Cockroaches and the Research Works Act
Timothy Birdnow
Science is broken. No, I do not mean that it is no longer making exciting and important discoveries, but it is broken in the sense that accountability is shot to aych, ee, double hockey sticks. Increasingly, research is undertaken for a purpose other than the advancement of knowledge, and we are seeing increasingly a trend towards falsifying results to fit a particular conclusion.
Take Robert Liburdy; a cellular biologist at Lawrence Berkeley National Labs. Liburdy did groundbreaking research on the dangers to cells posed by electromagnetic fields. Liburdy unfortunately faked all of his data, leading to a national scare.
How about John Darsee? He faked a bunch of cardiac research. Or U. of San Diego's Robert Slutsky (what a great name for a cheat!) who wrote a paper every ten days and was finally caught as a fake. Slutsky managed to convince a lot of reputable researches to sign on as co-authors while he made up science. Or what of William McBride, the guy who exposed thalidomide? He went after a drug called debentox, which was supposed to help with motion sickness. Unfortunately, McBride made it all up.
Or Jan Hendrick Schon, the boy wonder physicist of Bell Labs who was finally shown to have been faking all of his data. He would have gotten away with it had he not been quite so prodigious; writing around 40 papers a year. He would recycle the same graph for different papers, which is how he was eventually caught. Peer review failed to find his duplicity.
Here are some of the memorable science scandals. http://discovermagazine.com/2000/oct/featblunders
And let's not forget the big ones; nuclear winter, global cooling, acid rain, alar, Y2K, global warming, now oil fracking causing major earthquakes. And most of this stupidity is coming from the big science journals!
What is the answer to this? Sunshine is the best disinfectant, as they say; the more minds that can consider the work of individual scientists the greater the likelihood of detecting error or outright fraud.
But the way science is peer reviewed and the way it is published is at best antiquated. A research paper must be published by a for-profit journal, or at least a journal that must cover it's costs, and many papers are hidden behind a pay wall; you have to buck up to read and critique them. And space is limited, so papers must pass the editor and the peer reviewer, who may have their own agenda and ax to grind. So many excellent bits of work never see the light of day, or see it and are dismissed because they do not have the "prestige" of peer review and journal publication. And once published it may be protected from unwanted scrutiny by a pay wall.
And remember, science is funded largely by government or big foundations, or corporate interests, and the money from these groups overwhelmes the puny financial benefits from those actually looking to find the truth. How much does Nature make from readers as opposed to advertisers and contributions? I honestly don't know, but I suspect readers are taking a back seat.
Which means that special interests drive the content of the journals. Not that they openly, notoriously drive them, but in the end one does not bite the hand that feeds, and the all-you-can-eat buffet is coming from special interests. So what gets published? Work that benefits the special interest types.
And the biggest special interest is government.
So we have a problem; we could more easily catch fraud or incompetence if more people were reading the papers, yet the trend is to hide - hide data, hide methodology, hide sources. Michael Mann's refusal to give Steve mcKintyre this information led McKintyre to reverse-engineer Mann's methodology to reproduce the "hockey stick" graph. Global warming has been shot through with this; read the CRU e-mails to see how Jones, Mann, Briffa, and the rest of the Gilligan's Island researchers have purposely stonewalled Freedom of Information Act requests, blackmailed journal editors, tampered with data, refused to share, etc.
I myself proved (in my own small way) that more minds are important to the advancement of science. Michael Mann Penn State climate huckster (he belongs in the state pen rather than Penn State) made a splash (yet again) in the mainstream media by co-authoring a paper (Kemp et. al.) claiming that the sea level is rising in North Carolina. Fortunately I was able to see a copy of the paper; it was easy to rebutt to someone who knows anything about rivers and coastlines. http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/06/warmist_cargo_cult_science_returns.html
Had this been hidden behind a paywall I could never have seen it, and that would mean I would never have been able to make the criticisms necessary to debunk the paper. Anthony Watts kindly supplied the pdf file for it.
The point is, a lot of people could find a lot of problems in the science that a compliant and muckraking journalistic community will advance as fact. It took McKintyre to expose Mann's hockey stick graph because McKintyre was a statistician, not a climatologist, and he knew a pile of steaming horse poop when he saw it, while many of Mann's peers didn't have the expertise to understand what they were seeing. (In the case of the sea level rise paper, I had read an article about Louisiana's "sinking" tidal pools and immediately realized that the same was happening here.) This doesn't mean every criticism is valid, or even worthwhile, but it does mean that a researcher has to defend his work, and the more minds engaged with the research the more likely error or fraud will be detected.
Which is what is alarming about this: a new bill before Congress, the Research Works Act, aims to restrict and minimize the dissemination of research to the general public.
This at a time when public policy is being driven by scientific research, and that research can often be dubious. Now more than ever the public needs to see the work being used to recommend and set policy, and the science needs to be criticized to acertain it's accuracy. Hiding research behind a pay wall of secrecy serves nobody's interest - except the corrupt or incompetent scientists, the publishers, and the government.
Please note that this bill is bipartisan, sponsored by California GOP Rep. Darryl Issa and Dem. Carolyn Malone of New York.
Here is the text of the bill:
http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill=h112-3699
To ensure the continued publication and integrity of peer-reviewed research works by the private sector.
Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,
SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE.
This Act may be cited as the ‘Research Works Act’.
SEC. 2. LIMITATION ON FEDERAL AGENCY ACTION.
No Federal agency may adopt, implement, maintain, continue, or otherwise engage in any policy, program, or other activity that--
(1) causes, permits, or authorizes network dissemination of any private-sector research work without the prior consent of the publisher of such work; or
(2) requires that any actual or prospective author, or the employer of such an actual or prospective author, assent to network dissemination of a private-sector research work.
SEC. 3. DEFINITIONS.
In this Act:
(1) AUTHOR- The term ‘author’ means a person who writes a private-sector research work. Such term does not include an officer or employee of the United States Government acting in the regular course of his or her duties.
(2) NETWORK DISSEMINATION- The term ‘network dissemination’ means distributing, making available, or otherwise offering or disseminating a private-sector research work through the Internet or by a closed, limited, or other digital or electronic network or arrangement.
(3) PRIVATE-SECTOR RESEARCH WORK- The term ‘private-sector research work’ means an article intended to be published in a scholarly or scientific publication, or any version of such an article, that is not a work of the United States Government (as defined in section 101 of title 17, United States Code), describing or interpreting research funded in whole or in part by a Federal agency and to which a commercial or nonprofit publisher has made or has entered into an arrangement to make a value-added contribution, including peer review or editing. Such term does not include progress reports or raw data outputs routinely required to be created for and submitted directly to a funding agency in the course of research.
end
According to Michael Eisen:
http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=807
"In 2008, under bipartisan pressure from Congress to ensure that all Americans would be able to access the results of taxpayer-funded biomedical research, the US National Institutes of Health instituted a Public Access Policy:
- The NIH Public Access Policy ensures that the public has access to the published results of NIH funded research. It requires scientists to submit final peer-reviewed journal manuscripts that arise from NIH funds to the digital archive PubMed Central upon acceptance for publication. To help advance science and improve human health, the Policy requires that these papers are accessible to the public on PubMed Central no later than 12 months after publication.
The policy has provided access for physicians and their patients, teachers and their students, policymakers and the public to hundreds of thousands of taxpayer-funded studies that would otherwise have been locked behind expensive publisher paywalls, accessible only to a small fraction of researchers at elite and wealthy universities.
The policy has been popular – especially among disease and patient advocacy groups fighting to empower the people they represent to make wise healthcare decision, and teachers educating the next generation of researchers and caregivers."
[...]
"Several people have commented that the language of the bill I quoted refers to “private sector work”, thinking that this means it does not refer to work funded by the US Government. This term is defined in the bill as:
The term `private-sector research work’ means an article intended to be published in a scholarly or scientific publication, or any version of such an article, that is not a work of the United States Government (as defined in section 101 of title 17, United States Code), describing or interpreting research funded in whole or in part by a Federal agency and to which a commercial or nonprofit publisher has made or has entered into an arrangement to make a value-added contribution, including peer review or editing. Such term does not include progress reports or raw data outputs routinely required to be created for and submitted directly to a funding agency in the course of research.
They are using intentionally misleading language to distinguish works funded by the government but carried out by a non-governmental agency as “private sector research”. Thus, under this bill, works funded by the NIH but carried at a University would be “private sector research”.
This language is in there because the US Copyright Act specifically denies copyright protection to works carried out by federal agencies, and the authors of this bill did not want it to be seen as amending Copyright Act, something that would have ensured its defeat."
End excerpt.
So, Michael Mann's work at Penn State would be considered Private Sector, and would be verboten to disseminate.
We need more sunlight, not more shadows. Far too much science has been obscured by hidden agendas, hidden flaws, fudged numbers. It's time to let the sun shine in!
Shame of Congressman Issa!
Science is broken. No, I do not mean that it is no longer making exciting and important discoveries, but it is broken in the sense that accountability is shot to aych, ee, double hockey sticks. Increasingly, research is undertaken for a purpose other than the advancement of knowledge, and we are seeing increasingly a trend towards falsifying results to fit a particular conclusion.
Take Robert Liburdy; a cellular biologist at Lawrence Berkeley National Labs. Liburdy did groundbreaking research on the dangers to cells posed by electromagnetic fields. Liburdy unfortunately faked all of his data, leading to a national scare.
How about John Darsee? He faked a bunch of cardiac research. Or U. of San Diego's Robert Slutsky (what a great name for a cheat!) who wrote a paper every ten days and was finally caught as a fake. Slutsky managed to convince a lot of reputable researches to sign on as co-authors while he made up science. Or what of William McBride, the guy who exposed thalidomide? He went after a drug called debentox, which was supposed to help with motion sickness. Unfortunately, McBride made it all up.
Or Jan Hendrick Schon, the boy wonder physicist of Bell Labs who was finally shown to have been faking all of his data. He would have gotten away with it had he not been quite so prodigious; writing around 40 papers a year. He would recycle the same graph for different papers, which is how he was eventually caught. Peer review failed to find his duplicity.
Here are some of the memorable science scandals. http://discovermagazine.com/2000/oct/featblunders
And let's not forget the big ones; nuclear winter, global cooling, acid rain, alar, Y2K, global warming, now oil fracking causing major earthquakes. And most of this stupidity is coming from the big science journals!
What is the answer to this? Sunshine is the best disinfectant, as they say; the more minds that can consider the work of individual scientists the greater the likelihood of detecting error or outright fraud.
But the way science is peer reviewed and the way it is published is at best antiquated. A research paper must be published by a for-profit journal, or at least a journal that must cover it's costs, and many papers are hidden behind a pay wall; you have to buck up to read and critique them. And space is limited, so papers must pass the editor and the peer reviewer, who may have their own agenda and ax to grind. So many excellent bits of work never see the light of day, or see it and are dismissed because they do not have the "prestige" of peer review and journal publication. And once published it may be protected from unwanted scrutiny by a pay wall.
And remember, science is funded largely by government or big foundations, or corporate interests, and the money from these groups overwhelmes the puny financial benefits from those actually looking to find the truth. How much does Nature make from readers as opposed to advertisers and contributions? I honestly don't know, but I suspect readers are taking a back seat.
Which means that special interests drive the content of the journals. Not that they openly, notoriously drive them, but in the end one does not bite the hand that feeds, and the all-you-can-eat buffet is coming from special interests. So what gets published? Work that benefits the special interest types.
And the biggest special interest is government.
So we have a problem; we could more easily catch fraud or incompetence if more people were reading the papers, yet the trend is to hide - hide data, hide methodology, hide sources. Michael Mann's refusal to give Steve mcKintyre this information led McKintyre to reverse-engineer Mann's methodology to reproduce the "hockey stick" graph. Global warming has been shot through with this; read the CRU e-mails to see how Jones, Mann, Briffa, and the rest of the Gilligan's Island researchers have purposely stonewalled Freedom of Information Act requests, blackmailed journal editors, tampered with data, refused to share, etc.
I myself proved (in my own small way) that more minds are important to the advancement of science. Michael Mann Penn State climate huckster (he belongs in the state pen rather than Penn State) made a splash (yet again) in the mainstream media by co-authoring a paper (Kemp et. al.) claiming that the sea level is rising in North Carolina. Fortunately I was able to see a copy of the paper; it was easy to rebutt to someone who knows anything about rivers and coastlines. http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/06/warmist_cargo_cult_science_returns.html
Had this been hidden behind a paywall I could never have seen it, and that would mean I would never have been able to make the criticisms necessary to debunk the paper. Anthony Watts kindly supplied the pdf file for it.
The point is, a lot of people could find a lot of problems in the science that a compliant and muckraking journalistic community will advance as fact. It took McKintyre to expose Mann's hockey stick graph because McKintyre was a statistician, not a climatologist, and he knew a pile of steaming horse poop when he saw it, while many of Mann's peers didn't have the expertise to understand what they were seeing. (In the case of the sea level rise paper, I had read an article about Louisiana's "sinking" tidal pools and immediately realized that the same was happening here.) This doesn't mean every criticism is valid, or even worthwhile, but it does mean that a researcher has to defend his work, and the more minds engaged with the research the more likely error or fraud will be detected.
Which is what is alarming about this: a new bill before Congress, the Research Works Act, aims to restrict and minimize the dissemination of research to the general public.
This at a time when public policy is being driven by scientific research, and that research can often be dubious. Now more than ever the public needs to see the work being used to recommend and set policy, and the science needs to be criticized to acertain it's accuracy. Hiding research behind a pay wall of secrecy serves nobody's interest - except the corrupt or incompetent scientists, the publishers, and the government.
Please note that this bill is bipartisan, sponsored by California GOP Rep. Darryl Issa and Dem. Carolyn Malone of New York.
Here is the text of the bill:
http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill=h112-3699
To ensure the continued publication and integrity of peer-reviewed research works by the private sector.
Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,
SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE.
This Act may be cited as the ‘Research Works Act’.
SEC. 2. LIMITATION ON FEDERAL AGENCY ACTION.
No Federal agency may adopt, implement, maintain, continue, or otherwise engage in any policy, program, or other activity that--
(1) causes, permits, or authorizes network dissemination of any private-sector research work without the prior consent of the publisher of such work; or
(2) requires that any actual or prospective author, or the employer of such an actual or prospective author, assent to network dissemination of a private-sector research work.
SEC. 3. DEFINITIONS.
In this Act:
(1) AUTHOR- The term ‘author’ means a person who writes a private-sector research work. Such term does not include an officer or employee of the United States Government acting in the regular course of his or her duties.
(2) NETWORK DISSEMINATION- The term ‘network dissemination’ means distributing, making available, or otherwise offering or disseminating a private-sector research work through the Internet or by a closed, limited, or other digital or electronic network or arrangement.
(3) PRIVATE-SECTOR RESEARCH WORK- The term ‘private-sector research work’ means an article intended to be published in a scholarly or scientific publication, or any version of such an article, that is not a work of the United States Government (as defined in section 101 of title 17, United States Code), describing or interpreting research funded in whole or in part by a Federal agency and to which a commercial or nonprofit publisher has made or has entered into an arrangement to make a value-added contribution, including peer review or editing. Such term does not include progress reports or raw data outputs routinely required to be created for and submitted directly to a funding agency in the course of research.
end
According to Michael Eisen:
http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=807
"In 2008, under bipartisan pressure from Congress to ensure that all Americans would be able to access the results of taxpayer-funded biomedical research, the US National Institutes of Health instituted a Public Access Policy:
- The NIH Public Access Policy ensures that the public has access to the published results of NIH funded research. It requires scientists to submit final peer-reviewed journal manuscripts that arise from NIH funds to the digital archive PubMed Central upon acceptance for publication. To help advance science and improve human health, the Policy requires that these papers are accessible to the public on PubMed Central no later than 12 months after publication.
The policy has provided access for physicians and their patients, teachers and their students, policymakers and the public to hundreds of thousands of taxpayer-funded studies that would otherwise have been locked behind expensive publisher paywalls, accessible only to a small fraction of researchers at elite and wealthy universities.
The policy has been popular – especially among disease and patient advocacy groups fighting to empower the people they represent to make wise healthcare decision, and teachers educating the next generation of researchers and caregivers."
[...]
"Several people have commented that the language of the bill I quoted refers to “private sector work”, thinking that this means it does not refer to work funded by the US Government. This term is defined in the bill as:
The term `private-sector research work’ means an article intended to be published in a scholarly or scientific publication, or any version of such an article, that is not a work of the United States Government (as defined in section 101 of title 17, United States Code), describing or interpreting research funded in whole or in part by a Federal agency and to which a commercial or nonprofit publisher has made or has entered into an arrangement to make a value-added contribution, including peer review or editing. Such term does not include progress reports or raw data outputs routinely required to be created for and submitted directly to a funding agency in the course of research.
They are using intentionally misleading language to distinguish works funded by the government but carried out by a non-governmental agency as “private sector research”. Thus, under this bill, works funded by the NIH but carried at a University would be “private sector research”.
This language is in there because the US Copyright Act specifically denies copyright protection to works carried out by federal agencies, and the authors of this bill did not want it to be seen as amending Copyright Act, something that would have ensured its defeat."
End excerpt.
So, Michael Mann's work at Penn State would be considered Private Sector, and would be verboten to disseminate.
We need more sunlight, not more shadows. Far too much science has been obscured by hidden agendas, hidden flaws, fudged numbers. It's time to let the sun shine in!
Shame of Congressman Issa!
posted by Timothy Birdnow | 8:34 AM
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