Open Science Symposium 2020, Session 2
So, I’m going to go ahead and
introduce our first speaker. One thing I just wanted
to remind folks of, our speakers specifically,
is talk for about 12 to 15 minutes. If you start to get pretty close to
that 15-minute mark, 2 minutes or so, I’ll just give a quick verbal, hey,
two minutes left, so be expecting that. But yeah, so
our first speaker is Richard Sever. Richard is the Assistant Director
of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press at Cold Spring Harbor
Laboratory in New York and co-founder of the preprint servers,
bio-R-xiv, and med R-xiv.
Richard, you can feel free to go ahead and
share your slides and get started. And I’ll be timing it, so you don’t
have to worry about timing yourself if that helps. [LAUGH]
>> Okay, and so you can hear me okay, can you? >> Absolutely. >> Okay, my screen, so I think we’re good. >> Yeah. >> So, yeah, well,
Thanks very much for the invitation. I’m excited to be here virtually,
if not in real life. So, I want to talk a little bit about
preprints, specifically bio Rxiv and med Rxiv today. But I just wanted to start by saying that
All of the things I’m going to talk about come from Cold Spring Harbor Lab.
So, it’s important to stress,
this is in an academic context. Cold Spring Harbor Lab is
a mainly molecular biology and genetics lab on the North Shore
of Long Island. But we also have a very, very long
history of scientific communication. Indeed, the first meetings were held
in Cold Spring Harbor more than 100 years ago. This is a slide from
the first course held there. And over the subsequent one hundred years, we’ve spent a lot of time on
a number of different initiatives. I like to say, we have hundreds of
scientists, thousands of visitors, and millions of readers. We have a conference program,
We have a graduate school; we do residential lab lecture courses. We’re also involved in
the dissemination of science, producing various books, journals,
and preprint servers, most recently. And to kind of to explain
the importance of preprint servers, I like to show this slide, which is
a slide I show the students every year, when I teach them about how
the publishing process works.
The point here is that in
traditional publication, every academic who’s listening will be familiar
with this, you submit to a journal. If it’s a decent journal,
the most likely outcome is that your paper is immediately rejected,
you have to start again. If you make it past the editor, then you
have to run the gauntlet of referees. If the editor still thinks your paper’s
halfway decent, the most likely outcome is that you have to revise
the paper, which can take months. You might go multiple cycles in this before anybody can
actually read the paper.
And then when the paper is published,
most of the time it’s behind the paywall. So, the question is, in the age of the web,
whether we should do it this way, and I think I would argue, that the answer is no. And then what we should do is decouple
the dissemination of the work from its subsequent certification by a journal,
by posting a preprint. And so that’s what I mean by a preprint,
an unpublished manuscript that has yet to go through the formal process of
being certified through peer review by a journal. And obviously,
there’s a precedent for this, that physicists have been doing this for
nearly 30 years. ArXiv was founded in 1991 and
now has more than a million preprints in computational science,
physics, and math.
And so inspired by this,
We launched bioRxiv in 2013. It’s also an academic nonprofit service,
completely free, and focuses on biological sciences, as it’s
really intended to complement the archive. It’s funded by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative
and Cold Spring Harbor Lab. And as I say, it’s free to read and
free to post. Interestingly,
since we launched this in 2013, a number of other academic communities
decided that this was a good idea. So there’s been a real explosion of
preprint servers, in a largely nonprofit, discipline-specific manner. Hence, chemistry, ChemRxiv, agriculture,
AgriXiv, SocArXiv, PsyArXiv, and many others. And, last year, launched
m1 as a collaboration with Yale and BMJ Group, to provide a home for
clinical preprints. The reason for creating a separate
server was that there were additional concerns about clinical information.
So, it very much complements bioRxiv, but
it has some enhanced screening procedures. There are some additional declarations
that authors have to make, really tailored to the dissemination of this
rather sort of more sensitive information. So, what are the benefits,
Why do this as an author? As I say, the main reason for posting a preprint is to
rapidly transmit your results. But it’s also an opportunity to get
pre-publication feedback from colleagues in the wider scientific community
so that you can improve your papers. So that it ultimately will be better
when you send it to a journal, and that process is quicker. It’s also a way to increase visibility,
especially for early career scientists. A lot of the time, the early career
scientists, their sort of time course of their fellowship will be at odds
with the time course of publication. With a preprint,
you control the time of dissemination. So, you can say, here is the work that I’ve
just done, you can read it right now.
This is useful for grant, hiring, and tenure committees who want
evidence of recent work. And there are examples like Nikolai
Slavov’s, that I cite at the right here. Where he got his first faculty position
before the work actually appeared in a journal, entirely on the basis of
the preprint of a Cell Reports paper. That once his key work appeared,
once he was already in the job. So, this slide,
if you look at the blue curve, it just shows what I mean by this delay. The blue curve is the submission
to publication times for, [COUGH], excuse me, for
journals and PubMed. And you’ll see that the median is
about six or seven months, but the range goes out beyond two years,
to three years.
It’s not unheard of for people to
spend three years in peer review. And of course, if you can disseminate
it immediately by a preprint, you can see on the far left,
that’s where bioRxiv sits, which is dissemination within 48 hours,
so that’s a major time-saving. What this means for an individual
is exemplified by this curve by a former postdoc at Cold Spring Harbor,
who now has his own lab. And he describes some work he did recently
where, basically, he wrote a paper. He was alerted to on Twitter that it
was on bioRxiv, midway through 2017. Started a collaboration with
the author of that paper, they started sharing resources,
and doing experiments. And by January of 2018,
they’d actually done a whole series of subsequent experiments, followed up
on with this great collaboration.
And we’re actually getting results from
that collaboration in January of 2018. Now, in January of 2018, the paper
that he first read midway through 2017 as a preprint was finally
published in a journal, pretty much in the same week that he’d
finished the follow-on experiments. So, for him,
That was a seven-month head start. He’s a tenure-track individual,
He’s got five years to make it, seven months is a really big head start. And our hope is that you imagine, if you
aggregate all those seven months together, that we really could speed up science.
And so Steve Quake with
the Bio hub in San Francisco has done some back-of-the-envelope
calculations that suggest, if you make various assumptions for
what that delay means in terms of the spread of ideas, and how
many ideas it takes to make a discovery. You could actually get to a point were,
if everybody posted their papers as preprints, in ten years,
you could speed up science five by fault, which I think everybody agrees with good
the idea, so this is just how to file archive works when mostly similar to paper,
and gross and administrative checks. The check account looks like a paper,
it’s a plagiarism screen, it then goes to group affiliates
are essentially faculty members who take a quick look and
say that looks like it’s science. To me not Very important
stresses aren’t peer review, they are saying it kind of looks like
science, the paper goes live and then an author can resubmit
a new version at any time.
It’s important to stress while you
do have the screening process and not just put up anything,
we do have concerns about ethics and don’t want to publish things
that are non science. Garbage, pseudoscience, or plagiarized work
There are concerns in the clinical sphere for things like ensuring that
Patient identities are revealed. So, you need some kind of a quick
look to check on that, and on the health side, we don’t want to
post any research that could be dangerous. Like disputed vaccine safety,
disease transmission we’re all familiar with HIV denialism, etc., and
toxicity and carcinogenicity. We’re not going to post a paper
that says cigarettes don’t cause cancer, so it’s important to have that screen
assuming you make it through the screen which 90% of More than 90% actually,
papers do and the paper goes online.
It’s date stamped on the top right,
so you get priority signals and also you can define the article type,
where you define all your results, confirmatory results, or
contradictory results. So that allows people to
do reproducibility studies, the manuscript gets a DOI,
the author can define the subject area and there’s a download link to the PDF. So, as you can see here,
this is an author’s PDF is not typeset like a journal,
it’s just the PDF that you’re presenting. But we do augment this with full-text HTML after a couple of days so people can see inline figures. As I say, an author can revise a paper
anytime there’s a big difference and compare the journal and
in the history tab, you see a list of all the prior versions
of the article so you can go back and look at them as well as a revision summary. Whereas if you say, look this is what’s
different about the new version of my paper, and that will inform
your choices of reader whether or not you want to read the new version or not.
We also provide metrics, so
you’ve article-level metrics so you can see how often a paper is
downloaded and all metrics for how often it’s been blogged about
other social media appearances. News mentions that type of thing, which I
think horses tend to be interested in and we have we also have on-site comments,
too increased discussion of work, as I said before the on-site comments, but we also aggregate discussions
that are occurring elsewhere. So, we have a scrolling list of tweets
about the article, links to blog posts about the article news mentions and
a number of dedicated discussion sites that we’ve been through to appear so
ultimate a little bit about those later.
Finally, in the feature list,
we also provide links to a journal when the article is published. So, after a few months of the article
published in the journal we put a general guideline web language basically
this article has now been published and down, and you can go and
read the first record there. So how are we doing? We actually this weekend
just passed 100,000 papers, and we’re getting through about 3 and
a half thousand papers per month. So, I think the scientific community
is really voting with their feet on the bio archive that archive is
obviously much younger sir but the interesting thing here is. Look at the first half of this plot,
the black line is total papers, the dark bars are submissions, and
the light advisor advice submissions. And what you see is we’ve got sort
of slow growth as expected through last year. Much like we did the bio
archive seven years ago and then on January 19, things exploded
as the COVID-19 pandemic and we started we got a huge influx of papers. And before long in March, April, we were
getting as many papers on that archive of bio archive about a hundred a day and
really, that was it was very timely that this was launched because it
was incredibly useful for public dissemination.
So, as I said, a hundred thousand papers
in the bio archive now about 10,000 on that archive, but pretty consistent 30%
of these papers are revised and sometimes multiple times, but
most of the time, it’s just once. We’re seeing around 30 million views
a month across the two servers and an interesting figure is that more than
70% of these papers end up subsequently being published in journals
that the from bylaws. And it’s too early to calculate for not five because we give a time lag of about
two years before and calculate it because it will be artificially low before then
many papers would still be in review. So, over this period of
the past seven years, it’s been great to see
these behavioral changes.
Many more biologists posted, read and
citing preprints Now I think it’s very rare to find a basic science journal that
doesn’t allow us to post a preprint. That’s why funders are encouraging their
grantees to siphon printing grants is a big move when INIH said you can
include preprints in your biosketch and we’re seeing places like Rockefeller
University encouraging Africans to include improvements
in their applications. And one of the things that has been
nice is the parking of the rate of the recent trends to only talk
about old data at meetings, preprints allow people to
put a stake in the ground. So, a lot of times people
can talk about new, new research because they’re confident
that they can put them up on the ground by posting frequently around the time
they give a talk at a meeting. One of the things that we want to do with
Biwako I’ve met all of these function as a hub to Promote and allow evolution
of the communication ecosystem. So obviously,
you discover initiatives by archive and that archive of indexed by
Metro Google Scholar, Microsoft, academic, so they’re all these discovery mechanisms, we link out to journals and
other means of evaluating content.
And as I say, we aggregate third
party discussions across the web and have provided a home for reproducibility studies release
confirmatory contradictory results, pedigrees, things that often journalists
in the past have been interested in. So, as I said, the most obvious
point of integration is journals, we have these two technologies JTP and
BTJ allow authors to very, very easily transfer papers from bio
archive to a journal, or vice versa. So more than 100 journals participate
in BTJ and what this means is that an author can submit to a bio archive they
completed the submission process, we then said now would you like to submit to
a journal there’s a big list of journals. They just click on one of those journals
and we will send all that information to the journal, which means they don’t have
to go through the torturous process of re-uploading all the files when
they go to the journal website.
You can also do the converse JTB so
a number of journals like Life and both when you submit to the journal,
they will say, it’s going to take us a while
to evaluate this paper. Do you want to put your paper
on the bio archive right away, you click a button that
happens automatically. They don’t even have to
go to bio archive and both of these are very
popular amongst sources. Another collaboration with journals
is this project called Trip Transparent Review Improvement. Which allows journals to
post peer reviews of papers testing alongside
a preprint on bio archive. And this is really interesting because it
although the display of the peer review is next to the free prin.
The decoupling is preserved. Because that page that I’ve circled
there is a hypothesis window, it’s an annotation engine. And that’s actually controlled by life is
not anything to do with bio archive is just allowing it to be displayed there. So, it’s an interesting example of
how something can be decoupled, but very easily discoverable. And I think it’s interesting to
talk about this decoupling and the possibilities for innovation. And we’re already seeing this
being promoted by preprints, so here are just a few examples. Perlites is a service from
The Company of Biologists, which is essentially news and
views for preprints. Pre-review is a journal club for
early career researchers. That allows them to learn how to
peer review by looking at preprints by looking at papers that have yet
to undergo peer review. So that’s kind of interesting. Review Commons and
PCI portable peer review and Institute so you can post your people on bio archive.
Review comments in PCI
completely independent services. They will review your paper, then you can
take those reviews to a journal and say, well, what do you think I’ve
already had this peer review. It’s been interesting to see
initiative self-organizing among the community amid COVID-19,
Mount Sinai, Johns Hopkins. University of Oxford have
created these networks where they’re rapidly reviewing papers in
med archive about COVID-19. Because they think it’s really important
with millions of people looking at these papers that there is something. Some contexts for readers,
particularly those who may not be experts. And actually, MIT Press has taken this
a step further by launching RRC19.
Which is essentially a journal
whose entire purpose is to review COVID-19 papers on
bio archive or med archive. So, it’ll be interesting to see
how that experiment works. And I think ultimately in
a sort of post-covered world. It will allow us to really answer
the question of what peer review should look like in the 21st century. So, you know, and we can ask the question,
When should care of you take place? And I would argue that 99.9% of papers
the peer review should take place after they’ve been disseminated. Is proof that people
can start reading them. How do you peer review them? If you’ve already accomplished
the dissemination. And maybe the pressure is off, and you can
think about what’s the best way to peer review a paper depending on the subject. Maybe if it’s a clinical trial, or synthetic biology paper, or
a developmental biology paper. Maybe you do something different and
because of the decoupling of the dissemination of the work and
peer review, that is enabled. Who should be the peer review?
Right now,
we have a system where everybody talks about the review of paternity and
how difficult it is to find peer reviews. But simultaneously there are complaints
that the global south and early career searches that usually
unrepresented in the peer review process. Again, does the decoupling will
allow us to rethink care of you and allow that second problem all
these people who want to peer-review papers and
haven’t solved the first problem.
Which is that we don’t
have enough peer reviews. We’ll see. And then finally,
Which papers should be peer-reviewed? There’s a good argument that there
are some papers archival papers. In a very niche area, a small number
of specialists, all of whom are perfectly capable of assessing themselves. So, I mean one question is do we need to
bother to appear in those paper’s tips at all, and maybe the peer review is
in the reading in those nice girls? That’s a question that we can ask. I think it is important to
think about peer review. It’s often mistakenly felt that somehow
posting a preprint means that you’re not for peer review or
if you’re in favor of frequency. That you really don’t take much
apparently, I don’t think that’s the case. Decoupling doesn’t mean that
one doesn’t take place. And I think in this day and
age and particularly, that’s the kind of the experience
of COVID-19 means.
We really do need forms of review. To signal the trustworthiness
of science and actually, maybe we can start thinking
about how we can do better. And so this is an article
that Kathleen Hall Jamieson. Who wrote cyber war, wrote with me,
very clever from plus. Marshall now who’s president of
the National Academy of Science. And in it, we talked about the different
ways in which we can signal trustworthy science. And trustworthiness of science and
articles, including things like badges that show
ethical adherence to various things.
Check for the checklist. People can go through greater transparency
forward linking to either discussion or events that take place after the article
is available online ID verification, etc. And all of these things that could
be enabled by the deep department. So, I think there are a lot of
experiments that can be done. In a post-free print world. And just finally,
I’d like to thank everybody who’s been involved in the work on the bio
archive in that archive. It’s quite common to think that,
it’s just a website and you’re not being interviewed.
So you just sling things up there. But actually, it’s taken a huge amount
of work and it’s been incredible. With the deluge of papers on COVID-19. So, there are a lot of people who are covering
poverty basically working seven days a week for months. We have great collaborations
with the Yale and BMJ team. Fantastic support
for the Chan Zuckerberg initiative. Technology partners, partnerships with
high wire press in Silicon Valley, Google, and Hypothesis, and again. Great collaborations with publishers
like class EMBO, Elife, and your organization’s like
reparative science. So that’s all I have to say today. Thank you very much. >> Thank you so much. That was fantastic,
Richard, and we do have one. So, we had two questions. One of them was retracted because
he answered it in the talk. So, the second one here is do you have
a sense of citation patterns for bio archive preprints versus
traditionally published versions. >> So well so
there are a couple of things there. So people are people are looking
at citation numbers.
And what you see is that
the majority of the larger majority of citations accrue to
the published version. But that will probably vary. I mean when you look at journal
citations most of the citations happen in the second year after papers are published. So, if you think the most preprints
in about two years and be published in the journal paper
when people make a citation choice. They will choose the journal first,
which I think is the right thing to do. So, I think the numbers
are somewhere between one and about 5% of citations to
the briefing version.
What is interesting is that
there are a few signs now. That is if you compare papers that
are posted on the bio archive. You try and find equivalent papers
that were not posted as proof and then the ones that were posted on the bio
archive get more citations in total. They definitely get more readers. And that’s interesting because it suggests
that maybe two bites of the cherry. The frequent and the published version,
get you more citations. But there are a lot of
confounding variables in that. So I’m a bit hesitant to
make any strong conclusions. Sounds good. Okay, so we do actually have another
question, but we do have to move on.
So, I’m going to be sure to flag that
question, and during the panel, I’ll bring that backup. Thank you so much, Richard,
This is fantastic, this is excellent. Okay, so now I am going to
cue up our second speaker. This is Cathleen Carley. And Dr. Carley is a professor of
Computer Science in the Institute for Software Research here at CMU and
IEEE Fellow. And Director for the Center for
Computational Analysis of Social and
Organizational Systems, CASOS. And Director for
the Center of Informed Democracy and Social Cybersecurity, and
that’s here at CMU as well. And I’m extremely excited for this talk, and
Dr. Carly again in 15 minutes or so, once you start to get to
about the 2-minute mark, I’ll send you a private message
in chat just to let you know.
>> I have to hit chat open, okay, yeah. >> [LAUGH] I’ll send you
A private message, yeah? Feel free to go ahead. >> All right, so, hello everyone and
Thank you so much for having me. So, I’m going to be talking about
disinformation and social influence. In particular, trying to show
you how that is currently being used to drive an anti-science bias.
And how it’s actually being used to spread
nonscience as though it were science. So, because this information is not new,
it’s always been around, on the left you’ll see a picture of
a bas-relief of Ramses the second. Ramses is claiming that he won this battle over the Hittite
people, and in point, he actually lost. And what did succeed though,
was his propaganda. Today disinformation is much more
elaborate costs much less to develop, and probably doesn’t last quite
as long as that bas-relief. But for example, a common one that is very
science-oriented during COVID-19 is that Bill Gates actually created
the COVID-19 virus, the SARS 19. And that he did that in order
to create a new world order. Once the virus is out there and spread worldwide it will cause
everybody to go into lockdown. Once they were all in lockdown,
they would then go cashless, because no one can go to stores, and
everything has to be done without hands.
And the same time they would install
5G towers all over the world. And those would allow you
to control RFID chips. Now that’s true. Okay, and the RFID chips though
could be implanted in bodies. And so, the vaccine which he also created
would be injected as it was injected into you, would contain an RFID chip. That’d allow the governments or the new world order to control
you through these 5G towers. This particular piece
of pseudo-science and they’re even posting it as science,
is actually all over the internet and is actually part of the campaign to
convince people not to get vaccinated. If and when the vaccine was to come out
for COVID-19, of course, it’s simply not true. So how does disinformation spread,
And what is it like? Disinformation actually has many phases. You might think it’s
just inaccurate facts, in fact, that’s not the dominant
part of the problem. That’s a plan, there are fact checkers
out there and so on, and you can look at it. Deep fakes as everyone’s talking about
today, again, are extremely rare.
But the real problem is a lot
of what’s called disinformation is actually spread through the youths of
illogic, unsupported opinions, misleading anecdotes, and
pseudo-science. Bots often spread it,
trolls, memes, and cyborgs. Conducting campaigns to both create groups
who are receptive to these messages and then just print
those messages to them. The reason it works this way is
because social media, much like science, is organized into topic groups. That is you have a set of people who
are interested in a particular issue. Like were all interested in DNA, or
were all interested in network science, or were all interested in the World Cup,
okay? And those people talk to each other, but
They also talk about the same things.
These groups online,
can become very pathological, just as academic departments can. Because not only do they talk to each
other, they only talk to each other, and they own and
get into what’s called an echo chamber. Where they’re all talk
very tightly connected and very much talking about the same thing. And once they are in those forms,
it is very easy to send exciting messages or just main messages. And actually, topple those groups over
through the psychological process called amygdala hijack into responding to the
world emotionally rather than rationally. And at that point, if you can do that,
You’ve lost them to scientific and critical thinking. So, what is happening is that
messages are crafted and people are adjusting things
to the digital airways. To actually take advantage of the way
things like Google search works or the prioritization rules and Twitter etc. So that their messages
always get to you first. It is much easier to find
pseudo-science on Google, for example, than it is to find real science.
They also exploit the way your mind works,
and the kind of confirmation biases you have,
your escalation commitment to make you think that once you’ve found this
piece of information, it is true. And in fact, studies now show that
people are not able to generally discern what information
is false, particularly, if it appears to be part of
their group’s norm, okay? >> So, for example, Democrats can’t tell
that democratic puzzles are false. Republicans cannot tell that republican
puzzles are false for example. In addition, all these things are exploiting
something called social cognition. Which is, the heuristics that our
brain uses to make sense of the world.
In terms, and
the vast quantities of information, in terms of generalizations and
in terms of groups. So, when you hear people say well,
everybody knows that the moon is made of green cheese, then you’ll say, yes,
I guess it is made of green cheese. And social cognition actually leads
you through an influence process, to start believing and thinking with those
that you interact with really believe. So, on social media, we just get you to
interact with the right people or non-people, and then you will start believing
and thinking about those kinds of things. Similar kinds of processes underlie why
there are camps in science that fight about the different approaches
to solving a particular problem. Some of the key ideas, of course, is that
There are these now with social media, with online archives. They’re the super spreaders who have
extreme capability of getting their message out there. That doesn’t mean anybody believes it. It just means it gets
out to a lot of people. So, one of the things
that you see happening, is you see super spreaders out
they’re spouting pseudo-science.
And the information gets
out to tons of people. Then you have these super friends who
are involved in two-way dialogues. They’re talking about well you
know this is kind of true, yes, I really think it’s kind of true,
well, my cousin said. And they get involved in
dialogue with you and can convince you of
things that aren’t true. And finally, there are the echo chambers, which on the surface look like
a lot of these super friends. What is being manipulated is actually both
the content, the stories that are being told, the narrative,
the words that are being used, and the way things are described
as well as the groups. Groups in online forums and it doesn’t matter if you’re talking
about Reddit or Google groups or anything like that are being manipulated
so that they are constructed. Who is actually talking to whom and
who are the opinion leaders? And this can all be done of
course by just simple messaging. The kinds of tools that are used are bots,
which are fully automated accounts cyborgs that are part human and part bots, and trolls
which are humans hiding under pseudonyms.
And so on.
As well as utilizing means utilizing subconscious cues and messages
such as light colors and happy words to make you think about things a certain
way and of course, the likes of videos. All of these things are out there. These things are used together to
create what I call a dating persona. Date persona are things that you
might think are a real person, like a real scientist but
they don’t really exist. And these fake personae are, have underlying links to people
who write fake science papers. Some of which have gotten into the archive. I don’t know about the medical one. They’ve gotten into the archive,
the computer science one.
In terms of understanding
the influence campaigns, we often look at who was communicating
what to whom, and with what impact. And a lot of what we find is that in fact,
the way you communicate is by getting people to engage
in particular discussions. Creating excitement, enhancing messages,
dismissing certain messages, and creating distractions. There’s a set of tactics that are actually
used to actually spread disinformation or even regular information. Though some of these tactics involve
shaping the content other tactics, such as building a group or
bridging between two groups. Or nuking an opinion leader
is actually shaped is actually designed to actually affect
who is talking to whom. And to actually create, like I said, local
opinion leaders for particular things. So we’ve actually developed measures for
all of these things and can actually measure them. Posts and
those posts could be social media posts. They could also be abstracts and authorship lists from various
articles online or in other archives. These techniques are actually used
to conduct influence operations, to actually change how
you think about things. For example. During a trying juncture,
which is a NATO exercise.
They have this thing called the Viking
Warrior campaign to try to convince people to do that. NATO was good to join NATO because it
was built with lots of good looking guys, who are out there doing their bit for
humanity. That was a very expensive campaign,
disinformation can be very cheap. For example, Russia put out this dismay
campaign, where they showed simply a meme of the defense minister of Russia coupled
with a meme of the defense ministry. Then there’s Sweden,
Norway, and the Netherlands. The implication is thresh as strong. NATO is weak because they have all
these nice women who smile running the military. And they don’t really
understand the military. It had much higher impact. This information can be done very jiggly. And therefore can spread very quickly. These are two more
information campaigns, one is used to build a group, and
one is used to nuke a group. On the left,
what you are seeing is that was done with. Where you had a set of young men
who did not know each other, But they had one thing in common. They all like to share
porn images of women.
They did not know each other didn’t so on. Bots came in and
started sending out messages. Naturally told each of
the guys about each other, which formed a group of these young
guys, and then once they did that. They then told them where
to go to get rifles and where to start fighting in
the Euro Maidan revolution. So, they created revolutionaries. That same tactic we’re seeing today is being
used in the anti-Vax campaigns to actually build groups
that are anti-science. Who hadn’t even thought
about science prior to that? On the right, you’re seeing what’s
called a typical geo fence. Or denial of service
attack in social media.
Where they’re just
blanketing the airwaves. Therefore, covering all of Finland with
just simply counting from zero to infinity in Finnish numbers is Okay. And therefore, blanking out
all the other information. So, you can’t even go in and
see what they’re talking about. These kinds of tactics have also
been used during COVID-19 to blank out certain areas and to actually
attack certain underrepresented groups. In a polarization campaign. What you see is you have bots,
trolls, cyborgs. Join groups like they’ve
joined the pro-Bax groups. They’ve joined the anti-Vax groups,
then they boost the numbers of those. Then they send out things that build
more connections among the members, which is basically converting them to
be more and more like an echo chamber. Then they wait for
some message to come out that is pro or that is either happy or
angry on one side or the other and then they counter it with
messages on the other side.
Which are then amplified by bots. So, for example, the story comes out that
says, hey, there’s a new vaccine for COVID the anti-vax side will say, yes,
but it actually has the RFID chip in it. So they’re going to control you. Or it’s going to sterilize you,
so don’t take it. So. And then this makes the groups angrier
than they engage with more backing and engaging community,
by building up the opinion leaders. Getting these two groups to not talk to
each other and getting them to be increasingly upset, actually makes
it hard and will make it hard. To actually deliver a vaccine
once it actually comes out. So, in disinformation campaigns you
basically are done like this you find the controversial issues you
embed bots and trolls on each side.
You build the ties you foster fear. And once you do call for protests,
you spread this information. So, this tactic was actually used
on the Reopen America campaigns. We saw new accounts created. You saw spiking when those
new accounts came in. The ones that were pro reopened were
all coordinated, organized, and started spreading not just
pro reopen messages, but at the same time anti-science messages. At the same time anti-backs messages. Do not wear mask messages, and
they cited papers that had appeared in pre-print series and linked to series that
said that you don’t really need masks. They won’t necessarily
save you from COVID-19. Also, stories about fake pandemics job losses, and
people and hospitals being empty. In our own state in Pennsylvania, we saw
they formed an echo chamber that was focused around the pro. You know reopened side that was
filled with a large number of bots. These bots not only pushed the anti-science the pro reopened side.
But they also began some of them
began to attack Governor Wolf. One of the bots in particular that
Girl Center Five was actually backing, alternative opinion leaders and
building up the group. And was actually building up the group and
was bringing in more excitement to them about where and when the various protests
would be as part of this campaign. She is also one of the ones who is
spreading an anti-science message. So, disinformation is all that is being
spread is also spreading intolerance in the Philippines and in many other countries the increase
in disinformation during COVID-19. This has led to hate communities forming
these often rapidly go away but, in the US, they have managed to stay,
They become very stable. And although many of them
started off as being.
You know, negative toward the people
on the ships and negative. You know, toward China,
They have now become very stable, and they are being redirected into their hate. Who is negativity towards science and negativity toward democrats and
negativity toward it? The African-American community has
negativity toward the LGBTQ community and so on. And they are being directed
at a variety of things. At the same time, bots are basically
being used to link increasingly of these hate groups together, and
that makes them larger. Associated with that has been a growing
anti-science trend in social media. In particular,
we saw a surge in April, with a surge of new attacks
against expert advisors, and of those spreading that information on
Twitter, 69% had boot-like behavior. So, we saw this increase in attacks and
an increase in means that were directed at trying to
reduce the scientific influence. So, these are some of the things I,
in my group study, we can find out more on our website and
so on here, but with that, I’ll stop.
>> Wonderful, you did perfectly on time. [LAUGH] That was absolutely perfect. Let’s see. You’re Dr, Carley. I didn’t see any questions come in,
at least, at this stage. I’m sure at the panel we will. If anybody in the next 30 seconds
has a question, feel free to ask. >> Sorry, I’m. >> Okay. >> Yeah, maybe Alex,
Would you like to unmute yourself? >> Sure. My name is Lex Kravitz. I was just wondering if there are effective
ways to reduce the influence of these networks and whether it requires
the social media companies themselves or what your thoughts are on solutions. >> Yeah.
So let me begin by saying that there
are a lot of bot networks that are actually doing good things,
for example, but networks are also used to warn people
that tsunamis are coming, and so on. And some of the button networks
just simply rebroadcast news. So, they’re not all created equal. If there are things, you
can do to stop them. Once is you yourself to quit. Do you know don’t just automatically
follow anyone who follows you because your get giving them that a lot
of those will be bought and you’ll giving them more power. Make sure you actually
physically know people. The other, other thing is just
because something’s trending in you. Bucks don’t go with what’s at the top, actually, scroll down because the bots
are getting it at the top and if you go down, you’ll get
more factual information often. So those are a couple
of things you can do. You can also report bots, although Twitter
and other places are very unlikely they don’t really like taking them down because
It’s against their business model.
And it takes a lot to actually
prove that something’s a bot. So, one of the best things you can do
in that sense is just ignore them. >> Great, thank you. >> Yes. >> Let’s see. And we have time. So, we added one more that came into it. It is, yes, so the question is, is it
good to differentiate between trolls and bots or can you consider them as
potential high-bid hybrid troll bots? Is that a conversation that ever comes up? >> Yes, so actually, the way we use the term, Troll, it must be a human being. It’s a human being who’s hiding under
a fake persona, who is actually engaged in hate speech, and
in what’s called identity bashing.
That means they pick a subgroup,
it may be police, or it may be an ethnic minority like Muslim
or maybe some other kind of group, and they will start using hate speech
against those kinds of groups. So that’s the way we use trolls. We recognize that in the media,
Sometimes they’ll talk about troll farms. often, they’re talking about
individuals running a set of bots and those are what we call cyborgs. >> Great, and one more very quick one.
Again, we’re doing great on time. This one I think you had
started to address quite a bit. Yes, so the person just said
you pretty much addressed this. It was the idea of just
becoming self-aware and kind of ourselves becoming
vaccinated against This, you know. >> Yes.
>> Against sort of, yes, you did an excellent job in addressing that. So. Okay, great. Well, if any others come in, I’ll
We’ll look at those in the panel. Excellent. Thank you, Doctor Carly. >> Pleasure. >> Okay, so I am going to introduce our
third and final speaker of this session. I’m very happy to introduce Sarah Qidan. And let’s see, I’m going to go ahead and get
Violet Cecilia Kaitlin is a technologist and researcher, working at the
intersection of technology and society.
She’s a Marie Curie Research Fellow
on open design and trusted things, which is a joint program between
Northumbria University and Mozilla. Her research focuses on the impact
of technology and the Internet in grassroots communities and neighborhoods. So, yes, Sarah, you can feel free to
go ahead and share screen, and again, once you get to about the two-minute mark, I’ll
just send you a private message and chat.
>> Great,
Thank you. I hope everyone can hear me. I should begin by apologizing that I do
not have slides like the other panelists, but I’ll try my absolute best
to explain my points. Thank you to the previous panelists for
the excellent presentations. My name is Sarah Keaton and
I am a Marie Curie Research Fellow on open data as I have
already been introduced. Our project aims to explore how
to build a more open, secure, and trustworthy Internet of Things. The project started at the University
of Dundee in Scotland where I’m currently best and it has now moved to
Northumbria University, Newcastle. And my research is basically trying
to explore possibilities for smaller-scale local, Internet of
Thing Technology and how communities and neighborhoods can be supported
in making the best use of them. And to the focus of my talk, today also
talked about other spaces that I have been involved in. I’ll be talking about openness for
internet policy and building equity.
So, I just wanted to start by saying that
as human beings we are curious naturally if you hide something or if you see
what’s that confidential top secret, suddenly you just want to know
what’s behind those words. And it’s just by nature that
we want to be like this. In fact, a lot of misunderstandings
happen because we are not open even if sometimes there’s nothing to hide. I want to use the example of
openness in Internet policy and why I believe that such openness
should be encouraged in other spaces. Let me take you back to 1969 to the
Advanced Research Projects Agency Network, commonly known as ARPANET, which has now
grown to be the internet as we know it. I think this information is known by many,
but for the benefit of those who do not know ARPANET was run by the
United States Department of Defense and it was a fast network or internet-related project geared towards research. So in September of 1969, UCLA was the very first location
to host the first node on the internet.
And the first message or email,
if you will, was sent to Stanford Research Institute which was
not to in October of the same year. So, by the end of 1969,
a panicle able to connect four locations that had UCLA University of
California in Santa Barbara, Stanford Research Institute, and Utah. 10 years later, of course,
it was no longer just the four nodes. It was ridiculously hard to draw the geographic
map of the network with the internet. Because of the complex connections now, it’s even more complex if you
add the layers of products and services that run on the internet
from multiple locations. So, it’s interesting for me to note that
something that started as two nodes or four nodes connecting with each other
has become enormously powerful, noticeably big, and in my opinion, ridiculously hard to predict.
And the fact that we can
actually, present today, file Zoom and other conferencing software is just
a testament to this enormous growth. So, of course, this isn’t something
that happened just like that. There are many things about that. Happened or helped to make it happen,
and one of the things is openness. So, the open nature of the networks and
architecture allowed people to contribute to adding new protocols and new services, and the Internet today still allows for many platforms and services to be added
because of the foundation that is set. So, I attended sessions yesterday and
today and, direct access is something that has come up frequently, I think in almost
all the sessions I’ve attended and related to the growth of the internet is open
access for requests, comments, or RFCs. If you’ve heard about them,
they are formal documents drafted by the Internet Engineering Task Force
that describe the specifications for a particular technology.
So please RFCs are actually public
documents they’re posted publicly the access to anyone and anyone in
the community is actually free to do. To propose something,
to write a policy proposal and submit it to the community and I think
this is a strength of the internet and the growth of the internet especially,
in technical standards, making bodies. And so, if you go to spaces like the
internet corporation for assigned names and numbers where I participate
in the pledge Advisory Committee, where we represent the interests
of internet end users to icons and to other spaces,
you find that participation is open, and all policies are developed according to what you
say is a multi-stakeholder approach. So basically,
it’s not just the technical community there are distinct groups, you have
Internet service providers, governments, civil society, security people, and different people just coming together
to project if you will, the internet. So, the internet has been defined as
a network of networks, many small, medium, and large networks connected
to make the one big internet.
And I like to use the analogy of
the internet as some sort of incomplete puzzle that requires different
stakeholders to complete, so it belongs to no one and yet
It also belongs to everyone. So, everyone basically plays their part and
you complete your piece of the puzzle, and I would like to recommend a book,
roads, and bridges. The anti-labor behind our digital
infrastructure by Nadia April, I’ll post that link on the chat. If you’ve not traded, I think it’s a particularly good book that
talks about interesting things. Basically, like how you take care of your
physical infrastructure, like roads and bridges, you should do the same with
digital infrastructure as well as medical records, banks, and things
or any free and public records.
It’s a really good book that I like to
read, and so in my current research right now in the Internet of Things, of course,
netizens are growing in number, and I should say actually exploding because
We are not just connecting with people. We are connecting things, all sorts
of things, billions of things and we need to understand and
learn from the current standards and what has worked in order
to build future internet. And don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying
that the internet right now is perfect and great because of openness and
the multi-stakeholder approaches. As you’ve heard from the previous speaker,
there are so many issues, surrounding the internet and
technology in general. You have a bias in artificial intelligence
system surveillance, misinformation, the spread of fake news,
and just so many issues generally. But I think what we need to learn from
this is what has helped the internet to grow from just four nodes to
Billions of nodes right now. So, moving on to building equity,
I just want to say that adding the word open to anything does
that make it open in a real sense.
I’ve seen many people add open
to make it feel like their project is open, but there are so many issues to
consider that sometimes the space might be open, so it’s open software or
it’s open whatever you call it, and the event some sit on the table, but that
does not mean that everyone is welcome. Sometimes we have to extend an invitation
to underrepresented voices to have them join us at the table. And once people are on the table, it also
does not mean that they have a voice, so many power structures,
even in open spaces and those with more power contribute more
than those with truly little or no power.
And sometimes also you have issues like
resources, so you have a seat on the table, or you have some voice, but you don’t, you
can’t even afford the resources to participate in these open movement things
from coding to software to policy. It’s usually on a volunteer basis and
many times, you’re either self-funded or you have external funding to allow
you participate in open pin spaces.
And then I just want to highlight
something that has always been with us but somehow, either we were not aware or
we chose to ignore it, or it has been made visible in our faces. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic,
and that is the digital divide, just like to remind you that the ITU, the International Telecommunications
Union is still reporting that 53% of the world’s population
actually, has access to the internet. That’s slightly more than half
of the world’s population, depending on who is counting. So, three months ago, I mean, three months
into the lockdown, I wrote a blog for our project website and I was basically
reflecting on things I had seen and observed. I grew up in East Africa, partly in Kenya and mostly in Uganda,
and I’m currently living in the UK. So, I was like, well, keeping in touch with
my family and friends and living here physically, I was just trying to compare
things on both sides of the world. And so, on the one hand, you had One part of
the population that continued business as usual, they were working from home
attending classes online shopping online, and things like that.
But there was another part of the
population that’s completely cut off from information from work from class content, because they don’t have access to
technology and to the internet. And it’s particularly sad for me because
at the end of the day, both categories of people are required to perform and
compete in the exact same way. So, we need to think about these issues
and we need to just constantly remember that as we fight for these things,
and as we build the tools, there is another half of the world’s
population that actually has no access and yet they are affected by all
the decisions that we make.
So, I watched as people posted pictures
of Bachelor graduation ceremonies, they were defending their Ph.D. theses and
just imagining that there was another part of the world where people
had been cut off from everything. And this experience is not unique
to developing countries alone, in the UK for example, I know
the government put in something like 1 billion pounds to tackle the impact of. No stitching time because of the pandemic
and I think out of that about one hundred million pounds was invested in remote
education and delivering laptops and internet to people who are needed
the most so what does this tell us? It basically tells us that the way we’ve
been doing things is not working well, and we have to find other ways basically
all doing this, especially in a world that’s becoming more technology-driven and
I think I’m going to stop here. I’ll be happy to take any questions and
Thank you, everyone. >> Thank you so much, Sarah,
that was fantastic, and I am just again, you can feel free to send
me questions in the chat or feel free to raise your hand and
unmute yourself as well.
If you have a question Let’s, see, give that a couple. Yeah, Sarah. I got a question for
you just to sort of, start off here. I love the point that you made
that just by having the word open, [LAUGH] it doesn’t
automatically mean that it’s. It’s going to be this welcoming,
accepting environment. There are a lot of things going
on that can impact that. And I think a lot of us on this call are
working in these open science initiatives, some of us as librarians, some of
us in industry, and so on and so forth.
And I guess what would be some
of your words of wisdom for us? Just like on a daily basis thing that
we can remember as we’re having these conversations on open Science, and
open technology and things like that, I would just love to hear
your perspective on that. >> Yes. So just to echo what the previous
panelists will say you can’t do everything basically,
You just have your passion. Part to play and this is why I was
talking about it as a puzzle basically so you get the piece that you contribute
to eating and if you’re looking at it from a multi-stakeholder point of view,
Everyone has a different role to play.
So, if we start with governments,
their role will be in terms of policy and ensuring that the policy is actually
effective and it’s doing the right things. But if you look at developers, how responsible is the technology
that you’re building? Is it actually building equity? Is it ensuring Is it giving us
social justice and things like that? If you look at our activities, like we just
have to continue pushing, like we’ll push the government to push the technologies,
will push everyone to do their part. So, it’s not like there’s
one solution to everything. I think everyone just played,
and put that up of the puzzle. And then we’ll all complete this
puzzle that I was talking about. >> Excellent. Yes, and so we have,
We’re doing pretty well on time, so we have some questions coming in too.
I’m going to go ahead and
pose one of them to you, and the rest hopefully we’ll
get to in the panel. The first is, what are your thoughts
on what we can do to try and equalize access to research data? >> Speaking to myself. So, there are so many things, I want to start with the point I was
talking about access to the internet. So, the basics, because before we even
talk about access to research data, we’re talking about online data like
right now, with the COVID-19 pandemic. We need to give people access to the very
basic that’s access to the internet. So, there are many solutions you can find
local solutions to give people access to the internet. I don’t know if you’ve heard
about community networks, where our communities
are actually building and maintaining their own networks using very
low-cost solutions and things like that. So, encourage things like that, encourage communities to be able to
develop solutions that work for them, and then, after that, we start talking about
Giving people access to resources. Though I think that has improved if you
look at 10 years ago, the access to data that we had 10 years ago is not
the same that we have right now.
So, for me, I would personally say
that start with the basics and then build on to that. >> Wonderful, wonderful. Well, at this point I want to
invite our three speakers back, I guess that if we were in person
we’d have you all come to the front, but we’ve got so
many great questions coming in and I’m trying to do what I can
to sort of Meld them and so it’s something that everybody
could kind of speak towards it. But apologies if some of these seem
like they are, again, quite directed.
So, I’m going to go to my list. It’s an exceptionally extensive list, which is great. So, this is a question for Richard. But I really think that anybody could
probably speak towards this because it’s that theme of participation that keeps
coming up in these open networks and participation. The question is,
at bio archive and just in general, is there any concept like
contemplation for a mechanism for flagging preprints that
are never published? So they’re put out there but
then never published, like, Is there a mechanism to track those? >> Well, it’s difficult. It’s difficult. I guess the question is
What does that mean? Right? So, I mean, the simple answer is that
we flag preprints that are published. So, if the pre-print is not published, then you know,
there’s an absence of a signal, right? So, in some respects, there is
the mechanism is just not having the thing that says that it’s being published.
The question is, what that means? And that’s where it becomes tricky. So, but I mean. In a bigger, longer talk I give, I give examples of some papers that
are five years in peer review. So, what does it mean? What does it mean to wait five years and
then say that I mean, there are examples. You saw that curve I showed there are
lots of papers that after too, I mean, I was talking to a friend of mine. The other day was like. You know,
I’m trying to get this paper into nature. It’s been two years. So, when would you do that? The other thing is thing I’ve
mentioned is that there’s clearly a subgroup of a small subgroup of papers
within quite a few of these big COVID-19 where there’s never any intention to
publish the work in the first place.
So that’s kind of, so the reproducibility
studies, some of them are like that. But with COVID-19 you see
an epidemiological study that’s coming out of China in February,
in the normal course of events, you would wait X months and
then that would appear in a journal, but that X months and
The state of the play has changed. A lot, so it’s almost kind
of like a progress report. So, I think that’s, I think the notion of flagging something
as not public doesn’t really make sense. But I do think this is where in
my last slide I talked about how pollution could take place with badges. And the kind of appending
of symbol signals, and different signals of
trust to manage scripts. And so, the facts and
not met archive itself means that it’s gone through some people’s
screening process.
So, people don’t think it’s non-science or
pseudoscience, they might still be totally wrong. Then you can imagine these papers
accumulate a variety of other things. And so I think that’s I suspect
That’s the way the central focus to doing some interesting things with badges. And I think things like some
efforts to test will kind of sit in that Not ecosystem
if that makes sense. It does. >> Yes. So, the next question is really for
all three of you. Do the panelists see any conflict
between solutions intended to have an immediate impact on current problems? And solutions intended to have
a more long-term impact on those foundational issues where those benefits
might not be seen for some time.
Do we have any thoughts on that? And the person who asked that question,
you can feel free to unmute yourself if you’d like
if you’d like to add anything to that
>> Yes, that was me but
you asked it pretty faithfully. >> So, I’ll start us off, we actually see that solutions Are designed to only have an immediate impact. When they are taken up by governments and
by policymakers, often have a long-term impact and
often outlive their usefulness. So, they rarely die an early death. Okay, we also see that
things that would have a long-term impact are less
likely to get funded or less, it’s not the glamour as
glamorous research.
And we often don’t see
as many people who are, we often see more people who
have humanitarian interests, and less technology interests
involved in working on those. So, we often, those are some of
the tensions that we often see. In terms let me reverse it,
turn it around, and say one of the reasons why this
information is weird is that it has both a short and
a long-term impact. And people often only go
after the short-term impact. Okay, can we remove all
the stories about drinking bleach and you’ll get rid of COVID, okay? And things like that
They’re just information. But without thinking about what
that is doing in the long-term, it has impacts on
who is actually communicating with you.
They’re not, it does and like, and
it also doesn’t get out the real intent of some of those messages,
which was not necessary, which was, yes, people drinking bleach it’s great if it’s
All people we don’t like to drink it. But the real intent of those messages
was not that the real intent was to signal that there was this white supremacy
cult that was becoming a religion and to get people to join it,
and they succeeded. And that is the long-term impact. So often we don’t even
study long-term impacts. >> So yes, I mean, that’s something
that you just said rang true for me.
That’s why there is a danger occasionally with
some sort of short-termism approach. We have a similar phenomenon where,
every now and then, an author decides that the paper is wrong or there’s some ethical
issue with the paper on bio archive. And so what we do is we,
and I’d do the same thing, is we execute what’s called a withdrawal. But just like a journal retraction,
we don’t actually remove the paper. What happens is that it
is labeled as withdrawn. DI defaults to a withdrawal notice but you can still don’t see that
thing that was withdrawn. And sometimes we actually have disputes
with bosses about this, and they say it was wrong. There was a screw-up,
my student wasn’t supposed to do this. I just want you to take it down. And what the response to that is,
that would be the wrong thing to do because it might feel good in
the short-term, but the reality is, that there will be digital
footprints across the web. That people would have indexed that,
we can’t go and tell Google to index it somebody
would have downloaded the PDF.
People will have taken the DOI,
and if they go back, and they go to a 404 they will say,
there’s something fishy. What happened here? And they might think
worse of you as an author. Whereas, if we’re transparent,
and we say there was a paper here, it has been withdrawn. You can see what was withdrawn, but the
important thing is that you also say they don’t want it to be considered as part of
the citation record for these reasons, and everybody’s transparent about it. Then actually in the long term,
It will be better for you as an author, particularly for an innocent bystander. So yeah, so that’s certainly true. And I think there are a few
examples like that. >> So, I’d just like to add that of
course technology advances so fast that sometimes by the time
you have the solution, whatever you develop the solution for
is actually obsolete. Ultimately, I think I should say that a solution
should solve a particular need.
So, you’re developing solutions too, so that means that you have a not just. >> Great. Okay, so I’m,
I’ve got another question here and again I would say this is probably, focused more on Richard and
Sarah, but again, anybody. [LAUGH] Can feel free to comment on this,
but it’s the idea of, so we have the internet as Sarah mentioned,
nobody owns it, but everybody owns it. It’s sort of at that intersection and,
in terms of encouraging people, stakeholders to play that substantive
role in providing comments and adding discourse to these kinds of things. And the specific question that
really came from this is, when we think about bio archive,
and how a lot of articles are, there are things on Twitter,
there are conversations happening.
What the questioner said is the discussion
of a lot of articles seems to just be limited to retweets, where people
are announcing here’s this preprint. And does Bio Archive plan to increase or
incentivize sort of a more substantive academic
discussion of those posted? So again,
That’s very directed towards Richard. But I think in general, for other two
speakers, it’s sort of that idea of how we encourage, healthy discourse around
any of these topics in open science, open technology, disinformation,
so on and so forth. >> So, we I mean, we obviously
want to encourage that we do have, we get on-site comments of about 8%,
which I would say seems pretty low until you compare it to journals,
which is much lower. And there’s a lot of discussion on
Twitter and third-party venues. I think that the challenge
is that we can do this, but it’s not clear to me
how much bio archive or med-archive themselves and do, and
one of the challenges we find for any kind of participation like
These are academic incentives.
Academic I mean, I always say
The most precious commodity for any academic is their time. And everybody has no time to do anything. And so, when academics think about how
They apportion time they think about what benefit they get from it. And maybe situations in which
there’s a direct benefit for them to engage in that kind of
discussion that’s public and open. But actually, right now, there’s not
much of a real incentive to do so. I mean, one of the things that I
think would help is particularly for early career researchers, right now
The currency of career progression is solely the papers that you produce. And early career researchers at that point
in their careers have very few papers. But if we can get to a point where some
of the contributions into discussions become more formalized, and
in some way recognized as a contribution.
So, I mean, I always say that if I’m
trying to hire somebody in scientific communication editing or something like
that, they will typically see their CV which is the two papers that I did in
genetics that took me the last four years. But actually, be really valuable to me for the sorts of things that I want to employ
them to do, as well as those two things they had like fifteen other contributions were
They would examine somebody else’s work. If we can start, I think that
will take institutions to start saying we recognize these things are
valid academic contributions. And so, I’m all for it I don’t think there’s that
much beyond providing a venue. I don’t think there’s that much we can do. I mean it’s significant to me that we had
this, explosive growth of metal archives and COVID-19, the exponential growth
of bio archives from 2013 to 2020.
All of this indicated it
was satisfying a need. We haven’t seen the same kind
of growth in the dialogue, but it’s difficult to know what
one should compare it against. I mean, there’s a hell of a lot of
discussion going on, on Twitter. Once it didn’t exist,
free Twitter didn’t exist, pre so hopefully it will come. >> So, I wanted to follow
up on that a little bit. In social media, a lot of the discussion
is driven by what’s printed in blogs. And by images and
then videos that you see on YouTube. If people in science got credit for
writing blogs and blog posts and got credit for doing YouTube videos. You’d see a higher discussion
level in real science. Because right now there are bloggers
out there blogging about pseudoscience, about non-scientific facts. And writing videos about them and a lot of
The discussion is centered around that. But if we could somehow
prioritize those as recognizable, acceptable things that
people could get credit for.
You would drive more discussion. Sorry, I hope I didn’t hit it. >> One thing just to add, though, is one piece of data that may
be interesting here for you. When we survey, we surveyed several
thousand bio-R-xiv authors a year or so ago. Actually, what we found was
a substantial number of them are engaging in conversations
based on their papers by email. So, I think that the other thing you need
to consider we all want to have an open discussion. But there are some kinds
of discussions that people, by them by the nature of
what they’re talking about. All my characters want to have private
and that’s a bit of a shift to happen. To say take a conversation that you’re
having personally with an author about their results and saying. Okay, now have that publicly so
Six billion people can listen to it.
And different people will make different
choices, but I think we’re moving in that direction, but it’s a bit-
>> Yeah, Sarah, there I was interested
in hearing your perspective, especially with the open technology
that you were talking about. And again, I keep going back to this
point because it was so prolific. The idea that they are the Internet is
There, nobody owns it and everybody owns it. And I’m interested to hear,
From your perspective, the idea of encouraging, healthy dialog.
And encouraging stakeholders to really,
I guess, plays a part in this. What has your experience
been like in that? >> Yeah, I think generally my
experience has been very good, maybe I’ve just been lucky that
I’ve met people who are welcoming. And if you go to ICANN, the Internet
Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, for example. They’ll have a fellowship program
to introduce you to Internet policy development. And they’ll tell you this is how you
will get involved in Internet policy.
And generally, I think right now there are programs that
help you to get involved in those spaces. The only thing is you need to know about
them for you to be able to participate, which information I don’t think is so
much out there. But I think generally it’s open, it’s
Welcoming if you have the information. And, yes,
Perhaps we need to do more outreach and create awareness about people. And told them why they needed to
contribute to Internet policy because I knew when I started
participating about four years ago. I didn’t even think that I could
contribute to Internet policy. I was just like that game there,
it’s for those guys over there. But if we know that
the internet affects all of us, then we are more willing
to actually participate. >> Yes. >> That is an incredibly prolific
way to end this session, and I know I have at least
a dozen more questions.
[LAUGH] And I apologize to anybody
that we didn’t get to during this. I’m going to throw these questions
into Slack in our OSS channel. And we can feel free to have that
conversation over there as well, but I just wanted to thank the three of you so
much. This was such a fantastic panel,
and fantastic session, all the talks seemed to vary and
complement each other. And all three of you were very, very,
yeah, I’m humbled to listen to your talk. So, okay, well
This is some business more for the broader OSS meeting today. We’re going to go to our lunch break now and
We’re going to return it’s 2 PM, I believe? Yes, 2 PM. In the meantime, obviously, Heider,
Be sure to have lunch stretches if possible. We also have Gather Town available to you,
and I believe there’s a Gather Town
link earlier in the chat here. And I’m going to go ahead, and
just repost this, so you have it. And Gather Town is a way that you can
continue the conversations if you’d like that we had earlier today.
It’s a fun little platform to have
conversations and meet different people. So, yeah at that, thank you so
Much, everybody and we’ll see you back here at 2 o’clock. >> Thanks very much. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Thanks.
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