Dear Dr. Craig McClain.  

I am contacting you on behalf of [A Major Textbook Publisher]. [The Publisher] seeks permission to use your material in the upcoming text book [Name of commonly used freshman text book but a long line of authors].  Please see the attached permissions request letter which formally lists the rights we are requesting. I am also attaching the copies of the materials we intend to use in the book along with the letter for your easy reference.  I would really appreciate it if you could kindly review the request and return the signed letter to me via e-mail at your earliest convenience. Or, you can indicate via email that you are granting us permission to use the material by agreeing to the following terms:

“Following rights to the licensed material specified herein are granted to [The Publisher], its worldwide subsidiaries and affiliates, authorized users, and customers/end-users: Use of the licensed material, in whole or in part, in the [Textbook], and in subsequent editions of the same, and in products that support or supplement the [Textbook], and in products that use, or are comprised of, individual chapters or portions of [Textbook], and in-context promotions, advertising, and marketing materials for the same; Territory (World); English; Formats (print and electronic, and accessible versions); Term (Life of the Edition + Future Editions); Print Quantity (No Limit); Electronic Quantity (No Limit).”

I look forward to hearing from you. Please feel free to contact me if you.

Thank you! Regards,

[Person from Major Publisher]

 Yeah…that was the tipping point.  So I responded back.

Dear [Person from Major Publisher]

My image is not free for use.  I can send you an invoice for usage if the [The Publisher] is interested.

Dr. Craig R. McClain

Apparently, they were fine with me invoicing them so I responded.

Dear [Person from Major Publisher]

Given the current cost of your textbook of is well over $200 for an undergraduate, I don’t believe I can support the use of my image in your textbook.  The only way I will allow usage of the image is if the company agrees to donate 30 free textbooks to the Louisiana College or University of my choice.

Dr. Craig R. McClain

 

From this, I received this response.

Dear Dr. McClain,

I passed your request to the Development and Managing Editors and after some consideration [The Publisher] is electing to decline the request.    We appreciate your response and will search for a replacement image to be included in the book.

Kind regards,

[Person 2 from Major Publisher]

Here’s the thing. How can I support a textbook that students will need $214 dollars to buy?  I cannot.  Not as a scientist committed to the tenet that information should be available to all, an educator who believes education is a right not a privilege, a mentor who needs to remove barriers for my students, and lastly someone who came from a lower socioeconomic family, struggled to purchase textbooks, and is now committed to reaching back and pulling others up.  I. CAN. NOT.

Even more, the landscape of Louisiana represents one of considerable struggle. The poverty rate in Louisiana’s poverty rate is 19.6%, well above the national average of 12.4%.  Child poverty nationally is 21.9% while in Louisiana’s is a shocking 27.8%. Twenty-four of Louisiana’s parishes are considered persistent poverty parishes with more than 20% of the population falling below the poverty line consistently since 1970.  Thirty-two parishes are classified as black high poverty areas.  These poverty rates place Louisiana number one among the 50 states in both poverty and child poverty levels (WorldAtlas.com 2016).  The ramifications of this poverty are seen in higher education in Louisiana.  The adult population with a bachelor’s degree or more nationally is 32.5% while in Louisiana is 14.7% and among African Americans, the national average is 14.7% compared to the 13.4% in the state.

I am, and need to be, personally committed to providing educational opportunity to all those in this state, especially those from lower socioeconomic backgrounds.  The high costs of textbooks are prohibitive for students in Louisiana. Indeed, the Louisiana Board of Regents through the LOUIS system is also committed to addressing the textbook issue including purchasing eBooks that can be substituted for required course textbooks.  This program has saved 40,000 students around $4.8 million dollars.  Also, consider that,

 college textbook publisher Cengage conducted a survey titled, “College Students Consider Buying Course Materials a Top Source of Financial Stress”. The results revealed that, “about 43% of students surveyed said they skipped meals because of the expense for books, about 70% said they took on a part-time job because of the the added costs, and around 30% said they had to take fewer classes” 

All of this has occurred on a backdrop of textbook prices rising almost 1000% in recent years — more than three times the rate of inflation (Bureau of Labor Statistics).  And instead of the publishers admitting there is a problem, they deflect.

Marisa Bluestone, spokeswoman for the the Association of American Publishers, called the BLS data “misleading” because of the “law of small numbers” where a small item that increases from $100 to $200 will appear as a 100 percent increase whereas if tuition increases from $10,000 to $11,000 it’s only a 10 percent increase. Further, the BLS data is “not the reality today” added Laura Massie, spokeswoman for the National Association of College Stores (NACS), as it doesn’t count buying used books or renting.

The prices for academic institutions to access the scientific literature has also gotten out of hand.  Despite scientists volunteering to both serve as editors and reviewers for journals and often paying to publish in these journals, many for-profit publishing companies continue to rake in profits while choking out access to the very scientists and scientific institutions they expect to volunteer and read their publications.

Last week the marine lab (the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium, LUMCON, where I serve as Executive Director) received the notification for renewal for a major journal, now published by a for-profit publisher. The cost for the publication next year is $9,545. The average inflation rate since we first subscribed to this title (starting in FY2010) is just over 20% annually. The number of issues has not changed (12 per year), nor has the size of the issues in terms of pagination, so it’s not a matter of getting more for the money.  Another way of looking at it is that one journal subscription would have eaten up 25% of the journals budget that we allow for LUMCON’s small library. It is hard to justify spending $10,000 a year for a single subscription for less than a dozen faculty.

So a couple of weeks ago, LUMCON made a bold move.  We canceled all of our paid journal subscriptions. Every. Single. One. Of. Them.  These funds will remain with our library, reinvested into other initiatives.  We have set aside some of these funds to purchase hard volumes without electronic versions, pay for singly purchased articles from the canceled journals, investing heavily in LUMCON faculty to publish in Not-For-Profit, Open Access Publishers, new library printers, and variety of other smaller library upgrades.  Needless to say, the amount LUMCON spent on journal subscriptions was considerable and freeing up those funds is actually allowing us to be able to provide BETTER support to our scientific teams.

You read that right.  I feel that even though we are losing journal access and the burden on the faculty and librarian to find needed articles may be higher, the funds that LUMCON now has available to invest in other library projects will provide a greater depth and variety of support for scientists and students at LUMCON.  Our journal access simply prevented us from affording these programs and infrastructure before.

I am in a position of leadership and have an amazing, supportive, and forward-thinking faculty to work with.  We are able to accomplish things that may not be possible in a larger university system.  So what can you do?

I am going to take a hard stance but here we go.

1. Do not require textbooks for your courses. Provide other materials and make them freely available to your students.
2. If you absolutely need to use a textbook, teach out of older editions. Provide in your syllabus a variety of links where that textbook can be purchased at a reduced fee. If you ever come across a good deal on that textbook, purchase it yourself.  Give or loan the book to your students in need.
3. Work with your university and state on ebook programs that purchase electronic rights to textbooks that are made freely available to your students.
4. Through your departmental and university committees, and your faculty senate, start working with your university (or putting pressure on them) to replace the antiquated and overpriced book model at your institution.
5. Do not serve as editor, reviewer, or author of a paper in a for-profit journal. Support the innovative models you want to see.  I recognize the commitment will be dependent on your career stage.  But you the senior faculty need to step up to the plate and be an example. Create safe places for junior faculty to be able to pursue this.
6. Change evaluation policies for faculty that reward open science models and decrease value on publishing in and with for-profit journals and publishing houses.
7. Do not grant interviews to journalists that work for these for-profit publishing houses and/or limit access to the materials behind a paywall. If we believe that scientific information should be available to all, then the public discussion and public translation of that work should also be freely available.
8. Educate yourself on open-access publishing standards. Here is a directory of all open-access journals.  Read about the difference between gold, green, and even copper open access standards.
9. Lastly, make sure you retain copyright over all your own work and make sure it is available for free on the web. I have been woefully poor on this front.  But as of today and moving forward, I will be posting all my preprints on https://arxiv.org/.  I will research all of the copyright and sharing restrictions on all of my published articles and try to find solutions in making them all more available.

I realized that this is a tremendous amount of burden on all us all.  Indeed, many times in science what is for the benefit of the scientific community is not for the benefit of the individual scientist.  These are big standards to follow, and depending on your career stage, opportunity, current funding, etc., you may not be able to follow all of these or follow them all of the time.  This does not make you a bad person or scientist.  But with all of us trying to make small decisions in the right direction, working toward this goal, we will move the field in total to the right place.

UPDATE: A colleague and friend asked this…

Great piece but genuine question, does open access = not for profit? Who are the not for profit publishers? Is there a list somewhere? I am all for open access and detest the pay wall system. But the problem with the current open access model is it places the burden of publishing cost on the individual scientist as opposed to the pay wall model where costs are met by library subscription and it is “free” for the individual researcher to publish. There must be another way to do this? I would like to see more societies running and profiting from journals. Then the profit goes back into science.

So open access does not always equal not for profit.  These are not mutually exclusive categories.  A journal can be

1. Completely open access, hybrid open access (papers are open access if the author chooses to pay additionally), or closed access
2. For- or non-profit
3. Society or not  (profit can be completely applied to the society or shared with a large for- or non-profit publishing house).

For example, PeerJ or PloS are open access and not for profit (UPDATE: Ok, ok people…PeerJ is technically for profit).  Nature Communications is an open access and for profit.  Unfortunately, I am not aware of a list of not for profit or non-profit journals.

My colleague does raise another issue which I’ve been burdened by for a while, the movement of paying for publishing of articles from the institution to the scientist.  The switch does not really address the real money issue and ultimately the taxpayer is footing the bill, the conduit of the money is just different.  I am not sure what the right model here is to solve this dilemma.  I am a fan of the PeerJ model that limits the publishing cost to a one-time fee for authors with each author of the paper paying this fee.  But the fee is negligible and spans an entire career.

Pricing for Lifetime Memberships is (from October 1, 2016):

• Basic: $399
• Enhanced: $449
• Premium: $499

Memberships allow for one, two, or five peer-reviewed publications per 12-month period respectively, counting from your last publication to your next first-decision.

The post Tipping Points, For-Profit Scientific Publishing, and Closed Science first appeared on Deep Sea News.

1. We focus a lot on science communication as the generation of content.  However equally, and if not more, important is the filtering of content.  In the last few years, poorly informed, incorrect and out right maliciously wrong content has become prolific.  We need now, more than ever, for trusted domain experts to amplify, share, and provide reliable and accurate information. I saw this first hand reporting here at DSN with both the Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill and the Fukishama Reactors that bad information was rampant and people were looking for trusted content.

2. Somewhere we stopped teaching students and the public how to critically evaluate information. Or may be it never existed at all.  We need with renewed vigor to teach students and the public how to think, reason, and evaluate information.  We need mandatory classes and lessons across education levels in logic, philosophy, mathematics, statistics, problem solving, and scientific methodology.

3. We need to make sure good and correct information is more accessible and more viral than bad information.  We need to make it easier for students and the public to get the information they need to be an informed citizenry.

4. Science needs to be more open.  Open access publishing, science communication, and citizen science and other initiatives were good start of a larger “open” movement.  But now we need to swing the doors of science open a little wider.  We are not open or honest to our failures in the enterprise of science.  Metal health issues, inequality, profiteering, and harassment run rapid.  We need change and a river in Egypt isn’t the first step.

We need to be more open about our failures not just successes. @DrCraigMc giving a rallying cry rant I needed to hear and can get behind this morning. #nerdsoftrust

— KT (@vivalakt) June 25, 2018

5. We need to renew the social contract between educational institutions and the public.  We need to place value on an informed and educated citizenry.   This is the hallmark to economic prosperity and quality, political stability and growth, innovation in the sciences and humanities, and overall public health.  The renewal of this contract comes first and foremost with economic commitment from local to national levels and the foresight that this investment will be returned 10-fold.

6. Scientists need to all become nerds of trust. On Facebook, over beers at the bar, in your local and state government meetings, you need to be there with science.

@DrCraigMc of @deepseanews encourages us librarians to be “nerds of trust for friends & family” & use social media like Facebook to discuss science in our social spheres. @alaannual #alaac18 @ALA_ACRL #STS pic.twitter.com/8it9UtOV4m

— Michael R Leach (@mikeleach42) June 25, 2018

7. Science communication needs to be goal and mission oriented.  The idea of a “Field of Dreams” model of putting something out there and expecting it work is ridiculous.  If you have not thought about what success is and how you are going to measure it, stop now.  Science communication has to be deliberate in action.

“We need to stop half-assing our science outreach” and to think I almost meh’d out of this mornings session because sleep. >⁦@DrCraigMc⁩ https://t.co/5wOgz5bTEJ

— KT (@vivalakt) June 25, 2018

8. We need to break out of the echo chamber.  If you defriended all of your Facebook friends who had different political leanings to you, you are probably part of the problem.  Are your science communication efforts only reaching the NPR and PBS, science-enthusiast audience?  Was the last science and drink night you talked at just hipsters in tweed? Probably…  Are you still wondering why the public is struggling with science or just actively anti-science.  YOU ARE NOT TALKING TO THEM.  We need new and creative ways to reach new audiences especially those in lower socio-economic classes. We need to go to where they are and put science there.

9. We need to create and support places and times of innovation…places that domain experts in humanities, social science, education and pedagogy, science communication, and scientists learn from each other and build together.  These need to be places that applaud risk and go after moon shots while focused on action and products. Events like #oceandotcomm are one example.

10. Even if we don’t get anything else right, we need to get one thing right.  Be passionate.  This idea of science as cold, heartless, and stale enterprise needs to die.

“Be passionate. Science is not a cold place, it is an amazing place. Share that.” – @DrCraigMc in how we connect and excite the community in science efforts #alaac18

— Paige Dhyne (@LibandLife) June 25, 2018

The post 10 Things Science, Science Communication, and Just Maybe All of Academia Needs first appeared on Deep Sea News.

It’s been a long time in the making, but we’re so happy to announce the publication of “Ten Simple Rules for Effective Online Outreach”, a new open access article in the eponymous series at PLoS Computational Biology. All of this blogging irreverence actually takes a lot of behind-the-scenes planning and strategizing. That’s something that’s has taken years of hard work and trial-and-error approaches here at DSN — an approach and mindset we thought was valuable to share with the scientific community. So please read, share, and enjoy. We’d love to hear your thoughts and comments!

Reference:

Bik HM, Dove ADM, Goldstein MC, Helm RR, MacPherson R, Martini K, Warneke A, McClain C (2015) Ten Simple Rules for Effective Online Outreach. PLoS Computational Biology, 11(4): e1003906. doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1003906

The post Ten Simple Rules for Effective Online Outreach first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Faced with such a question, I did what any studious scientist does: I went to the literature.  I did this simply because am not an expert on the current state of the social science of ocean literacy, which seems rather important if you’re planning a strategy aimed at improving it!  In other words, to work out how to get where we want to go, we need to know where we are.  In doing this search I was especially helped by a paper by Brent Steel and his colleagues from Oregon State University: “Public ocean literacy in the United States” (Ocean and Coastal Management 48: 97-114).  It paints a picture even more disappointing than I expected.  In their survey of 1,200 Americans, just 4% of folks assessed themselves as being well informed about ocean and coastal issues, whereas over a third considered themselves totally uninformed (this disparity was even greater in non-coastal states).  I was pleasantly surprised to read that 75% of respondents were familiar with the term “Marine Protected Area”, but disappointed that only just over half knew the term “Biodiversity”, which, after all, is what MPAs seek to protect!  About a third of people understood that El Nino affects ocean currents, while less than 30% understood the term “by-catch” in relation to fisheries.  I could go on.  Interestingly, Steel et al. went on to analyse the sources of knowledge that people use for ocean issues.  The use of newspapers and the internet (you go, ocean bloggers!) as information sources was positively correlated with ocean literacy, whereas TV and (to a lesser degree) radio were negatively correlated.  Armed with rigorous confirmation of the poor state of ocean literacy and some ideas about which media modes may/may not be helping, we can go on to think about ways we might help improve the situation.  I came up with 5 steps or ideas to start with, but I’d love to hear more ideas from readers in the comments section.

It might surprise some people that I would start with improving ocean literacy in scientists, not the public.  How does that work?  Aren’t scientists supposed to be the ones with all the knowledge?  Well, yes, but I’m pretty sure that if you ask most marine scientists (and scientists in general) they’ll tell you that science is an exercise in embracing individual and collective ignorance; scientists are just incrementally less ignorant of the world’s workings than everyone else!  Thankfully, improving ocean literacy for scientists is relatively easy; by virtue of their skillset, scientists are pretty good at assimilating and integrating new knowledge.  But there’s still one big hurdle to get over and that is access to that knowledge.  I enter into evidence the following anecdote.  Every day I get emails from scientists that go something like this “Dear esteemed colleague, I am <insert name here>, postdoctoral scholar from <insert developing nation here>.  Please send me a copy of your paper <insert latest earth-shattering Dove et al. effort here>.  Also, I have not the library access, so in addition please to be sending me all papers you have relevant to this topic also as well.”  There are good, earnest and hard-working scientists all over the world that are hamstrung because they just can’t get access to even the most mainstream literature.  If you think I’m picking on developing nations, think again.  In doing the search described above for “public AND ocean AND literacy”, I tagged 9 abstracts in a search of Web of Science, one of the major abstracting journals that gathers summaries of scientific literature into a conveniently searchable database.  When I sought the full papers, however, I could only get 4 out of 9, even using 2 different major university library logins.  In other words, the majority of relevant literature in this case may as well not exist, since it was inaccessible to me, blessed though I am by location and vocation.  Yes, it seems that improving ocean literacy for scientists is another case where the open access publishing revolution offers hope for real improvement.  It’s not the be all and end all of course (the financially-challenged, developing-world scholar can no more afford to publish in many OA journals than to subscribe to the traditional ones!), but it’s a huge step in the right direction.   To improve ocean literacy, therefore, I say Step 1 is – improve access for SCIENTISTS.  Of course, open access would make the very same information available to the public as well, which is even better!

Step 2 on the path to improved ocean literacy is a simple problem with an equally simple solution, one whose simplicity is matched only by many scientist’s resistance to embracing it.  It concerns ocean literacy very literally, but not literacy in the definition “familiarity with concepts”, rather, literacy as “ability to read and write”.  How can we expect the public to become familiar with the concepts if they can’t speak the language?  And therein lies the rub: marine scientists spend years of tertiary training and subsequent on-the-job experience learning, assimilating, indeed inventing, an entire language that describes the content of their research.  It’s not malicious – all expert fields, scientific and otherwise, do exactly the same thing to abbreviate complex concepts and give names to unique entities and processes encountered only in that field – but it does present something of an obstacle to effective communication.  The cold hard fact is that the public cannot and will not (and I argue should not have to) meet the scientific community half-way when it comes to communicating scientific concepts, and that puts the onus on scientists to use language more effectively when communicating about science.  I meet a lot of bright young scientists and students who rail against this idea.  “No!” they say, “Why should I do all the work?  The public needs to make an effort!”.  No, they don’t.  They won’t.  They just don’t care, and that won’t change until you tell them that the oceans are something to care about, and do it in a way that they understand.  So, my step 2 is – Scientists must use the language that we ALL possess, not the one only scientists possess.  Why do scientists not do this more often, anyway?  I think the answer to that may prove surprisingly complex, but here’s a couple of reasons I can think of right off the bat.  (1) It’s a pain in the arse; it’s hard to remember which words or usages others may or may not be familiar with.  To remedy that, I often suggest that people just try explaining it as if they were talking to their grandma: simply and respectfully. To succeed in communication, it is essential that scientists not lapse into jargon, nor give into condescending speech, which is easy to do if you’re oversimplifying.  I often find, though, that its not the complexity of the concepts that is the problem, anyway, so simplifying them is not the solution.  The real problem is that the audience is simply not familiar with the words you’re using, so they are denied the opportunity to understand the concept in the first place. In other words, its the style not the substance, stupid!  (2) The language is part of the scientist’s identity and so ingrained that it can be really hard to unlearn it for the purposes of sharing with others.  For some marine scientists, explaining the subtleties of Ekman transport, thermohaline circulation or bioturbation could be as disconcerting and challenging as a sighted person trying to explain “red” to someone blind from birth.  Of course, this problem of language awareness isn’t a new idea in science communication.  Most recently, Andrew Thaler at Southern Fried Science started a thought-provoking thread about words that mean something different in science than in regular use, and Carl Zimmer’s list of banned words has become essential reading for scientific communicators everywhere.  We at DSN and in the broader science community need to keep the ball rolling and remember at all times that the onus is on scientists to reach across the linguistic divide to engage the public.  One great way to do that: reverent irreverence (see? The core values tie together. Total package…)

My third step is all about who drives the approach we take to communication, scientists or non-scientists; in that sense, it’s probably also tied to the previous step.  There are lots of amazing things to see and learn about life in the oceans, and pretty early on the storytellers of society picked the low-hanging fruit.  These included animals like dolphins, whales, seals, otters and penguins; the animals that scientists label “charismatic megafauna” (a term that has come to have a somewhat derisive stigma in scientific circles!).   As a result of this process, a disturbing proportion of non-science folks think marine biology is all about Flipper and Salty, when of course those animals make up a vanishingly tiny portion of the diversity and abundance of marine life.  Rather than move on to tell the stories of other (IMO more interesting) animal groups, however, many uninformed/unmotivated producers of mass media have continued to hammer these species as being somehow iconic of “all things ocean”.  In doing so, the storytellers of society have often embraced stereotypes and trite oversimplification in order to give the people what they think the public wants; perhaps this is why Steel et al. found a negative correlation of TV with ocean literacy.  Regardless, I call this the Detroit approach.  When the US auto industry tried to give people what they thought we wanted during the SUV craze of the early Naughties – each trying to outdo the other with greater excess – we ended up with the Hummer H2 and so many other similarly ridiculous and irresponsible vehicles, and it drove the industry to the collapse.  No, Step 3 to improve ocean literacy is that scientists need to drive the storytelling more, using the Steve Jobs approach and not the Detroit approach.  The public didn’t know we wanted iPhones/iPods/iPads until Jobs told us we did through excellence in design and marketing.  If we want to achieve meaningful improvement in public ocean literacy, we need to stop pandering to what people think the ocean is about by, for example, not taking the easy route offered by the charismatic megafauna.  Instead, we as scientists need to take charge of the conversation and work with the storytellers to find intriguing, inspiring, exciting and entertaining ways to tell the public why the rest of the ocean is just so incredible, so cool and so critical to our collective survival.  Will it be easy? Not always, but I’m pretty sure the folks at Apple worked their tails off too.  We would all do well to follow the lead of the BBC documentary team in this respect, and to foster the development of new charismatic scientist celebrities (can you say Cousteau?) to help tell the stories.  This all seems to me especially important in light of the findings of Steel et al. that TV is negatively correlated with ocean literacy.  Whether that correlation represents cause or effect is not yet clear, but certainly there appears to be a lot of work to do to improve mass media as sources of ocean knowledge for the public.  At DSN we are in the gifted position of controlling our own media “channel”, however modest, so you can bet we won’t shy away from a good story, however challenging, about some less fuzzy but no less amazing aspect of marine biology.

Step 4 – Improve experiential learning options.  Learning is a funny old thing, and everybody does it differently.  Some folks can learn just from lectures (hearing), while some folks can remember everything from a book they read or a documentary they watched (seeing).  I, on the other hand, am an experiential learner: one who learns by doing.  I swear I learned more in one 2-week marine biology field course in 1993 than I did in the rest of that year’s university lecture courses put together.  The previous points I’ve addressed in this essay only really address the first two types of learning, though, the listeners and the watchers, so what do we do for the experiential learners?  How do we bring marine science to a largely land-based public in a genuinely hands-on way?  Well, there are actually lots of ways, just ask the National Marine Educators Association.  Here’s just two: Public Aquariums and Citizen Science Projects.

One of the best ways people can experience the ocean without setting sail themselves is by visiting their local public aquarium.  Most of the biggest and best of these are driven by multi-pronged missions that integrate entertainment with educational and conservation/research goals (if you’re not sure about your local aquarium, just ask if they are members of the Association of Zoos and Aquariums, it’s A Good Sign).  It’s a case of come for the fun, stay for the learnin’!   Their complex societal role puts a significant responsibility on aquariums to develop exhibit and program materials that will successfully engage the visiting public in marine issues.  As an industry insider, I can tell you that this is something the husbandry, conservation, research and education staff of all aquariums take very seriously.  So get out there and see what they’ve got going on: go to your local aquarium (or a zoo, a museum, a science center), touch an animal, enroll your kids in a camp, go to an aquarium sleepover.  In other words, get involved.  In most cases your attendance dollars will go to support a non-profit institution that can act as a key conduit for you and your family to experience hands-on the oceans that we all love.

The other way to improve ocean literacy for the experiential learning public is through Citizen Science projects.  That is, projects that aim to gather scientific data using the freely-offered help of the tax-paying public that so often supports our work.  Citizen Science is definitely a buzz word in science education and outreach and many column inches and blog screens have been devoted to this topic.  I’m no expert but I think I can safely summarise by saying that Citizen Science is admirable in principle, but hard to do well.  There are lots of them out there, but few marine ones have succeeded in engaging the public at any mass level (compared to, say, the SETI at Home program, for example).  Why aren’t there more?  Probably because they are not always appropriate to the topic at hand (e.g. how many average folks visit hydrothermal vents at bone-crushing depths, hundreds of miles from shore?), they can be more difficult to execute/administer than traditional data gathering projects, and also because scientists often have concerns about data quality when the information isn’t gathered by qualified scientists, or the grad or undergrad students under their direct supervision.  If you’re a scientist, consider a Citizen Science element for your next proposal, and if you’re not, look for one in which you, your kids or your school can participate.  Does DSN have a role in experiential learning or are we “just” a blog.  Well, we have some ideas bouncing around the collective noodle, so watch this space…

At the risk of losing readers who may be suffering from climate change fatigue, I will finish briefly with Step 5 – help the public understand that global warming is first and foremost an ocean problem, not an atmosphere problem.  Climate change is a topic that has received a lot of attention on this blog and countless others, and rightly so; it is the single greatest threat to the future  diversity of life on this planet.  Despite all the talk, there’s still a tragically huge amount of climate change denial going on (we’ve written about that too) and we can’t afford to allow that voice, unscientific as it is, to overwhelm the voice of reason, rigorous data and, let’s face it, reality.  We will continue to cover the importance of climate change phenomena as expressed in the sea, whenever important news develops in the field.  That will include warming but also ocean acidification, which is one topic of which the wider public remains sadly illiterate.

One of the best ways I think we can help promote ocean literacy is simply to be true to ourselves.  We, the DSN bloggers, but really all marine scientists, science online folks, science communicators, science journalists, all of us, need to get excited and to share that with the public.  As Holly Bik has said, we do need to cast aside the stereotype of the scientist as austere, bookish, lab-coated egg heads interested only in  publications and personal impact factors.  Instead, we need to embrace our own individuality, personality and passion for nature, then infect others with our enthusiasm for the cool things we’ve learned about the oceans and – even more importantly – for all the awesome unknown stuff left to learn.  We’re all faced right now with a fantastic opportunity to reinvent science itself (open access etc.) and its relationship with the people who so often pay for it (citizen science etc.).  In addition, we’re living at a time when newer and better technological tools are becoming available every day (social media etc.), tools that can help us make the most of these opportunities for the betterment of science and society.  It’s a great time to be a marine scientist and a scientist communicator and we at DSN are looking forward to playing a part.  I, for one, am psyched.

The post Promoting Ocean Literacy – a DSN Core Value first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Year after year, you honor female actresses, fashion designers, politicians, activists, athletes and models. You bestow awards on some truly amazing people, who have made it their life’s work to change the world and spread messages of peace, hope, and joy. When have you ever even mentioned science?

Day in, day out (and often all through the night) a veritable army of female scientists are working their assess off in labs across the world. We don’t do it for the money—we work because we believe in something greater than ourselves, believe that one day our small steps in knowledge will revolutionize our understanding of the natural world or translate into huge medical advances.

Glamour is the magazine our children and neighbours read. They certainly aren’t sitting down with the latest copy of Science.  Hell, they probably aren’t even reading our colloquial science-y musings at Deep Sea News, but we’re working hard to change that.

Glamour, I’m begging you: if you don’t honor women scientists as Women of the Year, how will people even KNOW that science even EXISTS as a career option?

Is it because society sees scientists as this?

Instead of this?

My sister’s high school friends don’t have aspirations to become a stuffy, boring intellectual (trust me, I’ve had this conversation with them).  We can only empower younger generations if we show them ALL of the paths that exist for them. And right now, science isn’t even on the map.

I have made it my life’s mission to change the public perception of science.

And at Deep Sea News, we’ve made it our mission to expand the culture of ocean science.

The oceans are deeply ingrained in human culture. Scientists are fundamentally human. Here at Deep Sea News, we have strengthened our resolve – we are determined to highlight areas where the ocean touches our society, and to provide a window into our lives as both scientists and members of this broader society. We will strive towards a future that allows for scientists and the public to be partnering stakeholders in sustaining and preserving our oceans.

Us researchers know that science is dynamic and interactive – full of passion and drive. Our colleagues have PERSONALITIES – we work with unique, intelligent people that are always a far cry from the dry, boring (old white guy) stereotype. I’m a marine biologist who reads Vogue and teaches yoga in my spare time.

But changing the culture of science doesn’t just mean reaching out to the public. It means convincing scientists to build and maintain a high public visibility—leveraging blogs and social media is lucrative and worthwhile.  Engaging non-scientists isn’t an option. In today’s world, it is a necessity. And, contrary to popular belief, this type of outreach doesn’t compete with your research—on the contrary, it enhances and broadens your traditional scientific portfolio.

Right now, I swear the science world is just like the fashion world.  In the words of Heidi Klum, “One day you’re in…the next day you’re out”. And in the cutthroat fight for tenure, you never want to be asked to leave the runway.

Getting published in the highest impact journals is like getting a front row seat during fashion week.  You put your head down, lock the doors, and work your ass off in hopes of one day securing that golden ticket. If you’re lucky, some mysterious group (Nature editors!) decides that your research is So Hot Right Now, and BOOM, ticket in the mail (manuscript accepted!).  Sometimes you look at who is there and you’re confused and annoyed – really? Snooki got an invite to Missoni?  (Nature’s table of contents is full of Mouse T-cell interleukin binding factor WHAT?).

With the intense job competition and tight race for funding, I feel like us early career researchers have two options:  We can quietly work hard, chasing high-impact papers or becoming really good at something like taxonomy, but realize that we will be forever cramped in a closet office and lack recognition for the first 30 years or so, OR we can become the Lady Gagas of science.  Sure, your eccentricity and unconventional ways may turn heads and boil some blood.  But behind the gossip and chatter, you make really f*#*%ing awesome music (innovative, thought-provoking science). Lady Gaga not only gets a front row seat at fashion week, but she gets people talking and gets people excited.  By reinventing the notion of a pop star, she has defined new paradigms for the entire music industry.

At Deep Sea News, we’re defining new rules for the next generation of scientists. The public will tear down the Ivory Towers with their own bare hands.

Yes, I am sitting here, alone in a room, venting out my frustrations though a computer—ranting online and hoping someone will notice. But you’re dead wrong if you think this will be the end of it.

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UPDATE: Thanks to everyone for all the fabulous discussion and thought-provoking comments. I just wanted to follow up with a clarification and a few further points

I’m not saying we should just go and glam up science. Running a glossy PR campaign might get people to take notice temporarily (and spur heated arguments), but it isn’t addressing the deeper root of the problem. Personally, I’m not one to get involved in these type of debates – everyone has their own opinion, often there is no right answer, and fruitless anger is a waste of my time and energy.

In my view, making scientists visible is about redefining what we value and how we function as a society. With a stagnant recession and climate change on the horizon, we cannot AFFORD to keep putting on blinders and recklessly forging ahead. You want to create jobs? You want to build a sustainable future? Invest in science and technology.

Grad students and postdocs are some of the most engaging and enthusiastic people I’ve met, but in terms of salary, benefits, and workload they are oftentimes treated like slaves. I have friends in Manhattan who work as secretaries and get paid almost double my salary–is that right? Given the way we currently treat scientists, what does that say about what our society values? A system that beats down its most promising trainees, either forcing them out (due to financial constraints, etc.) or forcing them to produce only what the system wants (high-impact papers), is fundamentally flawed. The system also places a perpetual barrier between researchers and all other non-scientists. A public that mistrusts researchers is not well informed about how science works.

I’m lucky that my PI is supportive of me blogging on the side, but I know that many researchers would not tolerate it and/or would constantly worry that it is interfering with their scientific productivity. But that brings us back to the issue of how we measure “productivity” in today’s technology-driven world.

Yes, there are a lot of people swimming in the Ph.D. pool, and far fewer academic jobs. Academia will always be competitive, and if you’re set on that career path you need to be fully aware of what the game entails. Going through grad school won’t be easy, being a postdoc isn’t a walk in the park. But not everyone who likes science has to go into academia! Not everyone needs or wants a Ph.D. The scientific thought process can be so inherently beneficial for EVERYONE, on both a personal and professional level: Knowing how to assess and find trustworthy sources of information, examining all the available facts, thinking about them critically, and then placing them in the context of your personal experiences and opinions.

What I’m advocating is that we just need a greater awareness of scientists in general. We exist! We aren’t boring! You can talk to us about normal stuff!  We’re as passionate and driven as any actress or rock star. For us insiders (academics, grad students, etc.), we all know that “stuffy scientist” image is definitely not true. But ask a random 7 year old what a scientist looks like, and guess what picture they’ll draw? The crazy old guy. The ubiquity of that stereotype is deeply disturbing:

Students’ views of science and scientists have been widely studied. Classroom learning environment has been found to play a major role in these perceptions. High school students often have a stereotypically masculine image of science and view scientists and scientific work as unpleasant entities. To examine where students develop their images, children have been asked to draw pictures of scientists. Most drawings portray a scientist as an elderly male wearing a white coat and glasses. However, teacher intervention programs have been shown to be effective in helping to alter these negative images (Mason, et al. 1991). [from the National Science Foundation website]

And then there’s this – a study where kids were asked to draw pictures of scientists before and after their classroom was visited by actual researchers.

The “after” pictures look like the scientists I know. But look at those “before” pictures!! As much as we scientists don’t want to admit it, we spend our entire lives locked in an Ivory Tower. The barrier between scientists and non-scientists is stark and tangible.  Treebeard needs to get his ass down to Isengard and rip down that thing down, stat!

So no, we shouldn’t all scramble to be high-visibility Gagas – I’ll happily volunteer to fill that role. If we can’t convince the system to change, we need to change our own approach. Deep Sea News isn’t a traditional approach in science, but we Deeplings have all experienced a multitude of scientific benefits from using this blog as a platform. We will make the collective of voices grow. We will redefine the status quo.

The post Changing the Culture of Ocean Science: a DSN core value first appeared on Deep Sea News.

I was extremely flattered a few years ago to be invited to join the academic editors at PLoS One. In that time I worked diligently to develop a Marine and Aquatic Science hub at the journal. I have accumulated what I consider to be an experienced team of academic editors who were both committed to open access but well respected researchers in their fields. These include Zoe Finkel, Carlos Duarte, Geoffrey Trussell, John Bruno, Stuart Humphries, Stuart Sandin, and Steve Volmer, just to name a few. Despite my tenure at PLoS One being over I am still wholly dedicated to the open access movement.

For those of you who don’t know, or have a skewed view, here is what the open-access concept represents. Publications are full text, peer-reviewed articles that occur online and can be accessed at no charge to the user. Note that these are permanent and the review process is often designed for quick turnarounds between submission and publication. After acceptance, publication often occurs almost immediately. Papers are again free to download, copy, and distribute.

Why open access? Bora’s consistent championing of open access and some thoughtful words from Jonathan A. Eisen shaped my own thoughts on open access. One of the most important aspects of science is communication, both among scientists and between scientists and the public. How can this occur freely when scientific papers are hidden behind walls of memberships and subscription fees? Open-access journals can only make science more transparent. To state in another way, communication is a step of the Scientific Method and science that is hidden behind a wall is incomplete.

More importantly, what concerns me is that access to information and research often paid for by the public through taxes, has become a privilege of wealthy academic institutions and well-funded scientist or laboratories. A close friend of mine is the head science librarian for a university. His tales of dropping major journals as subscriptions rise is horrifying and all to common. Most universities are not increasing library budgets enough to meet drastic increases in journal subscriptions. Even well-funded, individual scientists can afford subscriptions to only a few journals thereby making much of the literature difficult at best to access. I encountered this all too frequently on my $12,500 year graduate stipend in Boston. This creates a disparity among researchers. Well-funded groups may continue to remain well-funded as access information allows them to remain cutting edge.

Another important aspect of Open Access is that it is also Immediate Access. When I search for literature and I find a reference, I need it today. I may not be able to afford week or more for an inter-library loan to come through or the author to mail me a reprint. I may be working under a deadline to submit a manuscript or grant. More importantly, waiting for information may provide an unnatural break in the flow of synthetic thinking as one is putting together ideas and concepts.

If you don’t believe that open access breaks down barriers, consider that open access articles are consistently cited more against disciplines. Lawrence (2001) found computer science articles that were openly accessible on the Web were cited more. In physics comparing OA and NOA articles in the same journal/year, OA articles have consistently more citations, the advantage varying from 36%-172% by discipline and year. Similar results were found for philosophy, political science, electrical and electronic engineering.

Something else worth considering…

Some journals have gone through great lengths to keep individual subscription fees down. I both subscribe and publish at these journals. But other journals have become enlisted in the megaconglomerate publishing houses that are for profit. And closed-access is a consequence of turning a profit. The dissemination of information should not be hindered because for-profit publishers must answer to share holders.

Last..

Kevin initially drew my attention to another issue particularly relevant to my research interests. Currently a biodiversity crisis is underway, which many have termed the sixth extinction. E.O. Wilson in 1993 suggested 30,000 species extinctions occur per year, roughly three per hour. How many species are there on earth? That is a tough nut to crack. An extremely conservative estimate would be 3-5 million, but it’s likely closer to 30-50 million. In the deep sea there may be as many as 10 million.

The other side of this crisis reflects our lack of knowledge of biodiversity on earth. Less than 2 million species have been described. By E.O.’s estimate we are losing species faster than they are being described. Alarmingly, many invertebrate phyla are now wholly ignored. Other groups lack taxonomic specialists to both revise taxonomy and to describe new species. The downfall in the number of taxonomist reflects both a lack of funding and, potentially more important, a lack of positions. Moreover, funding for taxonomic databases is lax and for multiple reasons several online initiatives have been largely unsuccessful.

Kevin over at his other and older blog points to another issue that bolstering the crisis.

Taxonomy has historically been relegated to the back alleys of the publishing world. In-house museum journals, obscure regional or specialty publications and even more obscure foreign language academy reports have hidden many species descriptions, revisions and monographs from the eyes of interested biologists.

Open access journals may prove an asset to reverse this issue. But considerable barriers still exist (see Bo-Christer Björk excellent write up for this).

The post From The Editor’s Desk: The Case For Open Access first appeared on Deep Sea News.

2010 sees the end of the Census of Marine Life, a ten year effort to catalog and explore the biodiversity of world’s oceans. This year and next you will see a great variety of expert science papers communicating the findings of this massive effort.   Many of these papers will be published in PLoS One Marine and Aquatic Science.  I again commend Humphries, the chief editor Peter Binfield, and the editorial staff at PLoS One for both providing a home and highlighting this fantastic work.

Today PLoS ONE unveiled their newest collection, a group of papers on a central theme, on marine biodiversity and biogeography.  This collection will continue to grow and currently includes 11 papers with two insightful overviews.

As part of [the Census of Marine Life], participating nations and regions generated new syntheses of marine biodiversity knowledge in their adjacent waters. These summaries are collected here. Each paper describes the physical, geological, chemical, and biological characteristics of the region, provides a brief history of research and species discovery, and gives insight into the role of Census activities in promoting and synthesizing this information. These articles bring together teams of regional experts to identify strengths and gaps in taxonomic capacity and ecological knowledge, potential focal areas for biodiversity research, and threats to marine biodiversity that span fishing disturbance, habitat destruction, invasive species, pollutants, and climate change. They provide species inventories and document patterns of endemism within different taxa, and they identify biogeographic regions and taxonomic groups with the greatest potential to yield new discovery. Individually these articles provide insights that can reveal regional needs and promising directions for future research; collectively they establish a baseline for further global assessments and identify mechanisms for future international collaboration

The post PLoS One and the Census of Marine Life first appeared on Deep Sea News.

A presentation to the International Society of Managing and Technical Editors on August 2009 from Peter Binfield Chief Editor at PLoS One

The post The Future of Online (Academic) Publishing first appeared on Deep Sea News.

The post Why I Believe in PLoS One first appeared on Deep Sea News.

I was extremely flattered a year ago to be invited to join the academic editors at PLoS One. In that time I worked diligently to develop a Marine and Aquatic Science hub at the journal. I have accumulated what I consider to be an experienced team of academic editors who are both committed to open access but well respected researchers in their fields.  These include Zoe Finkel, Carlos Duarte, Geoffrey Trussell, John Bruno, Stuart Humphries, Stuart Sandin, and Steve Volmer, just to name a few.

Today the Marine and Aquatic Section is live. I am excited to introduce our first paper in the section.  Schmidt et al. examine the biogeography and population genetics of whale sharks demonstrating that disparate populations have considerable gene flow between them. Overall the paper cautions that conservation of whale sharks require global initiatives.

Please add Marine and Aquatic Science RSS feed to your readers!

The post Marine and Aquatic Science at PLoS One first appeared on Deep Sea News.