Publishing your science paper is only half the job

Scientists should be keen to get out of the lab and explain their findings to a wider public

David Dobbs blogs at Wired
Einstein's General Theory Of Relativity
Not all papers achieve museum space like Einstein's General Theory of Relativity. Photograph: David Silverman/Getty Images

Perhaps the oddest and least predictable scientific conference I attend is ScienceOnline, a version of which met earlier this month at the British Library. That event, ScienceOnline London, or SOLO, is a spinoff of the original ScienceOnline held every January in the United States. Both started as science blogger gatherings and morphed into meetups of anyone interested in doing or communicating about science online – scientists, teachers, writers, network and data and design geeks, entrepreneurs. I go because I never know whom I'll meet – or what, on or off the official programme, will emerge as the hot issues.

One idea that took a higher profile than I had expected this year was that the scientific establishment has come to wildly overvalue and overemphasise the scientific paper. This idea, discussed for several years now, got a push at SOLO in the opening address by Cambridge astrophysicist and Royal Society president Sir Martin Rees and gained traction from there. Yes, the paper's critics recognise that for over three centuries the scientific paper has allowed scientists to "pass arguments from mind to mind", as science writer Tom Levenson puts it in a lovely book about Newton, "without the need for face-to-face confrontation". Yet they argue that the scientific paper as we use it now – dried up, fossilised – has become less a conduit for science than a stone it must drag around.

For starters (the argument goes), the paper offers, in this age of instant, data-rich communication, a horribly slow and expensive way to share data and ideas. As a result it consumes outsized portions of time, money, mental attention, and reputational weight. As Newcastle University computer scientist Phillip Lord put it during one panel, "When I look at formal scientific publishing now, I no longer see the benefits. I just see costs." Lord suggests scientists could do better publishing papers on Wordpress and sharing data using open notebooks.

But what concerns people even more about the paper is that tenure decisions, grant awards, and even university ratings now focus so heavily on publication in high-impact journals that the paper has largely displaced the real currency of science – the data, methods and ideas that papers are supposed to communicate – with the papers themselves. The paper shouldn't be the currency of science, but a way to pass the real currency along.

Ditching or devaluing the paper poses challenges, of course. How do you replace the filter of peer review? How would schools evaluate faculty? How would we properly credit and track the development of ideas?

Good questions, and they sparked juicy debates at the conference. But set those aside for now. I want to consider another problem with the paper's overvaluation: it discourages scientists from engaging the public. How so? Because many seem to think that when they've finished the paper, they've finished their work.

This struck me during one of the many discussions at SOLO of whether and how scientists should engage the public. A scientist in the audience said something that always gets said during such discussions: "What if you want to just do the work?" What if you want, in other words, to do the experiment or observation, analyse the data, write and publish the damn thing, and then get back to the lab and do it all again. Investigate, publish, rinse, repeat.

It's a charming picture of science. But even as he said it, it occurred to me that a) that picture is painfully outmoded and b) stopping with the paper does only half the job. For starters, only a few people (0.6 on average, according to a statistic quoted by Rees) will read the paper. Fewer will understand it, and probably no one will tell the nonscientific world what it means or why it matters. And if you're a scientist, shouldn't you want everyone to know your work matters, and why? It's important, valuable work, right? Presumably that's why you do it – and why you think (as I do) that the public should help fund it.

But here's the essential fact: science has no importance or value until it enters the outside world. That's where it takes on meaning and value. And that's where its meaning and value must be explained.

Scientists implicitly recognise this at a limited scale: They want their colleagues to understand their work, so they go to conferences and explain it. But that's not enough. They need to go explain it at the Big Conference — the one outside of academe. They need to offer the larger world not just a paper meaningful only to peers, but a friendly account of the work's relevance and connections to the rest of life. That means getting lucid with letters columns or op-ed pages or science writers or science cafes or schoolchildren or blog readers. Those who can't hack that – stage fright, can't write, or just doesn't feel right – can support their peers who do engage the rabble. Write some code for them, maintain their web pages, give them rides, or grant them time off from inside the lab to take the lab's work outside. But do something. Because if you "just do the work," you're not finishing the work. You haven't got it out there.

Some are already swinging into action. Many of the scientists at the SOLO event argued their community must do more to engage the public and make the case for research funding – unless, of course, they want to see massive budget cuts and a world where social and political discussion are shaped less by evidence than authority. Some of them, crying "No more Doctor Nice Guy!" are now organising British scientists to take to the streets.

Getting your research out there and taking time out from the lab is a pain, no doubt. But if you're a scientist, surely you don't expect the rest of us to just assume your work is important. No. If you want the world to believe that your work is important and that modern life and a free society depend on a rigorous, evidence-based approach to things, you wouldn't ask us to take it on faith. You'd want to show us the evidence.

David Dobbs is currently in London working on his fourth book. He writes for publications including the Atlantic, the New York Times Magazine, National Geographic, Wired, and Wired UK, and blogs at Wired