Guest Post - The Covid Infodemic and the Future of the Communication of Science - The Scholarly Kitchen
peter.suber's bookmarks 2020-07-08
Summary:
"The world has gotten pretty opinionated about how scientific communication should be designed, and most of what has been published has fallen into one of two camps:
- Camp A) The Covid crisis has torn down the walls of science and cranked the speed dial to 12. Instead of traditional journal publishing which takes months, preprints are exploding, “a global collaboration unlike any in history” is happening in real-time, and an old system is finally getting the overhaul it needed!
- Camp B) We are seeing the first true social “infodemic.” Misinformation is everywhere, most of what is out there “isn’t even science,” and governments are cracking down on social media platforms and scientific publishers to dramatically limit the content that makes it online.
Both of these camps are at least partially correct, but few articles address the fact that speed and uncertainty in science are often two sides of the same coin, and getting the benefit of speed without the risk of uncertainty is extremely challenging....
Many of the old systems that have slowed down the pace of science in order to establish relevancy and truth-seeking as it builds from observation to intervention shouldn’t be thrown away in the move towards speed, but rather built into and strengthened via new technologies."