Carl Zimmer, Scientists On the Loose! My AAAS Talk

"[J]ust three weeks ago, at age 72, [Stephen] Hawking once again did something new. He posted a two-page document online....Hawking did what scientists usually do: he wrote up this idea in a paper. But he didn’t proceed to keep it secret until it appeared in a peer-reviewed journal. Instead, on January 22, he uploaded the paper, “Information Preservation and Weather Forecasting for Black Holes” to the physics pre-print site known as arXiv. Two days later, Nature had a detailed article about Hawking paper. New Scientist published an explainer piece the same day. These stories swiftly got a lot of attention on sites like Digg and Facebook, driving hordes of readers their way. Today, three weeks later, the paper is still only available on arXiv, where anyone can download it for free....To me this episode epitomizes the huge changes in our field....But recently these elements have crossed two thresholds–of scale and connection. And the result is a drastically new way for scientists to reach the public. If Hawking had this idea ten years ago, things would have worked differently. To get a wide audience for his new idea, Hawking might have submitted his paper to a prominent journal. The journal would then send it to anonymous reviewers. If the reviewers judged it good science, it would go into press. But it would only be available to people with thousands of dollars to spend on a subscription to the journal. The journal might promote the paper with press releases. They’d let us journalists look at a preprint—but only if we respected an embargo and stayed quiet till then....At this point, the outside world would have known nothing about the paper. Only when the major print outlets unveiled their stories would they find out. Only in the comments the reporters offered from other scientists would people get a hint of what the scientific community thought....Every step of this process has changed—or, rather, there is now a set of parallel steps. Arxiv has become a required stop on the road to publication for physicists. Biologists are following their lead now, too....The curtain-raising ritual at high-impact journals is losing a bit of its magic. It becomes not an unveiling, so much as a stage of maturation in the life of a research project. I have no idea when or where Hawking will ultimately publish his new paper. It’s possible that the journal he chooses will offer the final paper as freely as arXiv did. Open access publishing is steadily growing. Just yesterday afternoon, AAAS, the host of this meeting, announced they were launching their first open-access online journal, called Science Advances. Peer review is also becoming more open. Scientists are increasingly reviewing papers in public, after they are published or even when they are on a preprint server....It’s common for scientists to debate new research as soon as it’s published, on blogs, Twitter, or Facebook. New companies are launching in order to measure this response, and to create an alternative to the traditional ways of measuring the impact of a paper. Instead of looking at the number of times it shows up in the footnotes of other papers, maybe the number of Tweets matters, too....[Journalists] don’t have to sit dutifully by your computer, waiting for some journal to deign to let you know about a new paper. You can go hunting. You can turn up a new paper that’s just sitting quietly in a preprint archive, and share it with the world. And you can get a more realistic understanding of how scientists toss around ideas. If research simply appears in an august scientific journal, it can be hard to figure out how it actually fits into the current scientific debates. The last thing a journalist wants to do is present research as if it’s the discovery of extraterrestrial life, when, in fact, it’s arsenic life. The new ways that scientists share their ideas and opinions helps us. We can take the pulse on Twitter. We can follow comment threads. We can throw questions into these debates in real time if we so wish. But it also presents new risks that we journalists should be mindful of. The scientist who tweets the most may not be the wisest expert on a particular topic. If you come across a preprint, you have to ask, “Does its mere existence constitute news?” Or is that preprint just a flakey idea that will make it into a serious journal? Should journalists wait for the journals to give these papers their seal of approval? Is that what journals are for now—to designate important science? Or are they simply seizing that role for themselves from the scientific community as a whole? ..."