Guest post by Professor Robert G. Brown of Duke University.
Not all scientific research is equal, in terms of its probable impact on humanity. If one is studying poison dart frog species in tropical rain forests, getting a number wrong or arriving at an incorrect conclusion will generally have very little impact on the life of somebody living in California, India, China, or for that matter, in the tropical rain forests in question.
On the other hand, medical research has a profound impact on us all and has a long history of abuse, both deliberate and accidental. From the egregious claims of snake-oil salesmen whose very name has come to be the universal metaphor for “science” subverted to special interest to modern cases of confirmation bias and manipulation of data in e.g. drug testing, because of the potential for profit from medical science and technology it has proven to be necessary to defend the public against bad science. All medical research at this point is strongly regulated at or before the point where the rubber meets the road and actual patients might be adversely affected or killed by bad science or self-serving deliberately manipulated science.
Some of the key standards of this regulation of research include transparency and reproducibility, as well as the near-universal use of double-blind experiments to prevent the pernicious advent of confirmation bias, backed up by the threat of liability if the research process is deliberately subverted because of any sort of vested interest (including the simple desire to “be famous”, or “win tenure”, or “keep one’s grant funding”).
Engineering is a second place where doing science (in this case applied science) badly is dangerous to the public weal. If a bridge, a car, a space shuttle is designed poorly or carelessly, society ultimately pays a significant cost. In this case the needs of engineering firms and private individuals for protections of intellectual property are carefully balanced against the need to protect society. Consequently, the building of bridges, cars, and space shuttles — with or without proprietary components — is subject to oversight, inspection, and again, legal liability.
Climate research has long since passed from the realm of being a tiny discipline with a handful of researchers whose mistakes had almost no impact on humanity to being an enormous, publicly funded research machine that has a huge impact on the public weal. Whether or not you agree or disagree with the Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (CAGW) hypothesis, there is no denying that it has a huge impact on people all over the world. Quite literally every human on earth is currently at risk either way relative to the conclusions of what is still a relatively small community of scientists with a remarkably homogeneous point of view.
Whether or not these scientists are honest — do or do not sincerely believe their own conclusions is not an issue (any more than it often is in the case of medical research or large scale engineering projects); what is important to the general public is that the scientists at this point have a clear interest that potentially conflicts with their own. At risk (to the scientists) is: loss of (enormous) funding; loss of prestige; loss of political power and influence. Many of them have staked their entire reputation and career on stating conclusions as near-certain scientific fact that have a multi-trillion dollar price tag to society associated with their conclusions — however objective and well-intended — turning out to be correct or incorrect.
This dwarfs the potential damage that could be done even by unscrupulous drug companies, by medical researchers seeking to make a name for themselves, by incompetent physicians and all of the other scientific activities in the general field of medicine that are so tightly regulated. It dwarfs the damage that can be done by a faulty braking system in an automobile, by whole cities of buildings that cannot (as it turns out) withstand earthquakes, by faulty O-rings in space shuttles. It dwarfs even the damage that can be done by unregulated banking systems leading to global financial collapse that lower the standard of living “suddenly” on a worldwide scale. It is larger than the combined probable damages from all of these activities put together over any reasonable time scale.
I must emphasize that from the public point of view, this risk is in some sense symmetrical. Taking global steps such as creation of an entire cap and trade financial instrumentation in order to combat CAGW is without any doubt enormously expensive and the loss in this case is certain and immediate. However, as proponents of CAGW theories are quick to point out, society is required to make some kind of wager regardless because the cost of doing nothing if their hypothesis is true may also be extreme.
However, it must be carefully noted that one is balancing a multi-trillion dollar and immediate certain cost against a future possible cost that is by no means certain. It is simply a matter of responsible governance that the cost-benefit of this risk be soberly and, above all, openly assessed. Furthermore, both regulation and liability are absolutely necessary — indeed, long overdue — in any scientific endeavor that has long since left the ivory tower of pure research and become the basis for such far-reaching policy decisions.
Unfortunately, climate research that not only has impacted, but has led the way in the public debate and scrutiny that should correctly attend the collective expenditure of vast amounts of wealth that could otherwise be put to better use has not, thus far, been conducted in an open way. Critical data and methodology have been hidden and treated as if they were proprietary by the scientific researchers involved, in spite of the fact that the data itself has rather often come from governmental organizations or is the direct product of research funded entirely by public research grants, as in most cases is the published work itself. That this has occurred, and continues to occur, is not at issue here — the evidence that this has occurred and continues to occur is conclusive and indeed, ongoing. The simple fact of the matter is that whatever the truth of the hypothesis, the methodology and data used to support it are largely hidden, hidden well enough that it is routinely true that they cannot easily be merely reproduced by a third party, let alone the conclusions be intelligently and critically challenged.
In the ivory tower it is not unreasonable or uncommon for this sort of practice to exist, at least for a time. Scientists’ only “commodity” of value at a research University or government organization is their ideas and their research work, and theft of both is far from unknown. It is perfectly reasonable for individuals to initially hide their research goals and methods from everyone but perhaps a small set of trusted collaborators until they are proven to the satisfaction of the researcher, lest some key discovery or idea be co-opted or pre-empted by a competitor.
Even in the ivory tower, such obfuscation is supposed to — and typically does — come to an end when a work is published. Publication is the final goal of the research process in the ivory tower of the University (and often in a government laboratory) and in both cases there is a careful separation between work that is done with an eye to obtaining a patent or protected intellectual property and work being done (especially work being done with public funding) for open publication with no related rights being preserved.
Once a scientist has published in the latter case, it is expected that they will make both methods and data public upon request and invite others to reproduce and either verify or criticize the methods and any results derived from them. Anything less is a corruption of the scientific process that — when it works correctly — eventually rejects error and advances the sound. This process is often imperfect — even with levelling/protecting structures such as “tenure”, there are differential rewards to scientists based on how well they keep key ideas, methods, or even data back to maintain an advantage over their competitors and it is not uncommon for only part of the story to be told in any given publication, especially early on in the development of a new idea.
Although one can therefore understand the origins of this sort of reticence and inclination to hide research methods and data or share them only with carefully selected collaborative colleagues, and although one might even still respect this right up to the point of publication in climate research, in the specific field of climate research the public stakes are too high for this practice, however common it might or might not be in the study of poison dart frogs or the physics of graphene, to be tolerated.
The conclusions of modern climate research are almost exclusively based on published results such as the (now infamous) “Hockey Stick” graphs produced by Mann, et. al. and data sets such as HadCrut3. HadCrut3 itself is currently made readily available, but only as processed results obtained by some means from streams of raw data that are not. It is, in fact, essentially impossible for a third party to take the actual data used in the current HadCrut3 snapshot published by the Met Office at the Hadley Center, feed it to the actual code used to generate the processed data, and verify even the very limited fact that the data and the code do indeed produce the same result when run on different computers, let alone that the methodology used to produce the result from the data is robust and sound.
It must once again be emphasized that public policy decisions that have been made, are being made, and will be made in the future based on the raw data and methodology used will cost every living person on earth on average several thousand dollars, at least. Again this is stated without prejudice concerning whether or not the published temperatures are, or are not sound, or whether CAGW is, or is not, a well-supported scientific hypothesis. If it is true and we do nothing, it will cost thousand of dollars per living person and many lives over decades. If it is false and we spend money like water to prevent it anyway, it will cost thousands of dollars per living person and many lives over decades; in addition, it will do incalculable cost to the credibility of “the scientist” in the minds of the public that further amplifies this monetary damage by altering the profile of government funded research and the level of trust accorded to all scientists in the public eye.
I am writing this article to call for new legislation to address this issue, legislation that creates direct oversight for climate researchers whose work directly impacts the decision making process directing this enormous but unavoidable gamble. I am writing this as a citizen that is already paying for decisions based on the “certain” conclusion of CAGW — if this conclusion is certain, then it is certainly true that it can be transparently certain, with the entire process used to arrive at it right back to the original raw data open to public and scientific scrutiny not only by those that agree with it but by those that honestly disagree with it or merely have doubts that it is true and would like to verify it for themselves.
I would suggest that this legislation be soberly and conservatively drafted so that it in no way hinders climate researchers from carrying out their research but adds the following requirements that must both precede and follow any published result that impacts the decision process.
a) All numerical code, and input data (that is, the raw input data including any that is for any reason available from one’s source but not included in the computation, along with the provenance of all the raw data) used in arriving at some conclusion must be openly published in an immediately usable form and made readily available to anyone in the world as of the date of publication in any journal, public presentation at conferences or workshops, or publication or inclusion as a reference in policy document such as IPCC reports.
This legislation shall apply to publications based on proprietary data as well as data from public sources. The immense cost of the public decisions based on such publications and the risk of corruption of the results cherrypicked or data that might have been altered in hidden ways by vested interests is too great to permit data to be used or selected from any source that cannot be checked in its entirety, including the data that is left out.
Note well that this precise measure is indeed needed. The FOIA has already proven to be inadequate to compel the release of code and data used to generate datasets such as HadCrut3 or the “Hockey Stick” or “Spaghetti Graph” curves that currently support many of the conclusions of climate researchers.
Note also that this is hardly a burdensome requirement. It is sound practice already to carefully provide provenance and good organization for one’s raw data, to provide sound backup and revision control for the computer code used to process the data that permits “snapshotting” of the code actually used to produce a result, and to archive both for any given publication in case one’s methodology is ever called into question. The only additional requirement this imposes is to set up a website and put the data and code snapshot there with a short piece of documentation accompanying it that frankly will be of as much benefit to the researchers in the long run as it is to anyone seeking to download code and data to check results. Nowadays the cost of this is so low as to be “zero” and in any event is trivially within the means of any grant funded climate research program that almost certainly is already using one or more web servers to disseminate both results and data.
b) The establishment of a board of governance for the science with the specific and narrow purview of addressing abuses of the open scientific process. The need for such a board, and the need to staff it with people who are completely disconnected from climate or environmental research or any political organization or corporate organization with any possible interest in the outcome is clearly demonstrated in the occult Climategate conversations where it is revealed that certain researchers working in the field are far more concerned with “causes” and “winning the PR war” than with the science and are willing to deliberate tamper with data and methodology to hide results that confound their desired conclusions or to directly and deliberately subvert e.g. the objectivity and independence of the journal review process to suppress competing points of view right or wrong as they might be! The only place such discussions should occur is openly, in the literature itself, in the form of critical counter-articles or published comments, not in behind the scenes efforts to discredit editors or have them fired.
Note well that implementing provision a) will make tampering with data or methods far more difficult, but not (as evidence from medical research abuses reveals) impossible, and nothing (so far) seems to have worked to maintain any semblance of fair play in the public debate — on both sides of the climate issues. Even if the only sanction used by the oversight board is public censure and the probable elimination of future funding, those are probably enough in a world where one’s scientific reputation and ability to continue work are one’s greatest treasure.
c) The establishment of personal liability for any work that is published wherein it is later shown that the researcher did knowingly and deliberately manipulate data or methods so that their arguments lead towards a predetermined end (confirmation bias, cherrypicking data) without openly indicating what was done and why in the publications. Again, there is ample precedent for such liability (and the corresponding governance and oversight) in all scientific and technical endeavors that directly impact on the public weal, in particular in medical research. There should be considerable freedom under this rule to make honest mistakes or to pursue unpopular or popular conclusions — one of the major purposes of provision a) above is that it should ensure that there should never again be a good reason for sanctioning a researcher after the fact of publication by guaranteeing transparency — but just as would be (and historically, often has been) the case when it is determined that a published medical study where the researcher or corporation sponsoring the research “fudged” the data and as a result patients died or suffered losses makes the researchers and/or sponsors legally liable for the damage, there need to be at least limited liability and public sanctions in climate research to provide a strong disincentive to academic dishonesty or the protection of interests that, in the end, are not strictly the pursuit of scientific truth.
Needless to say, no researcher can afford to pay the true liability cost of a mistake in a ten-trillion dollar public policy decision driven by their work, but actual overt dishonesty and work performed with hidden/vested interests cannot be allowed to proceed unpunished, either. This has proven to be absolutely true in countless other, far less costly, realms of scientific, economic and sociopolitical endeavor — wherever an unregulated marginal advantage exists to be exploited by an unscrupulous individual, sooner or later such an individual shows up to exploit it. There is far too much at stake here not to protect the public good.
To conclude, much of what happens on this and other blogs, e.g. Climate Audit, is ultimately fruitless. Much energy and time is expended discussing this abuse or that abuse of good scientific methodology without any real hope of putting it right or on e.g. FOIA requests and other straightforward (but openly obstructed) attempts to simply understand how various numbers that purport to show anomalous warming were generated. The place progress has been made is primarily in a very few, but extremely significant cases (e.g. the deconstruction of the infamous “hockey stick” graph that at this point is completely discredited in spite of having dominated public discourse and public policy decisioning for over a decade) when access has been obtained to raw data and actual computational code. Mistakes that may well have misdirected hundreds of billions of dollars of public money could easily have been averted by legislation like that suggested above mandating a completely open and above-board process.
Those who advocate the CAGW hypothesis should welcome such legislature — if they have nothing to hide and their results can indeed convince “97% of scientists” as claimed, then they should make it easy for those scientists to not just read their published results (working from hidden data) but to be able to verify how their work advances from the hiddent. They, and their “cause”, can only benefit from a completely data-transparent process if their conclusion is correct.
Advocates are mistaken in treating the CAGW hypothesis as a public relations problem to be solved or a cause to be fought for in the first place (terms bandied about in a most disturbing way in the Climategate communications however they were intended), often discussed as alternatives to the far simpler option of publishing papers that address and attempt to refute competing claims, ideally acknowledging points where they might have a point. Scientific discourse has no room whatsoever for either of these as the popularity of an idea is irrelevant to its probable truth, and “causes” smack of either political or religious thinking, both of them ultimately irrational in different ways. An idea is held to be correct when it is well-supported by a mix of good fundamental science, reliable data, and openly reproducible, openly critically examined methods, and any good scientist will always bear in mind the fact that however much they “like” their own conclusions, they could be wrong.
There is little that is certain in science, and good science is honest about the uncertainties even when — perhaps especially when — there is a lot at stake.
Yes, this is a high standard of truth, one that will take time to achieve, especially in a field as complex as climatology, where many results are obtained by means of rather complex computational or statistical methods that rightly should be closely scrutinized as it is all too easy to either “lie” with or be honestly misled by an incorrect model (again this happens so often that we have a whole terminology such as “garbage in, garbage out” to describe it) or incorrect statistical analysis — the latter especially is a bete noire in sciences (and medical research) with far less impact on the public purse than climate research.
Nowhere are the stakes higher; nowhere is the oversight lower and the methodology ultimately more deliberately hidden than it currently is in climate research. And why? If CAGW is indeed true, a truly open process of research and decision making should be openly and even enthusiastically embraced by supporters of CAGW, because it will equally well compel skeptics of CAGW to provide full access to their methods and data and reveal possible vested interests. How often have we all heard the litany “anyone who criticizes CAGW is supported by the oil industry” (and seen scurrilous allegations to that effect in the ongoing discussion revealed by Climategate). Well, here is an opportunity to provide objective oversight and liability in the unlikely event that this is true — but in both directions.
I would therefore strongly suggest that a sympathetic advocate be found who would sponsor the a-b-c rules above as actual legislation to govern all climate research, publicly funded or not, that is actually used to influence large scale public policy decisions. Indeed, I would call on all climate researchers and journal editors to enforce “voluntarily” compliance with rule a) whether or not such legislation is ever written! Climategate 1 and 2 documents have clearly, and shamefully, revealed that many climate researchers currently knowingly and deliberately refuse to make either data or code/methods publicly available even when proper FOIA requests have been made. Journals such as Nature or Science have a deep responsibility to ensure transparency in any papers they choose to publish that have such a huge real cost and impact on public affairs either way their hypotheses are ultimately resolved. Papers published in climate science that specifically address the issue of global warming, including papers published in the past, should be given a reasonable opportunity to provide provenance and access to raw data and methods and, if that provenance is not forthcoming for any reason, the papers should be publicly repudiated by the journal and withdrawn.
Perhaps we could call it “Mcintyre’s Law”, since few people have fought this battle more frequently, and more fruitlessly in far too many cases, than Steve Mcintyre.
“cherry-picking temps from 1998 to [insert date here] is not a good policy. 1998 was an extreme outlier, and the accusations of cherry-picking you will get for doing this are probably well-founded.”
Absolutely. How about cherrypicking a date such as the Holocene Climate Optimum? Or from the (restored) MWP? In my own opinion, we have approximately reliable global temperatures from an approximately 30, maybe 40 year base, and those temperatures are generally not derived from surface station data. This base is too small to be of any use whatsoever in the study of a process whose visible timescale of variation is practically unlimited that itself, exhibiting natural fluctuations that are close to an order of magnitude greater than the largest possible change observed from the LIA to the present.
None of which matters in the issue of data transparency, of course.
rgb
@Hugh Pepper says:
December 3, 2011 at 9:04 am
Are you allergic to links? I can never seem to locate any in your pronouncemnts.
“I would not limit this to Climate- but extend it to all EPA and NOAA science.
All IPOs and even real estate transactions require full disclosure- and these are voluntary exchanges. Why isn’t full disclosure applicable given we are forced to pay the costs of regulatory demands. The new Supreme Court ruling on full disclosure actually makes the hurdle for compliance higher than simply stating what you know– you need to pass along concerns about what you don’t know. And that means all the data- not just what you used in publication. It might be simpler to just make the government regulatory agencies accountable to the same standards as the private sector.”
Well said, and I wouldn’t argue about it being applied to all publicly funded research. However, you’ll get grief with such a suggestion from the “technology transfer” sector. At the moment, believe it or not, a lot of publicly funded research pays for the development of results and methodology that are patented or copyrighted by the individual (or the individual’s sponsoring institution, e.g. their University) which then uses the patent to make money. The argument is that (only) the private sector is capable of turning the ideas into wealth, and the patent is needed to get people to invest the effort required to do so with some guarantee of return. Or something like that.
Personally I find it annoying — it enables the shell-game argument of the far right that government funded research is useless, among other things. I’m a strong proponent of open source software, and of open ideas. I’d like to see the actual authors of original ideas be rewarded, but the way our current system works they get the dregs after an entire crowd of hands dip into the value stream; not infrequently they end up with nothing at all. But that opens up a debate into all sorts of things — patent trolls, the DMCA — that could be used to weaken the chances of a more limited regulation passing.
Hence the point about economic impact of the science on the commonwealth. In the cases of medicine and climate science, the motivating issue is billions of trillions of dollars, spent worldwide, plus huge human morbidity and mortality on a similar scale. In the case of the EPA overregulating CFCs (we could re-examine the ozone problem again, for example, where there is similarly “weak” evidence for human causation) there is some cost to regulating them unnecessarily, but it is hardly a catastrophic burden.
However, one of the reasons I posted here is as a first step in an open process called a “Request For Comments” (RFC). RFCs built the Internet, for those of you who don’t know. Post a proposal to a group for comments, get the constructive comments on board, take them into account using a purely practical, reasoned process, improve the document until it becomes the basis for a possible standard, then implement it. If the consensus view is that applying Mcintyre’s Law more broadly than just climate research is wise — personally I’d suggest adding medical research next to the list of things that justify the legislative transparency before adding NOAA in general or the EPA — then sure, why not? However, bear in mind the possible cost — NOAA and the EPA do a lot of very good things; they are hardly demonic representations of the Antiscience come to bring about the apocalypse. I have both friends and acquaintances in the HPC community and elsewhere who do work for them (I live about twenty minutes from the EPA’s NC headquarters). Targeting them, especially with the election coming, is likely to be interpreted (correctly, at a guess) as being political, not objective.
rgb
Hugh Pepper is only being a water boy for the corrupt climate scam clique; an enabler. I can understand the motives consisting of illicit money and power that the clique gets out of their CAGW scam. But folks like Pepper are just useful idiots parroting alarmist talking points; know-nothings taking sides based only on being scared of the pseudo-science lies emitted by the self-serving alarmist contingent.
It’s amusing to see someone like Hugh so terrified of the black cat in the dark room. But when honest science turns on the light… there is no cat. And there never was.
“If it is true but we do nothing…it costs.” and “If it is not true but we spend ….it costs.”.
It would appear that one thing is forgotten: If it is not true and we do not spend. That way it does not cost us any further.
An overseer. Who appoints the overseer? Another rigged situation.
I have not read all the comments so it is very likely that some or all has already been covered.
Politically this thing is dead as a duck. The political will to continue with this is gone, that is clear from every corner. The sad thing is that nobody can just come out and say that, the politicians will now go through a number of years of slowly extracting themselves and in 5 years or so every one has forgotten. Science will be the loser.
In the meantime there will be more money spent on research, talkfests and wind farms etc, after all we can’t just go cold turkey. The believers need to be weaned off, and this will take some time, until it is clear that they are definitely a minority.
Having said all that, based on what we currently know and using accepted theory, the day will come when fossil fuels will be too expensive to extract so putting work into alternatives is needed, even if that day is 100 years away.
But we don’t have to do it on the basis of AGW.
@Robert Brown
Your comments are fascinating and important. I do hope you get some some useful responses here to help in furthering your proposal.
I recommend focus upon (a) as I think the principle of open access to data for researchers and “auditors” ala M&M is the critical aspect. Whether any institutional processes or sanctions would help or hurt is a much more complicated discussion, but as a first step getting a requirement of ready availability of data would help the situation enormously. The relevant journals and scientific societies ought to be pressed to move on this independently of any legislative proceedings. That’s why I think you should consider calling it “McIntyre’s Principle” and not only work for “McIntyre’s Law” — because the principle can be advanced and upheld in many more ways (and much more quickly, perhaps) than in legislative processes.
p.s. I know the following is quite a distinct issue since it is more about publishing of articles than data availability per se, but have you followed or had experience with the “open access” movement such as the Public Library of Science (PLoS)? It seems that key aspects of the PLoS approach are the opposite of how The Team approaches climate science — the PLoS idea (as I understand it) is get all articles out there and let much of the “gate keeping” be done mainly by the citation and criticism process over time, rather than emphasize a narrow hierarchy of “prestige” journals such as “Nature” et al and let much gate-keeping be done before publication. I don’t think that the PLoS journals are going to do awy with “Nature” et al but it is fascinating to see a much more “open” scientific publishing environment:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Library_of_Science
One more note on my last comment, I did not mean to give any impression that the PLoS journals are not peer-reviewed, they are. As I understand it they will reject or require revisions for any article which does not meet a certain standard of the peer reviewers. It’s more that since they are online there is not the traditional premium for “limited space” which over the years came to make journals like “Nature” come to be the locus of “most important” etc. Again, I know that “open access” publishing of journal articles is a distinct issue from “open availability” of data but some of the “gate keeping” issues of people like Phil Jones & co. have been a source of unwarranted power to control both data and the journals. I like this approach much better:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLoS_ONE
“The research speaks for itself, and the professional standards required in each field set limits for all research endeavors and subsequent publications”
Too true.
Now, care to open your eyes & look at the research & standards that produced & continue to support MBH98 etc?
That’s what Climategate fully opened the door on, the thoroughly disreputable conduct that both produces these travesties of scientific research and sustains them & their practitioners.
Professor Brown, it’s a good start! I believe Senator Inhofe should get a copy, as should Speaker Boehner. While we can’t legislate honesty, maybe we can at least make it harder for the so-called “climate scientists” to cheat.
We’re making this too hard. The federal government needs to get out of the research business. We borrow 43cents out of every dollar to conduct research.
Step 1. Cut all available grant money by 50% now.
If we limit the money they can fight over then they will be more selective how they pass it out.
“Here’s a tenth-of-a-loaf first step. All climate-related scientific research papers will be liberated from their paywalls, with the government picking up the tab. The burden on the government would be tiny, and the benefit substantial. And this law could easily get passed–it would be hard to oppose it. The public would like the sound of it.
The next step would be to expand the scope of the law to cover papers in other contentious topics. And then maybe for all topics.”
I personally love this idea. What it comes down to is the government funding things like Physical Review up front instead of ass-backwards. The way it historically worked was that you would submit a paper to a journal and they might or might not try to charge you “page charges” for its publication. Who paid those charges? Your grant. They would sell you reprints. The government grant picked up that tab as well. The University would profit — they made money on the overhead (indirect costs) charged on the money you paid to have the papers published. The journals would usually waive page charges if you couldn’t pay (had no grant) because they could make it up from where they did charge, and because they had other sources of income, the most important one being the money they made from (e.g. University) libraries who had to purchase a full, very expensive, subscription to the journal. Who ultimately paid for the library purchases? Your government, through grants — one of the many uses for the indirect cost money. Many physicists would also pay for their own subscriptions out of pocket, if they made enough money (some of which came from their grants) to afford it.
The internet has made most of this moot. Papers are submitted in very nearly photo-ready form — editorial tweaking is all but eliminated and what little takes place is supported by powerful formatting languages (like LaTeX) and other computer tools. Reprints are a matter of sending somebody a PDF. Yes, libraries still purchase paper subscriptions to many of the most important journals, but I can get at any paper in the world from where I sit typing at home through the Duke library, for free (to me), because Duke is still paying for en masse unlimited access subscriptions to the journals in question when the access attempt comes from a Duke controlled IP number or is forwarded via an authenticated connection to the Duke Library. And yes, a lot of the money that goes to pay for the subscriptions comes out of indirect costs on research grants in a complex ecology — the research can’t be done without access to the literature, the literature costs money to create and distribute, the government funds the research so that ultimately most of the cost of creation and distribution is sooner or later borne by the government, but only on the far side of a complex screen of money going from this pocket to that pocket, usually with a small deduction or two for overhead, along the way.
There are exceptions to this rule. There are some internet-only journals with free distribution, run completely on voluntary time or with the support of small grants. There are people that are leaving the journal process altogether and simply directly distributing their papers to colleagues, but this makes e.g. getting tenure difficult since tenure decisions now rely on simple electronic search tools that can tell in a few seconds how many times all of your papers have been cited in the entire body of literature! But only if they are in the literature (and refereed literature at that).
To me it has seemed absurd not to cut out all of the middlemen in the publication process and fund it directly for some time now. However, bear in mind this is not without its own problems and it still isn’t clear that it is wise to do so, even to me. For one thing, how do new journals come into existence, or old ones die out, if they are directly funded by the government? Who decides whether or not to fund a journal titled “Homeopathic Medicine” devoted to anecdotal “research” wherein it is alleged (without double blind support) that two drops of peppermint oil dissolved in a cubic meter of water cures warts? Who controls who edits the journals and what papers they will consider for publication? If they are publicly funded, can somebody sue them if a paper is rejected?
It’s a nontrivial question, once again. I think it would greatly serve the public weal to pay many existing journals once and for all for unlimited public access. My list of journals that should be thus supported might not agree with yours, however. Who decides? What criterion should they use to decide? Does that funding come with a double side order of control? (See the earlier comments on the dangers of government control, which I generally agree with.)
There probably is a good way to solve most of the problems with the idea. In the meantime, yes, it is absurd that research we have both paid for with our tax dollar is somehow sold back to us, after a markup, with still more tax dollars used to pick up the tab for some of that access. Note well that I can’t even get at my own published papers via the journals that published them unless I go through Duke, although I have final-draft PDFs of most of the ones published post somewhere around 1990, where my computer resources started to routinely include latex and enough storage to archive papers. But think about the whole problem, not just the annoying symptom.
rgb
I love the open access online publishing model for all journals (if the economics can be worked out) which is why I was mentioning the PLoS journals.
However, I would keep the open-data proposal front and center in these discussions and proposals, simply because that is the “no brainer” proposal that could be most rapidly implemented (on voluntary basis by journals and research labs and scientific societies) without or before any legislation.
The open-data proposal could in principle be implemented almost “overnight” if the will is there, by individual scientists and labs putting data on FTP servers etc., links on existing websites, etc.
It does seem likely (to me anyway) and any more complicated or far-reaching proposals, especially ones requiring legislation, are much more likely to get wrapped up by opposition and foot-dragging.
Oh c’mon Rob. Regulation of science only works for science. Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming is a religion. It’s therefore protected by the 1st amendment in the United States.
Dear Lucy Skywalker,
I agree entirely with your post and all four points. My sole quibble is our measures of “effectiveness”. When the hockey stick is no longer a controversy but is removed permanently from the wikipedia pages on global warming and global temperature reconstructions, then I will agree that blogs have been effective in altering the public debate. At the moment, the best I can grant them is that they (we, you) are trying.
rgb
“This is not a PR exercise, or some kind of malicious game being played out by conspirators with a vested interest in making dramatic change. Those who inpute these motives, are simply wrong.”
My dear sir. Read the Climategate 2 letters. They refute you. That is precisely what it is. They refer to it as a PR exercise, by name.
In other posts I already described what I believe to have been the seductive process that led otherwise good people into bad scientific behavior. I could be mistaken, of course, but it is a plausible (I think) argument.
As for the rest of it — I agree, CAGW, as a scientific hypothesis, could be correct. It could also be false! Thus far the debate and scientific process studying the question has not been balanced — that is a simple matter of historical record (read the Climategate documents for yourself). I’m not impugning their motives; they could be as pure as the driven snow. I’m impugning their actions. And I’m in particular impugning their ongoing actions stonewalling requests to look at raw data and methods.
As I have repeatedly said, they could be right! In that case, how is anything in the world harmed by making the raw data and methods whereby they compute the figures with which they claim to “prove” that they are right openly available, and I do mean openly available, available enough so that you or I can check their work and see if their conclusions are indeed borne out? Remember, it is a sure cost of trillions of dollars if we act on the basis of these conclusions, and that this money is basically wasted or at the very least not optimally spent if those conclusions are even somewhat less than “catastrophically” true. Mere AGW isn’t a sufficient cause for panic-driven creation of entire carbon marketplaces and expensive global regulation. It’s the question of catastrophe that makes the issue important, and quite different from (say) studying the behavior patterns of Galapagos songbirds.
rgb
Robert Brown says:
December 3, 2011 at 11:31 am
“Here’s a tenth-of-a-loaf first step. All climate-related scientific research papers will be liberated from their paywalls, with the government picking up the tab. The burden on the government would be tiny, and the benefit substantial. And this law could easily get passed–it would be hard to oppose it. The public would like the sound of it.”
That’s an ill-conceived idea. It basically creates an entitlement program for scientific publishers wide open to abuse. I won’t want to pay for such a thing. It’s an exceedingly slippery slope. If privately owned science journal subscriptions are paid for by the government for whoever wants them why should the National Enquirer, Reader’s Digest, and the Wall Street Journal be excluded from the gravy train?
The purpose of the hockey stick is to A: show that climate was “stable” for 1000 years and B: show that temperatures skyrocketed in recent times. It’s purpose is to show the current increase in temperatures while eliminating the context of historical variation such as the MWP and LIA. That damage has already been done and there is very little we can do to reverse it. We have an entire generation of people GLOBALLY who have been taught that AGW is “fact”. Undoing a “fact” is much harder than exposing a lie.
“As a physicist, engineer, and physician, the points made by Prof. Brown resonate strongly with me. I have made and are similar points…”
Wow. Talk about in school for life…;-)
But yes, your professional qualifications make you uniquely qualified to speak out on this. My wife is the physician, so I have to get my input in that corner secondhand…:-)
rgb
“However, I would keep the open-data proposal front and center in these discussions and proposals, simply because that is the “no brainer” proposal that could be most rapidly implemented (on voluntary basis by journals and research labs and scientific societies) without or before any legislation.”
Yes, Skip. You are absolutely right. Whether or not they will implement it without leverage from the outside world, however, is another matter. I assume you’ve read Montford’s The Hockey Stick Illusion (or looked over some of the history on CA and elsewhere). If a mere “open data proposal” (I’d throw code and methods into that, BTW, not just data) were going to be accepted just by someone asking, why then has Mcintyre’s attempts to get them with the help of the journal editors met with open refusal, let alone “resistance”, in many cases? Why has Nature still not published a retraction of MBH? Why are MBH and MJ and many other flawed statistical studies still in spaghetti graphs on Wikipedia?
I’m afraid that it will take a law. It shouldn’t need to, but I fear it will. There is just too damn much money, and now too many political reputations, at stake here. The stakes are very, very high — re-election prospects, proper stewardship of public money, trust of institutions like the BBC. This really is an explosive problem and finding a “soft” solution seems unlikely.
rgb
more regulations because even special inquiries showed that the previous batch worked so well?
new regulations because the EPA lacks power?
the patient suffers from anemia, therefore more leeches?
what if you can’t get anything but what you fund? could we try ‘no funding’ for a while? it seems to me that parasites would disappear if denied a host.
I strongly agree:
In Data Libertanianism, Judith Curry posted:
I posted:
Stephen McIntyre points out the harm caused by selectively showing favorable data while hiding unfavorable data in Hide-the-Decline Plus
He quotes Soon et al (EE 2003):
McIntyre points out:
Just ask: how much of this would have happened if climate science was funded voluntarily?
John West says:
December 2, 2011 at 11:20 pm
davidmhoffer says:
“Publicly funded research has its place, and that place is theoretical research. Applied science should be done in the private sector.”
So, the National Hurricane Center should be turned over to CNN?>>>
No. The National Hurricane Centre should be retained, and should be responsible for collecting the data of use to analyzing hurricanes. It should make the data and the methods used to collect it public.
The analysis of the data should be contracted to private industry. Contractors that produce quanitifable and verifiable results will rise to the top, contractors that produce results that are wrong or (even worse) produce results via the exclusion of data, using data sets upside down, using code that produces the same result no matter the data, produce results by mysteriously mixing up different data sets at different points in the analysis…these will all disappear in short order.
When you get paid to collect data, analyze it, and produce a result, you get the result you want. When you get paid to answer a question to the best of your ability based on the data available, you get to bid on the next contract by doing a good job on the last one.
It was my understanding that data and methods including code must accompany peer review papers in scientific journals.
That the hockey team have been getting away with not complying in peer review papers, it should be that these offending papers are cancelled and rejected until compliance with the correct scientific procedure is met.
I think Justin J. has a point.
The question is not whether his critique of government is “ideology”, it’s whether it’s true.
wattsupwiththat has shown, over and over again, that AGW not about the science. The discussion needs to be about the role of government.
Are we going to argue that the fact that climate science has miscarried so badly, and the fact that it’s entirely a creature of government, is some kind of strange coincidence?
Perhaps the hardest work for skeptics is the emotional work of asking this question: If I could avoid this kind of massive waste and corruption, but only at the cost of giving up my dearly held belief in government funding of science, would I do it?