After three days of action, we were both basically planning on being observers for the remainder. We even had a bit of a lie-in on Thursday and missed the 8:30 talks. I let the sea level wash over me, there was an interesting review of various projection methods for global sea level change and some detailed local investigations. I then briefly popped into some paleoclimate variability stuff, which is an area that our new project/post-doc will probably be looking into in the near future.
We were planning on staying late into the evening, so chose a gentle option for the afternoon - the panel discussion on blogs and social media in scientific research. It was, perhaps predictably, fairly rubbish. I've been to enough of these sort of things (e.g. at the AGU) that I should have known better, but like I said, I needed a mental break anyway. There was the usual po-faced advice for "professionalism" etc, and the ubiquitous stern advice to under no circumstances blog any research in progress, because the journals won't like it, because of copyright, or prior publication, or some other generally ill-defined bogey-man.
It took all of 30 seconds to confirm what I was already pretty confident about, that
Nature explicitly allows pre-publication on a personal blog or server such as Arxiv. The
AGU and
AMS have basically the same policy for all of their journals. Of course the
EGU
does too - almost all of its journals provide open access to the
submitted manuscript prior to publication anyway. That EGU web page
handily has links for similar statements from Elsevier, PNAS, and PLoS.
Can anyone find a single case of a journal rejecting a paper based on
the fact that an author has discussed some of the content on a blog?
But still, the myth propagates. Sigh. I'm sure he meant well, but that's little excuse for making up stuff (and thereby potentially misleading the audience) that could have been so easily checked.
[
Update: but see comment below - apparently, the Geological Societies of America and London both prohibit any prior publication of "results, data, ideas and/or interpretations", including on any electronic media. It's therefore understandable that the speaker might have assumed these conditions would apply more widely. But fortunately, they don't!]
Of course, there is no
compulsion to write about work in
progress, if it is something you'd rather keep private. There is no
compulsion to write about anything at all! Perhaps it's time to present
to the world, jules and James' three rules for scientific bloggers and
twitterers:
1. There are no rules.
2. See 1.
3. You have the right to remain silent, but anything you do say will be taken down and may be used in evidence.
Rule 3 brings us on to the other big bogey-man which was, remarkably,
that some people seemed genuinely concerned about getting sued.
Honestly. As if anyone actually cares what inconsequential drivel you
write on your personal corner of the internet. Of course it wouldn't be
sensible to libel anyone, but that's nothing to do with blogging per se,
but rather a matter of ... being careful not to libel anyone,
irrespective of the format. You should remember that you are effectively
standing in public shouting with a megaphone - most of the time, no-one
is listening, but someone could be, and it's the embarrassing bits that
will get propagated - like, that someone said that blogging research in
progress is a big no-no :-) I would guess that the knee-jerk
re-tweeting of a libel might be more of a risk than writing a blog-post
on some scientific topic, regardless of whether you are critical or
cheer-leading. But it's certainly not a particular issue for scientists
that I can see.
The humorous highlight was when one
panellist stated that blogging had doubled his citation rate, which he
supported by a histogram of his citations over time. I of course
immediately assumed (based on the graphic) that he was joking, but it
soon became clear that he was being serious.
I may re-post his stats when I have access to
WOK
next week, but for now a verbal description will have to do. His
histogram showed the rapidly increasing quasi-exponential growth in
citation rate that just about every mid-career scientist will have seen
over the first 10-15 years of their career, though the last few years in
his case seemed to showed a distinct plateau. His blogging started
shortly before the last year in the increasing phase, and hence (or
otherwise) he attributed the final doubling to this. If I was him, I'd
be more concerned that his blogging efforts might have hurt his
performance sufficiently to kill off the expected subsequent growth in
citations, as this seems to me to be a far more plausible interpretation
of the data he presented. I don't want to embarrass him too much (hence
not naming him, though he'll be easily enough tracked down if you try)
but google scholar suggests he hasn't actually published a great deal in
the last few years, at least compared to the arbitrary handful of other
mid-career scientists of similar overall performance that I bothered to
check. Not that I care about his output one way or the other - I'm just
pointing out that his claim that blogging gave him a boost is hardly
supported by the evidence. Of course there may be an number of
alternative explanations for his particular trajectory.
Rant
over, I'll demonstrate that I'm also quite capable of posting entirely
positive and enthusiastic commentary without snark when the situation
deserves it. Jules and I greatly enjoyed the short course on nonlinear
time series analysis oven by Reik Donner and Jonathan Donges. I'd
seen the former
giving a "Young Scientist" prize lecture a few years ago, which at the
time was a bit too detailed and I never got round to chasing up the
content. The gentler didactic style this time round was much more
digestible, even up to the 8pm finishing time. This event was certainly
the highlight of Thursday, and one of the highlights of the week for me.
After
that ~12h day, we thought we deserved the morning off. I don't think I
have ever done 5 full days at a meeting of this nature without missing a
session, and I'm not sure it would be sensible to try. Friday always
has the feel of a wind-down and this time seemed particularly weak in
terms of my interests. It is hard not to feel sorry for the afternoon
speakers. We managed a morning run before heading into town for a really
good cake. One thing that we have been repeatedly reminded of is that
Viennese standards of service are not on the same planet as what we have
come to expect in Japan. But once you get used to that, it's pleasant
enough really.
In to the conference for the afternoon, there
wasn't actually a great deal I could focus on. I wrote most of this post
in the climate data homogenisation session, which had a few interesting
things, including rather bizarrely a talk on the periodicity (or
otherwise) of
Dansgaard-Oeschger events. I wonder what the satellite calibration guys made of that!
Then off to
Salm Bräu for
probably the best meal of the week. I've been pleased with how well the
Tripadvisor recomendations have turned out. Next Sunday's half marathon
may suffer as a result, however.
