The answer always sounds simple and obvious initially, yet
it never seems to pan out that way, and the problems always come down to money
and career advancement. The value of science comes not from doing experiments but
from relaying the results and interpretations of completed studies. Science has
no value while it sits in a lab notebook or on a laptop's hard drive-- it has
value when others can see it, use it, test it, and expand upon it, so knowledge
is shared. Shouldn't we make our results as publicly available as possible,
and as early as possible? Further, our research was sponsored by federal funds
ultimately deriving at least in part from taxes-- it was done on the backs of
our friends and neighbors. How can we justify not maximizing its speed of
impact?
You may think I'm talking about open- or free access to
refereed scientific journal publications, or to deposition of scientific
pre-prints to services like bioRxiv, arXiv, or Haldane's Sieve. The argument certainly
can apply to both of those activities, but I'm actually talking about something
different. I'm talking about scientific presentations at conferences.
I have a proposal that I'd like to raise with one of my
scientific societies in a few weeks-- one that was discussed in an earlier blog entry. It
sounds simple-- the society should facilitate recording (with permission from
the presenters) contributed talk presentations and put them in YouTube or
equivalent. This has been done successfully before for smaller meetings (see this conference). Let's also facilitate having presenters (again, with their consent/ permission) upload
posters to a free online site (e.g., this one). What better way to maximize impact and speed of
sharing? Anyone in the broader community can watch the talks and learn the
exciting new ideas, potentially long before a final manuscript is ready, much
less a refereed publication. And for conferences with multiple concurrent
sessions, this allows the possibility for attendees to see talks they'd missed--
who wouldn't want this?
It's not contentious in some sense, since it'd all be
voluntary. If you don't opt-in, it doesn't happen. If you don't want to share
for whatever reason, then fine, don't. In
talking with several colleagues, though, it seems the idea of a society even
facilitating this effort is at least potentially contentious. Many concerns were
raised:
1) Would such presentations online constitute
"publication" and thus prevent the author from being able to publish
the final version of these results in a refereed journal? Most journals in my
field would not be so ruthless, but some journals especially in
biomedical areas, are ruthless (see this list of journals/ publishers and their policies onprepublication of manuscripts). From the publisher standpoint, they want the
press associated with the findings (hence "money"), and they thus manipulate scientists by
limiting their ability to translate the work into refereed journal publications
(hence "career advancement"). The concerned ask-- by providing this
service to facilitate recording, is the society potentially hurting some of its
members?
2) Would such online presentations potentially open the
facilitating society or conference organizers to damages or lawsuits if the
presenters fail to consider copyrights? Many scientists are careless in
grabbing images from Google image search (irrespective of copyright) or failing
to get proper permissions to show figures from work published in
non-open-access journals. If the society or conference organizers
"sponsor" conference recordings, could they be sued (hence again,
"money")? Or perhaps a junior scientist may make an off-hand negative
comment about an established scientist's work, and be penalized in some way
(hence again "career advancement" concerns)?
3) Would allowing a fraction of the conference to be posted
online make it so fewer people elect to attend the conference in person,
thereby devaluing the conference ("career advancement" for all
participants) and potentially also causing the sponsoring societies to incur a
financial loss ("money")?
4) Would ruthless others attempt to "scoop"
results by copying the work or rushing a related experiment, particularly affecting junior scientists who generously opted to have their
presentations shared ("career advancement")?
5) Would people see yet misuse the results without fully
understanding the context the way the presenter does?
Again, a seemingly simple idea, but many complications. The
discussion is worth having. I'll give my answers to the five criticisms above,
though there are others I won't go into.
On #1-- I have two replies. First, it's rare at least in my
subfield. Second, I think the community should take a strong stance of not
publishing in journals that elect to have such ruthless behavior and
demonstrate such an antagonism to scientific dissemination (their purported
goal).
On #2-- I think there is reason to be cautious and to give
guidance to presenters on proper attribution/ permissions. That said, I find it
hard to believe that, short of airing clips of popular movies currently in
theaters, there would ever be retribution sought more severe than a demand that
something be removed from the internet in a specified timeframe (which can be
done). On the junior scientist issue, that issue is potentially
"better" if the content is taped, since he/she is likely to be
correctly quoted rather than potentially misquoted as having said something
worse than they actually did.
On #3-- The biggest benefit of conferences is not sitting
passively in talks-- far from it (see this blog). I'd never skip a conference
because a fraction of the talks were online. Further, I can't imagine, at least
in the near-term, that more than 20% of a very large conference would opt-in
given the concerns associated with #2 above and #4 below.
On #4-- This is an issue for every conference presentation,
irrespective of whether online or not. People have cellphones with cameras, so
if they are so ruthless, they can snap a picture of the poster. They can take
detailed notes at talks. I totally acknowledge that it's a greater concern when
the material is made so much more accessible (though it also potentially allows
clear documentation of when they had presented this work and thus their
primacy). So yes, this is a concern, and merits consideration by participants
in whether to consent to taking this risk in exchange for sharing their
results. But I think they should be allowed to make this decision for
themselves rather than having the society paternalistically decide not to
permit the option.
On #5-- People misinterpret the context of results from
fully documented peer-reviewed journal publications all the time-- it's hardly
a unique problem. This concern was raised repeatedly in the context of trying
to stop the now-mandatory sharing of data used in published papers in my field. While I'm sure this happens, bluntly, I've
always found this criticism as a reason for not sharing to be uncompelling, and condescending to one's colleagues.
But I invite readers of this blog to submit their own
thoughts. Maybe I'm totally wrong in my responses, or maybe there's even zero interest in this as a service. Is
offering the OPTION to record talks at a conference and make freely available a
good idea? Same for submitting posters to an open repository? Do the concerns
outweigh the benefits, and am I just being audacious by pushing this idea? Comment very welcome!
