The frontier is in your living room: playing games for science

People sometimes ask me now that I am out of the lab if I ever miss doing science, and I’m never quite sure how to answer that. It all depends on how you define “doing science.”  I think the question they are really asking is whether I miss the lab work. That’s a different question for me. I think “lab work” and “doing science” stopped being synonymous at some point after I fell down the administrative rabbit hole of lab management.  In that sense, I missed “doing science” long before I left the lab.

But what does it mean to “do science”, anyway?

This is hardly a semantic question. Modern science is often perceived as something carried out by experts. When we say something is “scientifically proven”, it implies (rightly or wrongly) that it has passed some rigorous and authoritative standard, and the gatekeepers of that standard are, naturally, the highly-trained professionals we call scientists. But in turning science as a whole over to the expert, we introduce a barrier to broader public understanding and appreciation for science as a means of learning about the world.  In other words, if science is something done by experts, and you’re not an expert, then science is off-limits to you.

It’s an ironic twist considering that science itself is a relatively young profession. The earliest pioneers in science were often self-taught amateurs and tinkerers — people who had little formal training but were passionately curious. Their work laid the foundation for modern science, and yet, if they were working today in their basements and garages, we might question the validity of their contributions to science. Today they would be viewed as quacks, operating on the fringes of science — not “real” scientists.

Obviously, the nature of some fields of research is much different today than it was 200 years ago. There are all kinds of sane, practical, reasons not to be doing molecular biology in  your basement. But I think we have to be cautious about confusing the practise of science with the spirit of it. The spirit of scientific inquiry demands that there be a place for the amateurs and the tinkerers — those who relish what Einstein once called “the sheer joy of finding out.”

Recently, I was reminded of a paper published a couple of years ago in Biology Letters, written by a group of 10-year-olds, about an experiment their class had conducted with bees. I remember being charmed by the elegant simplicity of it all, right down to their hand-drawn crayon figures – these children had embarked on a project from which they came to understand science as a simple process of asking questions and finding the answers. In a recent TED talk, their advisor recounts the challenges of trying to get the students’ work published — the “experts” in this case did not believe that children could make a valuable contribution to science. And yet, they’d answered a question that none of the experts had ever answered before. They discovered something new.

To me, that’s what the spirit of science is all about, and that’s something I believe should be accessible to everyone. People need to know how science works. Science simply can’t thrive as a mysterious black box that only experts can decipher.

One of the wonderful consequences of the growing popularity of “crowdsourcing” is that it can also be applied to scientific problems. Thanks to websites like Scistarter, Zooniverse, and Games for Change, researchers can now directly engage the public in collecting or analyzing data on a large scale. Through so-called “citizen science” projects,  you can contribute to research just by observing what’s in your own neighbourhood, or by playing a computer game. The very definition of what it means to “do science” is changing, and I think it’s only for the better.

It also means, incidentally, that in some ways I get to “do” more science now than I did in my final year in the lab. I mean, if I am going to spend a Saturday playing games instead of writing papers, why not get sucked into a real-life puzzle like Fold.it, EteRNA, or Phylo?

Projects like this also open up new interdisciplinary possibilities. Have graphic design skills? You can make infographics for NASA. Or if you’re into music, you might try your hand at describing digitized collections of piano scores. Simply by moving these projects online and tapping into the public’s interests, there’s a whole new opportunity to break down disciplinary boundaries and stereotypes about what constitutes “real science.”

Perhaps most importantly, citizen science projects have the incredible potential to start a public discussion about science, something that politicians, journalists, and scientists often aim to do, only to fall seriously short of engaging their audience.

It will be interesting to see how these early forays into public engagement in science play out (no pun intended). I hope it’s  the beginning of a more enlightened era for scientific communication, one that engages the public actively rather than expecting them to be passive consumers of knowledge handed down by experts.

Publish or perish — what’s behind door #3?

There has been a lot of discussion over the past year about the state of academic publishing — from the exploitive business models of the publishing heavyweights, to the crisis this creates for libraries, and the emerging case for open access. Longtime readers of this blog will know that I am a strong proponent of open access initiatives, and that I believe this kind of public debate on the issue is long overdue.

But I also wonder if it misses the point.

You see, we’re still not addressing the issue of what makes researchers beholden to publishers in the first place. The publishing models may be changing, but the culture that drives the explosive growth of academic publishing has not. So while open access promises to bring down one barrier to scientific communication, we continue to ignore what is potentially a much more formidable and serious challenge — the sheer volume of papers being published.

Although it’s difficult to determine accurately, it has been estimated that there are more than 50 million scholarly papers in existence right now, with more than 1.5 million new articles being added each year (and steadily climbing). That’s about 3 papers being published every minute.  And the sad reality is that the vast majority of these papers will never be cited.

This begs an obvious question: if the purpose of scholarly publishing is to communicate our results, but the majority of papers go unread or uncited, are we actually communicating? More to the point, why do we continue to “publish-or-perish” if most of our publishing efforts are for naught?

The truth is, it’s not primarily about communication anymore; it’s about satisfying institutional demands that treat publications as a proxy for research excellence. That idea took root over a century ago, when William Rainey Harper, then president of the University of Chicago, first proposed that advancement in academic rank and salary should be tied “more largely” to research productivity. The policy was quickly adopted by other research-intensive universities. By the 1930s-40s, the phrase “publish-or-perish” had been coined to describe the pressure on academics to publish, and today, it’s practically synonymous with the academic lifestyle. Today, scholarly publications are not only used to measure individual performance, but also to help determine institutional rankings and to measure national performance on innovation.

Today, the pressure to publish comes not from a demand by the consumers of knowledge (i.e. other scholars), but from a demand by the merchants of knowledge — those whose profits and prestige are linked directly to growth in research publications.

What about the rest of us?

Short-term career advancement aside, the publish-or-perish culture doesn’t really benefit individual researchers, who invest much of their time and energy either in producing papers or in reviewing them — a huge waste if most of those articles fail to reach their audience.

It’s not particularly beneficial to students, since researchers are often forced to prioritize research output over teaching. For grad students, publish-or-perish means they spend much of their time learning and conforming to an academic career structure that will not serve the 70-80% of them who will not have access to stable academic careers no matter how much they publish. That’s another post entirely.

It doesn’t benefit scientific integrity, since the unrestrained growth in publications places more and more stress on the system of peer-review. The pressure to publish is so intense that researchers will resubmit their rejected manuscripts multiple times, working their way down from the top-tier journals to the electronic slush piles that have lower standards of peer-review. Each published paper then, often represents multiple rounds of peer-review, each a burden on the system, and even then, it’s still possible for researchers to pay for access to bottom-feeder journals just to get the paper out, however bad. Bad research in turn places its own burden on the system as precious resources are invested in a futile effort to validate them.

In recent years we’ve seen everything from rampant plagiarism and duplication of publications, to data manipulation or fabrication, to elaborate “citation cartels” used to artificially inflate the prestige of certain journals. Just last week, a researcher was caught using his own email address under a fake name so that he could “peer-review” his own papers!

On one hand, we might be comforted by the fact that the peer-review system is catching these cases of obvious misconduct, but on the other hand, shouldn’t we be more alarmed about the institutional pressures that are leading to the behaviour in the first place?

And what of the higher-profile retractions? What does it say about the effectiveness of our current system of peer-review when the highest-profile journals (Nature, Science, Cell, etc.) also tend to have the highest rates of retraction?  True, these journals tend to be on the cutting edge and we know it can cut both ways sometimes. These journals also have large audiences: more eyes means more potential for catching a mistake. But these are also the journals that tend to get the most press, so such high-profile retractions also have the potential to negatively impact public trust of science. When you have researchers chasing publication in these journals as a career-making move rather than it being based on the quality of their data, it can only harm the collective image of the research community.

Public trust isn’t the only thing at stake. Scholarly communication is, by its highly technical nature, exclusive to a particular audience. Even with the expansion of open access publishing, which would make papers accessible to the public, there is still a significant barrier for the public in understanding that original research. And yet, never before has the public understanding and acceptance of science been so important. The big issues of the day — energy, sustainability, climate — require a certain acceptance of scientific information. But outreach activities often don’t count for much in faculty evaluations — so researchers tend to remain focused on writing papers for other scholars. In effect, the publish-or-perish system places more value on scholarly papers that go unread than on the myriad ways that researchers could otherwise be connecting with a non-academic audience to inform the public debate.

This is perhaps the most tragic waste of our scientific knowledge, and the point at which I begin to seriously question the ethical footing of the publish-or-perish culture. In an era of economic instability and fiscal restraint, when public access to scientific knowledge is key to advancing the most pressing social, economic, and political issues of the day, is it ethical for publicly-funded institutions to continue demanding that researchers prioritize scholarly publications (largely for the sake of prestige), at the expense of actually reaching the audience that can most benefit from the research?

What’s the alternative and how do we make it happen?