A scientist asks: What has the New Media done for me?

Posted on Friday, April 25th, 2008

By Stuart

Stuart Pimm

The “old media” — the main way I communicate my ideas and results has served me very well, thank you very much. With colleagues, I write my papers, they are reviewed, modified, submitted again, and published — typically a couple of years after we first obtained the key results. It’s a complicated game. For some, there’s an urgent need to see their results in print quickly. Frankly, most science can wait a bit.

The main issue is fame. Getting cited is important — in fact, it can be everything, a life-or-death issue as far as a career is concerned. Here’s the problem: most papers are never cited or cited only by their authors. Their authors totally fail to communicate. Read journals and you’d understand why. There are thousands of papers published each month in my field, I can’t read them all, and for many that I do, I wish I’d done something else, like watching paint dry. Finding the signal amid the noise is hard work.

Now, papers published in some journals — Science, Nature, PNAS, can become real citation stars. It’s not that these journals publish quickly (though that’s an appeal for many) but they are so brutally critical that 90% of the papers submitted there are rejected, most quickly. I did that job for Science for 11 years and may have rejected more people in my field than any other living person. (I never go down dark, quiet corridors at meetings on my own.) I read these journals regularly exactly because they do a reasonably good job of filtering out the riffraff. They’re a good investment of my time.

I’ve done well with these journals, but most of what my group publishes are in other places — journals that take a long time to publish, are not so widely read, and, worse are often not immediately accessible to readers online when they are published especially those in developing countries. I’ve several options. I can pay for our papers to be open access — $850 each at PNAS. (Ouch!). I can (and do) put my papers on my website whenever possible. These solutions make our papers accessible, which gives an edge, but they doesn’t solve the problem of distinguishing what we do from all the other papers coming out each month.

So, what the New Media can do for me? First, I want someone to be sorting through the noise for me, just as the editorial processes at the prestigious journals do for me. Any blogger who consistently has great taste and picks up important stories from the mass of material is quickly going to become important. News and Views, in Nature, for example, have exactly that characteristic. They’re “Old Media,” but a model the New Media could emulate.

Coversely, if and when such New Media knowledge brokers show outstanding taste, I’ll know to whom to pitch our own stuff. Andy Revkin is already there, of course, but is lonely.

Finally, are there completely new ways of communicating results? Yes! — much to my surprise. A couple years ago, one of my group, Kyle van Houtan, discovered an interesting satellite image that clearly showed how extensive were the mud trails caused by shrimp trawlers. In quick time, he found a depressing set of images from around the world in places where we expect fishing impacts to be devastating — even where the countries involved deny such things. No journal would have published those images in a way they would have had impact and the images alone told the story. We simply placed them on the web, The Intersection blogged them, and Nature covered them as a short news story. No peer review, no citable credit and not something early career scientists could do every day. In avoiding the peer review process, of course there’s a risk that one might add yet more unfiltered noise to obfuscate the rare signals. We thought the decision was the right one — the satellite images are the real stars. Without the New Media, we wouldn’t have had the choice.

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