman who subscribes to these journals unnecessary (although someone will still have to hold onto the archives of the older volumes that are still inconveniently not online).

Young later writes:

If we wildly debase the publishers source of income, we risk causing them to limit the articles they publish due to excessive overhead. I don't think that there are any scientists working today that would like to see the rate limiting step in scientific research become the publication process. It doesn't benefit anyone to have scientists struggle to create the research and then have to compete to get it published.

In this case, I think the logic runs the other way. If publishers are dependent on author fees, then it seems that they would have even more of an incentive to publish a given paper, not less. I'm not saying that's necessarily a good thing, but I don't think that criticism is a fair assessment. Overall, though Young has a thoughtful post that's definitely worth a read.

So, here's the rundown:

  • links to my site = good
  • intelligent critics = good
  • uninformed critics = bad
  • Miller amendment = good
  • open access publishing = good
  • libraries = super sexy scientific literature extravaganzas

More like this

Agreed that Deutsch would have been violating the amendment based on his attempt to rewrite the results of others. But what I wrote was If he could have restrained himself to writing Creationist drivel into NASA press releases without attributing it to anyone else, he'd be protected.

One could argue that such folks never have the self-control to do that, of course... ;^)

You make a good point about incentivizing journals to publish more. If the bottom line says, "if you pay, you can publish" there will definitely be more rather than less articles. I do think it is not unreasonable, however, for a government who mandates access to pay for that access.

You have also thoroughly convinced me why it was a good idea that I wasn't political in college. For the love of Christ, I thought Stanford was divisive.

And libraries are sexy...even if they are on the way out...