Guest Post by Thomas Fuller
When peripheral issues dominate the climate news agenda, it’s normally a sign that not much is happening on the scientific, political or legal front. So the fact that the blogosphere (and increasingly the mainstream) is so heavily focused on the No Pressure video and Ken Cuccinelli’s renewed subpoena of Michael Mann’s emails would tend to indicate that the climate is quiet.
But that’s not really the case. September was really warm, globally, increasing the odds that 2010 might be the warmest year since modern instruments began recording the temperature. Arctic ice, on the other hand, is recovering spectacularly quickly from a strong melt this summer. The University of Colorado seems to be saying that despite this warm weather, sea level declined….
So there is climate.
Judith Curry has put a firm stake in the ground on her weblog, discussing the potential and, perhaps more importantly, the limitations of models in climate science. The NOAA is discussing heat in the depths of the ocean and the Royal Society has revised its position on climate science overall, while here at WUWT you can easily scroll down to find interesting and relevant reports on papers and discoveries.
So there is climate science.
And the sharks appear to be circling for Rajendra Pachauri, with establishment organisations preparing the way for calls for his departure. Expectations for the climate summit in Cancun are rapidly being adjusted downwards, as are hopes for any kind of U.S. energy bill this year.
So there is politics.
To have discussion dominated by a twisted little video and what I believe a mistaken attempt to criminalize scientific error risks letting more important things slip out of control, or at least off our radar screen.
I have written enough of the No Pressure video and really don’t think there is much more to say. Big mistake, shows bad intent, use it as a reference point for evaluating further messages from the climate establishment.
And anyone who has read the book Steve Mosher and I have written knows that I think very poorly of what Michael Mann did–his actions in defense of his Hockey Stick chart were wrong, bullying, cheap and destructive of scientific publishing protocols and procedures.
But it didn’t rise to a criminal level (that was the UK deleting emails in advance of Freedom of Information requests, not Michael Mann). What Ken Cuccinelli is doing is going fishing for wrongdoing without an allegation of such wrongdoing–and that’s not how we should be doing things in this country.
I’ll get a lot of flack from you on this–and don’t be shy, I can take it. But remember as you write–District Attorneys are not always Republican, and controversial scientists can be skeptics at times, too. Don’t let your desire for a short term victory in the daily news cycle let you ignore what would be an erosion of all our civil liberties, I beg of you.
And let’s turn the discussion back to matters that we will at least remember three months down the road. Science, news and politics bring us enough material for discussion. We’ve noted the scandals, observed the wheels in motion. I’m not saying forget what has happened recently.
But let’s get back to the subject at hand.
Thomas Fuller http://www.redbubble.com/people/hfuller
It has been my experience that Engineers get it. I know Mr. Fuller’s co-author (Mosher) is an engineer. At the very least Moshpit has rubbed off on him.
And the stereotypical engineer is a libertarian if not a Libertarian.
Anthony, in the case of Cuccinelli and Mann, I disagree with your point of view (I think Mann’s behaviour is straight-out criminal). But I really appreciate how you keep your blog open to all reasonable points of view, and don’t shy away from tough debates. Long may we disagree, if we can continue to disagree in a reasonable way, and eventually arrive at something close to the truth. BTW, if anyone at this point suggests a group hug, I will bop him on the nose (well, metaphorically, anyway).
Don’t let your desire for a short term victory in the daily news cycle let you ignore what would be an erosion of all our civil liberties, I beg of you.
Right, because it’s just so much better to let a bunch of latte’ Communist Controllists and Post Normal Scientists = Propaganda Operatives conspire to loot and enslave us, which would truely be “an erosion of all our civil liberties”. [And Lordy, how the Left has been silent in the face of Obama, enc.’s, invasions into our lives and Constitutional rights and principles.]
I’m not hung up on what Cuccinelli is doing, but it’s nevertheless not anything illegal, wrong, or unwarranted, especially given that whatever ways we “should” otherwise be handling people like Mann haven’t worked yet or are just barely working no thanks to the “official scientific bodies” and complicit MSM
watchattack dogs.Tom, you are the one who seems to be unduly threatened by attention directed to these “peripheral issues”, which I don’t think really overtax anyone’s capabilities, including yours. And given the nature of Climate Science as basically a fraudulent Propaganda Op., I don’t agree that they are even peripheral.
“…a mistaken attempt to criminalize scientific error…”
There’s no attempt to criminalise scientific error. Cuccinelli has clarified this point several times. The question is, did Mann make an error, realise it, and then knowing that it was untrue use it to apply for more funds from the state?
Let’s take the R2 statistic thing. The MBH98/99 reconstruction fails R2 verification, as Steve McIntyre discovered, and was grudgingly conceded by Wahl and Amman 07. Did Mann know? The original paper said the reconstruction had passed R2, and even showed some R2 statistics in a chart. When we saw code that purported to be that used, R2 was calculated in it. So surely, Mann must have known the statistics, must have known they failed the test, must have known this rendered the reconstruction dubious, and yet he published it anyway.
But this is probably not a crime. I think it ought to be – you have contracted with the state to provide goods to a certain specification, and have knowingly not delivered them. If you was a contractor providing concrete for road bridges, and packed it with horse droppings, the state would probably have a complaint to make. However, I rather doubt the contract was worded precisely enough to catch him on that. It probably said “go research some climate stuff” and he did that.
The question is, though, did he use these earlier results in applications for more funds? Because while the contract may be too vague to catch him out, there is a law that any knowing falsehood in an application for state funds is a crime. I’m guessing not on the R2 thing, or Cuccinelli would probably already have him in court. But he presumably thinks he has sufficient reason to suspect there might be more “dirty laundry”, as Mann put it, in his papers.
It’s also worth noting that all this resistance by the university is a waste of time. If Cuccinelli wants, he can just submit a lawsuit, and all this stuff and more will have to be provided in discovery. The case may collapse at that point if they don’t find anything, but I doubt Cuccinelli would care. The civil investigative demand is normally seen as an opportunity for a person subject to investigation to provide a defence without all the other bad things associated with a lawsuit. Let them have a look and realise there’s no case so they’ll go away and stop bothering you.
And it does not lead to any loss of civil rights that you didn’t lose years ago. The rich can use lawsuits and discovery to legally destroy those too poor to fend it off – not by finding anything, but by imposing enormous legal costs. And Democrat Attorney Generals have been using it as such a weapon in the past, too. I understand one dragged some of the bankers in for investigation – not because they thought there was fraud, but because they were annoyed with them about that whole global economic crash thing. It’s not even new in academia.
If you want to reform the American legal system to stop this sort of ‘lawfare’, then please, go ahead. It certainly needs it. But this is just business as usual in the US politico-legal system, and all the whining to exempt academic scientists from the law is just special pleading. Best to just ignore the whole thing, unless and until Cuccinelli actually finds anything.
As a Virginia resident, I lean toward support of this investigation.
We spend too much money that we don’t have (in our county, our state, our country) on the equivalent of stardust and moonshine, and the end result for citizens (in our county, our state, our country) is that we have professional grant-getters and speech givers ensured of a comfortable tax-funded/often untaxed income (supported and egged on by hosts of untaxed “non profits”), while roads crumble, schools crowd, those services for which government was organized in common are reduced.
If Mann was given Virginia tax dollars for his work, then there is nothing unreasonable in asking to review what he did with them, after the revelations of his work practices in other areas. There is smoke emanating from some of Mann’s activities, and he was given some of our money.
That a state university is stonewalling on his behalf is not pleasant to me either. They thrive on our money too, and should be prepared to produce the books as it were for checking any time.
Any citizen has the right to see public records, and this was public money.
Perhaps we would spend less money encouraging a government grant class and a grant-chasing mentality if it were normally considered something the recipient had to be completely transparent with.
Hang on. Forget about Mann’s ignorance of proper statistical methods. Didn’t Mann have data in a folder called “Censored” where he had data and code that destroyed his hockey stick? Publishing the paper was a fraud, pure and simple. It was not “scientific error.” I don’t know which poor set of taxpayers paid for it, but it was a fraud and some A-G somewhere should be sniffing very hard.
Peter Whale
It was. In the English High Court. Gore got done like a dinner.
http://www.bailii.org/cgi-bin/markup.cgi?doc=/ew/cases/EWHC/Admin/2007/2288.html&query=“global+warming”+and+gore&method=boolean
Tom, you didn’t mention extreme weather, supposedly caused by global warming.
I visited the Great Lakes Shipwreak Museum yessterday, where I learned that 6,000 ships have sunk since commercial shipping began there. The Edmund Fitzgerald went down in November 1975 in an horrific storm with winds gusting near 100 mph, with all 29 hands lost. Gordon Lightfoot wrote a song about it.
That 1975 storm was the third worst of the century. In 1913 12 ships went down, with 250 lives lost; in 1940, 2 ships and 100 lives. Bad weather has been around for awhile.
http://richards-creations.net/EdmondFitzgerald.html
Peter Whale
Sorry about the URL. That’s how it pasted.
Let’s begin by examining the validity of your statement, “But it didn’t rise to a criminal level (that was the UK deleting emails in advance of Freedom of Information requests, not Michael Mann). What Ken Cuccinelli is doing is going fishing for wrongdoing without an allegation of such wrongdoing–and that’s not how we should be doing things in this country.” On the contrary, there are outstanding allegations of wrongdoing. Michael Mann and the University of Virginia refused to comply with the law and a citizen’s lawful FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) request for e-mail held by the University, claiming the e-mail no longer existed. When Virginia Attorney General Cuccinelli served a subpoena on the University to deliver the e-mail, the supposedly deleted and non-existent e-mail was recovered from the University computer servers. Consequently, it appears there is every reason to suspect a crime was committed when the citizen’s FOIA request was denied on the basis of a fraudulent claim of destruction of the e-mail. Unlike the case with the University of East Anglia, the statute of Limiitations is likely to remain in force in the Virginia case. It remains to be determined whether or not the evidentiary discovery will support misdemeanor and/or felony charges. That is the purpose and due process of law for which the CID is needed and proper.
Then there is the issue of the $466,000 (nearly a half million dollars) in grant monies Michael Mann solicited and received from the State of Virginia and its taxpayers, in addition to the huge sums of money he and the University of Virginia received from the U.S. Government. It has been argued by a group of scientists and others that Michael Mann and the University of Virginia should somehow be uniquely immune from a Civil Investigative Demand (CID) in a prima facie FOIA and/or fraud criminal case on the basis of some unwritten gentleman’s agreement to avoid interference with the intellectual freedom of scientists. Thusly, these same people see no cognitive dissonance, hypocrisy, or injustice when they punished, sanctioned, threatened, intimidated, and/or defrauded non-scientists and dissenting scientists by dismissing state climatologists, dissenting climate scientists, dissenting meteorologists, academics, students, political appointees, and others without any Civil Investigative Demand, administrative board hearing, arraignment and trial, or other due process of law thay are now claiming for Michael Mann and the University of Virginia without any statutory or constitutional right.
Rubbing salt into the wounds of the public they have wronged for many years, they are trying to carve out a privileged position of immunity for themselves just as the Members of Congress have done so before them. Discriminating against other classes of citizens, these so-called scientists want to enjoy an immunity from investigation and prosecution not enjoyed by other citizens in our society. Expressing outrage that anyone would seek to interfere with the privacy of their communications and right to publish their communications while remaining immune from due process of law, members of their class of citizens have been running rampant in innumerable criminal cases of defrauding governments, businesses, private citizens, and causing the deaths of private citizens.
For one example, Dr. Scott Reuben pled guilty to numerous charges of fraud in which he faked numerous medical studies published in medical journals as peer reviewed research for such companies as Pfizer. Despite the peer reviews, Dr. Reuben didn’t even have any patients enrolled in his faked patient studies. Physicians relied upon these faked perr reviewed papers to provide medical care to their patients. It was subsequently determined that Dr. Scott Reuben had been faking a number of medical studies for some thirteen years without being discovered and prosecuted.
Somewhere there is someone reading the forgoing and saying Dr. Reuben is just an isolated case, and his fraud is not representative of any widespread scientific fraud. Unfortunately, they are just plain wrong and ignorant of the facts.
Take for another example, the problem with widespread fraud due to ghostwritten peer reviewed science papers. Acta Crystallographica Section E was compelled to retract more than 70 peer reviewed papers ghostwritten by Chinese scientists as faked or fraudulent studies. Pharmaceutical companies have a reputation for ghostwriting peer reviewed studies in-house and then paying medical doctors and scientists to permit their name to b used for publication of the studies. This fraudulent practice has been reported to be widespread in the pharmaceutical industry and some academia for many years as an outgrowth of the academic practice of using graduate students to perform service for their superiors holding doctorates. The University of Alabama at Birmingham has been yet another academic institution which had to retract a number of fraudulent peer reviewed papers and remove eleven proteins registered in a database of such proteins used in science.
The fallout from the notoriously fraudulent stem cell research of Hwang Woo-suk and the investigation of his associate, Professor Gerald P. Schatten of University of Pittsburgh have been ongoing.
Closer to NASA there is the case of Samim Anghaie, his wife, and their business, NETECH, which fraudulently obtained 2.5 million dollars in contracts from NASA among the 13 U.S. government contracts totalling 3.4 million dollars.
Within climate science there has been a number of incidents of suspected fraud, one of which was reported by Dr. S. Fed Singer described the allegations of either fabrication of Chinese weather station data or plagiarism by Wei-Chyung Wang, University of Albany, from work by his colleague in China, Zhaomei Zeng.
Suffice it to observe, scientific fraud is not at all uncommon, and some commentators describe scientific fraud as being rampant. Looking at the known incidents of scientific fraud, it can be seen the perpetration of such fraud is highly rewarding with grants and contracts amounting in various examples as $70,000, $466,000, and $3,400,000. Whistleblowers are typically punished for their honesty, resulting in great reluctance to disclose such scientific fraud or enthusiastic cooperation with such fraud.
In your statement, “But remember as you write–District Attorneys are not always Republican, and controversial scientists can be skeptics at times, too,” you indulge in a fallacy seemingly common to many so-called Liberal-Left Democrats. You see opponents as necessarily being some kind of badly fundamental religious Right-wing extremist or at least some misguided minority Right-wing-nut Republican. Well, such ideas are extremist fantasies. There ae a great many people who describe themselves, as Republicans, yes, but also Democrats, Libertarians, independents, and others who insist upon honesty, integrity, and impartiality. A great many of these people cheerfully wish a pox on all politicians, activists, and Lamestream journalists who seek to frustrate the ability of ordinary citizens to govern their own lives free of interference by by people who think they know better what is best for other people besides themselves and seek to make themselves immune from the same rules and burdens they would impose on others. Whether it is the special immunities and privileges the MainStream Media (MSM) seek to deny ordinary citizen journalists or the climate data and information climate scientists attempt to deny ordinary citizen observers of climate science, you don’t have to be a Republican, a political conservative, or a right-wing-nut, to join with our political opponents in demanding non-discriminatory application of the due process of law to scientists the same as other citizens and professions.
At the very least, the University of Virginia and/or Michael Mann appear to be liable to investigation and prosecution for the violation of laws relating to the FOIA release of the e-mail evidencing Michael Mann’s involvement in the handling of $466,000 of state grant funds. There is more than ample evidence that scientific fraud is a common enough crime to warrant investigations, and convincing evidence of at least some violations of law with respect to FOIA disclosures. Scientists are not yet privileged with the immunity needed to commit FOIA violations and scientific fraud with complete immunity from investigation and prosecution. let the Attorney General represent the citizens of Virginia and safeguard their taxpayer monies and their right to the freedom of information guaranteed by written laws.
RESEARCH SUBPOENAS AND THE
SOCIOLOGY OF KNOWLEDGE
SHEILA JASANOFF
“More serious and conceptually more interesting are the cases in which litigants
expect to find genuine discrepancies between the “facts” reported by scientists
and the observations on which their findings were based. The expectation
that research subpoenas will enable courts to distinguish between valid and
invalid scientific claims appears to rest on certain widely held but empirically
questionable assumptions about the practice of science:
that scientific records are kept in accordance with standardized and
generally accepted rules;
that evidence of fraud, error, and poor scientific practice can be detected
unambiguously from written records;
that challenged methodologies (including methods of analysis and
interpretation) clearly conform or do not conform to “scientific”
standards;
that such standards preexist and hence can be mechanically applied
during legal inquiry; and
that the adversarial process is conducive to sorting out disputes concerning
the validity and reliability of competing research practices.”
This was dated 8/13/97. Scientists are subpoenaed all the time on a variety of issues when a conflict of interest occurs. Certainly one can’t argue that there isn’t a conflict of interest here can they? Can they argue that there isn’t legitimate arguments to be made from the preceeding list? Let the subpoena go through. It is completely in line with the rules that scientists in every other field have been forced to live with. Climate scientists have no special immunity.
Simon Hopkinson says:
October 6, 2010 at 12:32 am
Tom:
that was the UK deleting emails in advance of Freedom of Information requests, not Michael Mann
It’s really important to note that the request (and any subsequent acquiescence) to delete emails was made AFTER receiving David Holland’s FOI request for them, NOT in advance of it. It’s important because the distinction impacts the legality of the behaviour. The enquiries’ finding, that the deletion request was in advance of FOI, is not supported by the chronology of the evidence.
I agree with you regarding Cuccinelli’s pursuit of Mann. While Americans are busily guarding separation of Church and State, they’re failing to draw a line between Justice and Politics. This inevitably leads, as Lord Turnbull notes, to “more Widgery than Saville”.
The Attorney General of Virginia appears to be asking for copies of information that is the property of the State of Virginia. Once a University accepts State funding for research everything purchased and ALL work done with that funding is theirs not yours and all has to be accounted for in detail. There are also VERY strict contractual rules on commingling of funding in attempts to sidestep such vesting clauses.
Justice issues like climategate might be better handled in world climate courts once the United Nations is moved out of New York City and relocated to zero emissions open air, wind & solar powered facilities in Gaza & the West Bank!
I support Cuccinelli. If Mann had just published an incompetent thesis, I would agree with you. But there is also the issue of oversight of taxpayer funds.
If an Attorney General is forbidden from executing oversight over an area of state funding, even if the area is state provided academic grants, then the taxpayers who provided those funds have no protection from fraudulent misuse of public money, if the abuse is perpetrated by academics.
I think I recall a case of bubble fusion fraud being prosecuted.
http://pubs.acs.org/cen/news/86/i30/8630notw2.html
If you would like to immerse yourself in an ocean of EPA regulations, take a look at the current Regulatory Agendas & Regulatory Plans document. http://www.epa.gov/lawsregs/search/regagenda.html#download . 178 pages of upcoming environmental rules. How is anyone supposed to deal with this? We are drowning in a swamp of “Environmental Justice”.
If you are going to call “splattergate” a periferal issue, that would seem to suggest that you have not yet grasped the nature of the climate “debate”. If you regard the debate as essentially political, rather than scientific, then the 10:10 campaign is at the centre of the debate in the UK, and therefore the behaviour of 10:10 is mainstream, not periferal.
NZ Willy says:{October 5, 2010 at 10:47 pm}
“…I would disagree because “allegations” are not necessary for an investigation to be Investigation is not condemnation. So I think Anthony is misguided here, although well-meaning.
REPLY: This essay was written by Thomas Fuller.
– Anthony”
Good thing NZ willy is not on the investigation team. 🙂
“I’ll get a lot of flack from you on this–and don’t be shy, I can take it. But remember as you write–District Attorneys are not always Republican, and controversial scientists can be skeptics at times, too. Don’t let your desire for a short term victory in the daily news cycle let you ignore what would be an erosion of all our civil liberties, I beg of you.”
The global warming “science” has been being used to reduce our civil liberties (and wealth) for the last 10 years (particularly in europe). I really don’t see the civil liberties argument in the Mann case. The university was paid by the state for the work. The state asked for documentation and it wasn’t provided. If science is to progress then somehow other scientists have to get access to the documentation to either reproduce or invalidate. If these scientists refuse to allow their work to be checked, and yet still use it as evidence that we are in a crisis, then there is no alternative but to the courts. The university should be ashamed of itself for allowing it to get to this point. If it is all above board, why are they not providing the documentation?
If this were an individual it may be different. Some rich guy taking a campaign against the university. If the end result is Cucinelli is successful it is highly unlikely to become the standard route for getting this data. Institiutions funded by the taxpayer will realise that the courts will enforce the taxpayer getting full disclosure of the way the funds were spent, and the basis for the claims.
At the end of the day the legal system is there to enforce the law, ideally in such a way that anybody considering breaking it fears that they may get caught. The scientific community was generally protected from this sort of action because the institutions themselves would publish the counter arguments. If somebody in Mann’s position (in the hypothetical case – not accusing mann as an individual) believes that he can rig the review process in such a way that the scientific establishment will not debase his claim then the only resolution must be through the courts. If fraud can be committed in this manner it must be possible to be caught.
I view governments not funding fraud (hypothetically) to relieve me of my money and liberties a rather important civil liberty. The stakes are far too high for key players to be allowed to hide behind this kind of defence.
In a recent conversation with a retired teacher, the discussion was ‘how do we cleanse the erronious climate science from school corriculums, and school teachers minds?’
Without the Cuccinelli investigation of Mann, and hopefully a public trial of M Mann et al for committing fraud, the answer was ‘not for 50 years’.
So you see, this investigation gets at the heart of the matter, that without Cucinelli the USA is doomed to M Mann et als huge corrupting influence on science for two generations.
To fail to root out this corruption would be like failing to react to Pearl Harbour.
Tom,
With all due respect (and you are due a lot), you are condemning the investigation without much actual basis to do so.
You only have crugate and some reviews of Mann’s work by academics.
You are not an attorney. You have not seen the rest of the work related e-mails Mann and gang communicated with. You have not reviewed how Mann spent the money he got.
Academics are not above the law. I am tired of them acting as if they are. Mann went from perennial student stuck in a PhD program at over 30 years of age to one of the main players in the promotion of the most extreme form of AGW fear mongering in an amazingly short period of time.
None of that was explained by climategate.
It is inevitable that we will find out the rest of the story.
But ‘peer review’ in climate science has become cover-up and tribalism. As we saw in Britain, the government reviews were obvious whitewashes.
So who should lead the exploration to find out what, and how, things went wrong in climate science? Climate scientists? The UN? Journalists? All have proven to not be up to the task.
I would suggest that the AG of Virginia may not be perfect, but he is a pretty good place to start.
“What Ken Cuccinelli is doing is going fishing for wrongdoing without an allegation of such wrongdoing–and that’s not how we should be doing things in this country.”
Sorry, Mr. Fuller, you are dead wrong on this. The IRS needs no probable cause for a financial audit. No scientist, or scientific organization that accepts taxpayer dollars should claim that the government needs probable cause to review the activities, correspondence, and scientific results that were supported by taxpayer dollars.
No one forced Mr. Mann to accept the government support. But as soon as he did so, he removed any argument that the activities supported should hide under any kind of cloak of ‘privacy’.
I run a small business. So small in fact that I have to do the payroll and the VAT accounting myself, as well as the business of making money.
Occasionally, mistakes get made. Normally these get corrected with nothing more said, but I know very well if I make too many mistakes I will get investigated. It’s a huge pain in the backside, as I have to go through several years of VAT, or payroll submissions with the investigator, but, as I am relied on to both calculate and submit the correct amount, it can hardly be considered odd if someone wants to check if the sums are being done right when there is evidence that they have been done wrong.
And that is the point. An investigation is not an accusation of guilt, it is an investigation into whether the proper procedures are being followed.
Mann would appear to have “made a mistake” with research funded by grant money. If he doesn’t admit it, that would seem to be grounds for investigation itself, as it is the responsibility of the researcher to use the money properly, and flawed research is not a proper use, regardless of intent.
If he doesn’t admit mistakes were made, let alone why, how can you determine whether there is a case to answer or not without an investigation? It’s not an invasion of civil liberties to be required to justify yourself, your actions and your procedures when you make make mistakes with other peoples money.
This action against him may appear unseemly, but it probably wouldn’t seem so if there had been full co operation from the outset.
You are wrong about Cuccinelli. I, myself, have e-mails and files for 15 years, of my work 10 years of which are government contract work. If the government were to subpoena my records or even just ask for them, I would have them. It’s a record of my work. Why would I throw it out? Some people I work with have 30 years of notebook records. This idea that an important climate scientist has “lost” or won’t turn over records is absolutely a coverup. I support Cuccinelli and am prepared for similar treatment. That’s modern science.
Chances that Mann will be touched in any way are scant.
Susan Mazur has written some articles on the state of the peer review system. Among her pieces, there was an interview with David Noble, a rather radical science and education historian who has created controversy in every university where he has taught. I have just selected a few excerpts that give the flavor of that interview, including a part where they touch on Monbiot and the whole climate change issue, but the entire piece is worth a read. Noble is also the author of The Corporate Climate Coup: http://tinyurl.com/3dg7r8
Here are just a few excerpts from that interview. The system seems to be corrupt beyond repair
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL1002/S00222.htm
[…]
Suzan Mazur: I’ve been focusing on abuse inside the peer review system in recent articles, which has spiraled out of control – to the extent that at the low end we now find virtual death squads on Internet blogs out to destroy scientists who have novel theories.
[…]
David Noble: When you say THE problem is the peer review system – the peer review system in my view is doing what it was designed to do — censor. And filter. Peer review is a system of prior censorship, prior review – prior meaning prior to publication. So the idea of abusing the peer review system sort of adds insult to injury, because the peer review system itself is injurious.
Suzan Mazur: The first scientific journal was published in 1665 by the Royal Society of London. Would you briefly timeline events from there, highlighting what the original plan was for a postwar National Science Foundation?
David Noble: My understanding is that peer review in its modern form is very recent, dating from World War II. The participants in what we now call science were people with resources, usually independent wealth. When we go back to the Royal Society we’re talking about a very small community of people.
[…]
By about 1943-1944, there was discussion about what the postwar scientific establishment would look like. By this time, the corporations and the universities and the scientists who had been reluctant to take federal funds for fear of taxpayer involvement were now so enamored of the largess that they didn’t want to give it up. And they said, we can’t go backwards — this is the new game — we are going to be taking taxpayer money. But we don’t want the taxpayer involved in what we do. This is a fundamental challenge to the whole. . .
[…]
Harry Truman said it was the most undemocratic piece of legislation he’d ever seen and vetoed it. It went through minor changes and became what we have today — a scientific establishment run by scientists with very little political oversight. The key thing is how they kept the taxpayer out was through peer review.
[…]
Suzan Mazur: It wasn’t until the 1960s that science journals were turned into a money-making racket when the federal government gave its blessing to a per-page fee for publication. Scientists were not only writing articles for the journals for free but now there was a per-page fee for publication.
[…]
David Noble: If the taxpayer is paying for the research, why shouldn’t there be a representative array of citizens on all scientific panels? And again, going back to your first question, the purpose of peer review is prior censorship and I believe very strongly that if people want to criticize something that you write or I write, they have every right to do that AFTER it’s published not before it’s published. To me that’s the critical issue.
[…]
Suzan Mazur: Getting back to the current dilemma, a secretive peer review system with hundreds of thousands of private for-profit and professional society journal editors, editorial board members and reviewers of scientific publications — none of whom get paid. And a scientific journal publisher like Wiley, for example – a publicly listed company – with $1.6 billion in revenue for 2009.
Elsevier, the science publisher — also publicly-traded — puts out 2,000 journals and describes itself as “a global community of 7,000 journal editors, 70,000 editorial board members, 300,000 reviewers and 600,000 authors”. All working for free?
Isn’t it strange that so many busy scientists write these staggeringly complex journal papers for free, that they pay for their articles to be published and thousands of dollars extra if they want the public to read them, even though it’s the public who funds the research? And that journals continue to operate in secrecy about revenues and operating costs, with some of them now making millions of dollars? Isn’t it strange?
[…]
David Noble: Let’s put it in a larger context — 90% of research done in universities, even private universities – is paid by the taxpayer. Any company can come to the university, lay down some lunch money and leverage that 90% and in exchange get contractual obligations for prior review before publication. Non-disclosure agreements. Licensing rights. That’s the whole system.
Suzan Mazur: It’s all for sale.
David Noble: IT’S ALL FOR SALE.
[…]
If a private company has put in some money to that research effort, they have a contract that gives them rights. One of the rights is PRE-PUBLICATION REVIEW. They want to see the research, check it out for anything that’s commercially viable and they can censor. They can say, we don’t want you saying anything about that. THIS IS ROUTINE. THIS IS THE STATE-OF-THE-ART RIGHT NOW.
Suzan Mazur: Incredible. Is there a way of breaking up the “academic mafias” so that discovery and the free flow of ideas prevails and individual researchers have a shot at being funded and having their ideas taken seriously?
David Noble: Well, you’d have to revoke the Bayh-Dole amendment.
[…]
Suzan Mazur: The Wall Street Journal ran a shocking piece in 2005 discussing the fact that scientists were spending even more money hiring ghostwriters to write their papers in an attempt to “pile up high-profile publications, the main currency of advancement”. According to the WSJ, these ghostwriters whipping up journal articles for the scientists were sometimes employed by communications firms charging $30,000, and the firms were part of larger companies like Thompson Corp. and Reed Elsevier. Would you comment?
David Noble: Well, it doesn’t surprise me at all. The pharmaceutical industry, they write the articles. There’s a guy named David Healy, a very well known, he’s a psychiatrist. He’s an expert on SSRIs – antidepressants. He’s written a lot about this.
What happens is the pharmaceutical companies actually write the articles and then put the academic’s name on it – which is similar to what you’re saying. How can they get away with that? Well, the academic gets a publication out of it, even though it’s not anything they wrote.
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David Noble: Well of course. I’ll tell you the story about my attempt to get my first book published. I’m a historian not a scientist. I wrote a book about the corporatization, the commercialization of science called America by Design. I sent it to Princeton University Press, MIT Press, Oxford University Press and a number of others. They ALL rejected it after sending it out to anonymous peer reviewers who had this to say and that to say. Then I sent it to an editor of historical works at Knopf, a private company, who liked the book and made a contract with me – no peer review. The book was published by Knopf. After the book was published, the same academic presses put in bids for the paperback rights and it was published under the imprint of Oxford University Press.
I did four books like that with Knopf. Knopf published the hardback and Oxford published the paperback. Knopf published without any peer review. The lesson for me was learned very early. Peer review would have blocked the publication of my book.
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My criticism of peer review, which for me is no big deal, turns out to be unique. Nobody’s talking about this. When George Monbiot attacks Alexander Cockburn by saying that the stuff Cockburn is referring to was not peer reviewed, and I say what kind of an idiot is Monbiot.
David Dixon was a writer for Science and Nature. . . There was a time when there were science journalists who were alert to this and understood the politics of science. But when this whole climate change thing came down the pike, all of these self-interested people – Monbiot had a book to sell. All the environmentalists are getting probably millions of dollars in foundation money to peddle this. And they’re still doing it even though the whole thing has collapsed. And it’s completely disqualifying the public by saying it all depends on the IPPC. It all depends on peer-reviewed journals. That’s what they were saying.
When you look at all this sordid stuff at East Anglia University about climate change. People begin asking: And this is the foundation of the whole game?
Suzan Mazur: People have been bought off.
David Noble: Right. And when Alex Cockburn and I and Denis Rancourt raised questions about it, we were just pilloried by the Left, which is mindboggling.
Suzan Mazur: It continues. The attack by the so-called Left regarding the questioning of science and peer review. They say this is the system we have – you think we’re going to throw away thousands and thousands of papers and start from scratch?
David Noble: Well the whole thing’s corrupt.
Suzan Mazur: Yes. We’d better pull out of the nose dive as soon as we possibly can. No scientist I’ve spoken to thinks that is doable or a good idea.
David Noble: Peer review makes things so easy for people who are evaluating. All they have to say is that’s a peer-reviewed article. End of story. Gold. They don’t have to actually read the stuff.
So, suppose I’m up for promotion and the dean says, oh look he’s got six peer-reviewed publications. Well they’ve been peer-reviewed, I don’t have to read them. You see what I’m saying? Takes them off the hook.
Suzan Mazur: It’s frightening, very dangerous.
David Noble: Let me tell you this, you’ll be amused. York University is the third-largest university in Canada. This past year they amalgamated a number of different faculties into The Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies, which is the biggest academic faculty in Canada. And they hired this guy with much fanfare from outside to become the new dean.
The president announced his appointment with a lot of trumpets. And he’s described as a renowned scholar of Chinese history. Well, I said that’s interesting. I wonder who this guy is. And I start looking. A renowned scholar of Chinese history – let’s see what he’s written. I couldn’t find anything. And I said, this is strange.
I happen to know some real historians of China. I called them up and asked, have you ever heard of this guy? They said no. The long and the short of it is – the guy is virtually unpublished in the field of Chinese history. He’s unknown in the field.
So a group of faculty took out an anonymous Gmail account called York Faculty Concerned About the Future of York University and exposed the fraud, accused the president of fraud. Here’s what happened – NOTHING.
He was made the dean anyway without faculty opposition. Meanwhile, the university hired outside lawyers to sue Google, Bell and Rogers, the main Internet Providers, to try to get the identity of the people who did the expose. That’s what happened.
But the most important thing is there was no outcry. That was it. The most egregious academic fraud I’d ever experienced. Why was there no outcry? It was all confirmed. The university said well it was a mistake by the media relations people, acknowledging that the guy had no publications. He’s still the dean. He’s the guy who’s reviewing everybody else’s CVs and dossiers for promotion and hiring.
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David Noble: It is incredible. But the point is he’s the dean. That’s it. Why was there no uproar? And here’s the reason. Because all the faculty have no scholarly credibility either. There’s no other explanation. They’re all playing these games.
WHERE ARE THE REAL SCHOLARS? There aren’t any. Everyone’s either broken or bought. There’s complete conformity within the community.