Not Quite Connecting the Dots
Academics urge public communications to adhere to our research integrity principles, not realizing those have become a joke
Yesterday in an editorial in Nature, the writers point to an “Advice paper” from the Research Governance and Integrity Officer at Cambridge, who “proposes that public-facing science-communication work should adhere to the same research-integrity principles that are used for scholarly publications, and suggests that universities should support scientists who do so.”
The author of the “advice paper” discusses various pressures to publish and makes some mild statements about how “publish and perish” is a problem, and how researchers should not exaggerate their claims. But he doesn’t discuss more systemic issues, which are key to the problems we’re facing when it comes to public trust.
The author throws around terms like “open” and “integrity” as if those two can be reconciled. After all, the dominant OA model is Gold, which is based on a central editorial conflict of interest — the lower my standards, the higher my revenues — while preprints eschew scholarly peer-review entirely.
Some people in their academic cloisters haven’t registered how out of order their own house has become.