Slashdot Mirror
Creative Commons For Science
chrisspurgeon writes "The folks at Creative Commons are rolling out a new project aimed at improving the dissemination of scientific publications and data. The National Institutes of Health is already proposing mandated Open Access to all NIH-funded research, and many scientists welcome the free redistribution of their papers, they just don't know the legal details of how to do it. The Science Commons project will take on the copyright problems unique to scientists (things like pre and post prints, and electronic vs. paper journal distribution)."
now he can get his stuff copyrighted too!
The battle for accessible culture is important, but the battle for accessible science is more important (IMO).
Keep up the good work!
Need professional pictures taken in the Puget Sound? Hire me!
With all the discussions in previous years regarding the government trying to decide what scientists can and cannot post in journals, I am hoping this can further put the government at a distance and allow free information to remain, well, free.
IGB: More fun than eating oatmeal!
Global warming "scientists" have been pulling this off for years and years now without the help of a Creative Commons lisence. I don't see how this would really change anything.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
It can good for education and learning, for home educators and schools.
I think this is excellent, but only academic and possibly government funded research will use this. The pharmaceutical and bio-tech companies will continue to do their own thing and make billions.
It has never been difficult for crackpots with agendas to spread rubbish; usually with a purchased 'of the shelf' diploma under their belt.
What would be an idea is a repository of CC licenced scientific papers which academic critics can review.
Alternatively, Universites could run their own dedicated sites for papers; they *only* allow papers from their University to be made available there but anyone can read / reproduce them under the terms of the licence.
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
I'm a US government scientist, just found out that journals must have two types of copyright agreements, don't know if this is universal:
1. For most people, all rights go to [journal].
2. If more than X co-authors are US. government employees, the work must be Public Domain.
I believe this is forced on the journals as the price of accepting work from government scientists. This, is a Good Thing the government is doing (for once) over publishing industry. Don't know if this is universal across agencies, journals, sorry if the above paraphrase is impeferfect (legalese isn't in front of me right now).
All reputable scientific journals have a peer review system wherin the research to be published must first be scrutinized by other experts in the field. I don't see why free access to research publications would change this.
But how will all those poor Scientific journals continue to make money off of publically funded research?
(yes - the answer is that they'll be publishing the highest quality research results and providing a service to their readers by sifting throught the garbage, but still, how long will it take for HighQualityPublicResearch.com to come along?)
> Will this not make it much easier for crackpots with agendas to spread bogus/bullshit scientific "facts"?
I don't think so. The Creative Commons idea doesn't affect peer-review, reputation, etc., that are the bedrock of legitimate scientific publications. What it will do is make it easier for crackpots (and the rest of us) to read significant scientific publications.
BBC Radio 4 did a radio program about the publish problems in Science, especially Physics, recently. I thought it was very good.
You can listen to it online from the BBC website. It requires Real Player, however.
- Jax
The government can still mandate what is restricted and cant be released.. They can declare anything they want as 'not subtable for public knowledge due to national security reasons'
Whatever is left over is free game for this good idea...
---- Booth was a patriot ----
This is a steady progression toward using the "publisher pays" model of scientific publication. The Public Library of Science has been doing it for a while now www.plos.org
No, that's Slashdot that you're thinking of. :)
The television will not be revolutionized.
If the government funds your research, you should not be able to patent it and must make it, your source data, your computer programs, and your source code publically available for free.
That data, source code must be public domain or at least a BSD style license. This follows the federal government in that its publications are public domain.
Additionally, a financial statement of how you spent your taxpayer funded research money should be available for free, and be published on the internet.
In other words,
a. You can't profit from goverment grants
b. You cannot hide what you do with the grant money
c. Anyone can take your work without licensing fees or licensing legal agreements for any purpose.
Wow. Wow. Wow. Posted at 25 min after the hour, and still you have not been modded "troll". Wow. Have all the mods started New Years celebrations already? But of course you are right (unless it was a joke, in which case, very funny!).
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
Why, that's right! Amend II is self-contradictory. Is that why every gun-nut conveniently forgets the first half of it?
Sometimes seventeen/Syllables aren't enough to/Express a complete
The review system requires some work to administer (even when the reviewing itself is on a volunteer basis). People may worry that without exclusive distribution rights, publishers may not be able to raise the money to support such systems.
I don't know enough about the expenses here to say whether that's a real problem. The benefits of freer licensing are potentially so enormous I'd hope there's some way to do it without compromising the review process. (The full literature available anywhere on the internet, with full-text searching? Less hassle to teachers assembling compilations for courses? Etc., etc....)
--b.
I thought I was a badass with two... Now I must make a 10 dvr computer!! MUAHAHAHAHA!!!! *burp*
I don't know. Maybe it's just because most free access journals are unknown startups with no established history. If you submit a manuscript to one of the established and prestigious scientific journals such as Science, Nature or PRL (at least in my field), it's not only going to be peer reviewed but it's going to be subjected to a peer-review-from-hell. That, on the other hand, is unlikely to happen if you submit it to a free access journal...
The owls are not what they seem
This quote is really a steaming pile. Like today public and private school degrees are anything but purchased products? Get real. In the United States (and certain Caribbean islands), a university "education" is purchased for a price just like anything else. Rarely do grades and actual knowledge have much to do with obtaining a degree.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
To listen to the programme http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/science/rams/publish.r am 'Listen Again' service will happily send a RealAudio stream of the programme which mplayer --dump-stream will happily rip for you. (The Beeb say they can only offer streaming media because their rights agreements don't cover other formats :/ ) No, I'm not connected with Aunty Beeb in any way, I'm just a Radio 4 junkie :)
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
This is a very good thing. If my tax dollars are going to support the research, I hope it benefits as many people as possible (instead of just the big PHaRMA ).
I had heard that the Pharma people have a way around this. They will co-sponsor research with NIH, and when it comes time to publish, claim that all of the good stuff came from their share of the funding (and hence claim it as their IP). I don't know how true this is, but that's what I've heard.
I have been on the lookout for quality (human) Microarray data for doing predictive data mining with some exciting new techniques, but can't find too many such sets around. Looking at the revenues of Affymetrix (for instance), one would think there would be oodles of data out there; but this is not the case. Yes, I am aware of the SMD, etc.
I don't know enough about the expenses here to say whether that's a real problem.
Roughly speaking, there are no expenses.
The editor is usually a volunteer, and the reviewers are always volunteers. The editor sends your manuscript to two or three referees, who mark it up and write him a report. He then takes their names off the reports, and forwards them to you, with his decision (usually either ``forget it'' or ``revise and resubmit''). All this is done electronically, so costs are nil.
Reviewing is the price you pay for submitting to a journal: if you submit, you'll start getting articles to review. Doing a good job on these can only help your standing with the editor, and get you better referees and a better chance of helpful criticism on your next submission.
Aside from a secretary for the editor (not all publications have this), the only paid employees are the guys who run the printing press and the fat cats who take your checks to the bank. The authors and would-be authors do the writing, the peer review and the typesetting, and in return, the publisher takes the copyright and the profit.
See what I've been reading.
I'm a physics grad student now, but let me give my take on it. The answer to your question is really yes or now. Much like the printing press and the internet let's any crackpot publish/disseminate bogus facts, but it gives the same abilities to people that have something worthwhile to say.
But how do you tell the good stuff from the bad? Firstly, most scientists worth their salt will be able to immediately distinguish whether a paper is written by an expert in the field, or someone bullshitting. Now as to someone outright lying, well the case of Jan Hendrick Schon reveals that problem can exist within the peer-reviewed literature too. However, seeing how afterwards he was exposed he was fired, and even had his PhD revoked by his university, can hopefully deter other would-be frauders. Scientific 'trolling' may be a harder problem to crack, though.
One such method to determine relative 'goodness' of an author, or a paper, is to see how many times it is cited by another paper. In fact, one of my former professors at U. Penn was one of the motivators for this method because she experienced alot of discrimination trying to get a faculty job. (In the old days, and even today to a smaller extent, female PhD physicists are underrepresented). She had to use these citation numbers to prove her work was as influential as some of the top men in the field.
Of course, with fully open access, it will be relatively easy to create many 'spam' articles that cite your own article to increase it's perceived importance. One way to combat this might be to weigh citing scores lower if they come from within an intimate circle. Another would be to have a moderation and meta-moderation system to acknowledge which papers in their field are worthy of being cited. Of course this goes back to the 'elite' problem of someone being unfairly shut out, but at least they can still publish their paper openly, if they need to point out 20 years down the line they were the first to publish a certain theory.
There actually already are such open venues, for example the arxiv will allow AFAIK anybody to publish a paper there.
Other than publications, the American Physical Society , for example, gets some federal funding and hence provide some public services. For example, at some of the larger meetings they might provide a room for presentations from non-physicists or others, kind of like the local public access station on cable TV. Sometimes talks are given on philosophy of physics, sometimes there are just crackpot talks, but any decent physicist will be able to tell by a talk whether it is worthwhile or not.
make world, not war
This is the idea of "free" as in speech, people. And this is why the free software paradigm is more important than just getting stuff done and providing low-cost solutions. Bio-research is extremely heavily encumbered with patents and costs. I'm extremely happy to see several initiatives (see for example the BIOS initiative and the open access initiative) slowly gain momentum.
Hell, we had to pay to get an article published (quite common) and then pay another 30$ to get a copy of the journal issue (and, no, there is not such thing as free internet access for high-profile journals) to read our own article.
I really want publishers and research companies to make money, but public funded research must be free for all. This is humanity's intellectual property, not the coca-cola recipe!
P.
Hehe... I wonder if the True Love Waits crowd would like that as a slogan. ;)
The owls are not what they seem
So many of you seem to be saying "Grants don't allow companies sell the technology" or "A business should not profit from public money".
But let me share something with you..
There is a program called SBIR (Small Business Inovation Research). In which small businesses ( under 500 employees) can submit for grants for very (typically) very specific "problems" the various federal agencies want to have solved. With an end result being commercialization of your product/technology.
It goes like this..
1. Feds put out a list of solicitations
2. You submit a paper describing your idea and how commercially viable it is
3. You may or may not get "Phase I" funding for research.
4. Now, if you did well in Phase I you can submit for "Phase II" funding. Which gives you more money. This step is primarily to help get your product into the market. So you better have a good set of sales numbers ready.
Sometimes the "product" is something that the Feds will want to buy from you (e.g. NASA, US Army, etc..) and other times it will have civilian application. So if you want it to have civilian application, you can work on that too with the grant money.
And in regards to IP, you retain exclusive rights to ALL work you have done. And the US Govt. also has right to the technology, but not to sell it, just to use/improve/rework it.
This is not free money, you do need other sources of capital in order to progress in the funding. They aren't giving out free money without you doing some work and showing you can generate outside interest.
The point of the program is to grow the US economy and also to provide the US Govt. with R&D for technology it finds it has a need for.
There are many details that I have just glossed over. But you can find out more here.
There is a national conference twice a year to learn more about the program. You can find out about that by going here.
It has a sister-program called STTR which allows you to work with a university and use their labs and staff. You can learn about both at the conference, I find them quite informative.
I listened to this on Boxing day and found it interesting. It talks about the use of the internet in publishing.
A 'beer nut'?
Moderators need to get a sense of humor.
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=82084
http://romeo.eprints.org/stats.php
what is needed is that authors should now go ahead and self-archive -- not waste yet another decade
http://www.infotoday.com/IT/oct04/poynder.shtml
-- this time needlessly trying to negotiate a CC license with their publishers!
See also:
"Apercus of WOS Meeting: Making Ends Meet in the Creative Commons"
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsc
Here are some links for those who want more background and detail on the open access movement:
h ive.htm
Open Access Overview
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/overview.htm
(my introduction to OA for those who are new to the concept)
Open Access News blog
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/fosblog.html
(my blog, updated daily)
SPARC Open Access Newsletter
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/arc
(my newsletter, published monthly)
FAQ on the NIH public-access policy
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/nihfaq.htm
Timeline of the open access movement
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/timeline.htm
What you can do to help the cause of open access
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/lists.htm#do
Peter Suber
I'm not worried about scientists, I'm worried about the average boob who believes anything he sees on TV, because a "certified scientician" says so.
Like that Clonex or whoever, the UFO cult who claimed they cloned a human being. Despite the fact they couldn't even produce a photograph of the cloned baby, the media (thanks to a slow news week) plastered this "breakthrough" everywhere.
The average dope still thinks it's true.
People think that abortions cause breast cancer, because some born-again christian "scientist" said so (with nothing to back it up). People hear "science" and think it's true, they don't do the research to find out that this guy is alone in his belief.
Hell, every other day the media feeds us a story about "wine is good for you! it prevents cancer", and then the next day "wine is bad for you! it causes cancer!"
The problem is more with the media than the scientific community, I just worry about a giant collection of catchy scientific headlines for slow news days.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
But those problems you mention are independent of an open science publication service. Or perhaps maybe they'll get worse, but if you want to deceive people you can easily do so under the current system anyway.
make world, not war
But his point is true, that the review process takes some funding to accomplish.
There are some journals that operate with a "volunteer" editor, but they have trouble competing with journals that have a paid full-time staff, like Nature for example. Running a journal of that size is a huge operation; it requires so much time and effort that it can't be done by volunteers.
no more of paying $$$ to journals for reading the latest in science. with scientists publishing their work on their sites, it would be easiest to access the latest without burning a hole in my pocket...
Is Nature really a scientific journal? That's a serious question: it's not in my field, and I'm not familiar with it. As I recall, it's printed on glossy paper, and has advertisements?
I'm familiar with journals like Journal of Economic Literature (JEL) and American Economic Review (AER), which do have some paid staff, paid for through the American Economics Association dues and subscriptions. I'm also familiar with journals like the IEEE Spectrum and the American Statistics Association American Statistician (AMSTAT), which are glossy magazine with ads, and the Journal of the American Statistical Association (JASA), which has few or no ads.
Spectrum and AMSTAT are not considered serious journals in their fields, peer-reviewed or not, while AER and JASA are. The difference is that a non-Ph.D might read Spectrum or AMSTAT, but would not (probably could not) read JEL, AER or JASA. I think that Nature is in the same class as Spectrum, isn't it? It is intended for a broader audience than the few academics working in the field? It's not the primary journal of record for the discipline it covers? If so, I don't think that it's really the sort of thing this initiative is aimed at.
See what I've been reading.
One such method to determine relative 'goodness' of an author, or a paper, is to see how many times it is cited by another paper. In fact, one of my former professors at U. Penn was one of the motivators for this method because she experienced alot of discrimination trying to get a faculty job. (In the old days, and even today to a smaller extent, female PhD physicists are underrepresented). She had to use these citation numbers to prove her work was as influential as some of the top men in the field.
I am a female physicist and I think using the number of times a paper was cited as the sole test of how good the work was is a dangerous idea. In the space sciences, there are so many papers published every year, in many different journals, that it is impossible for anyone to read them all. What happens is that a lot of scientists will only read papers by established, experienced scientists that have built a strong reputation over many years. This means that the papers cited most often tend to be written by older men, and papers written by younger scientists and women tend to be cited far less often.
I find this quite disturbing, since when I recently did a journal article search for papers on a particular topic, I found an article published by a well-respected scientist in a reputable, peer-reviewed journal that was total garbage. In spite of the fact that the paper was just terrible, it had been cited many times. I know a lot of people who will cite a paper in their own work that was cited in a paper they recently read without bothering to check the original paper first.
I wonder how many people have actually read some of these papers that have been cited more than 100 times. Probably less than 50% of the people who cite a particular paper have actually bothered to look up the paper and read it carefully.
http://xxx.lanl.gov/
sorry, its not porn. don't know why they chose xxx
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Is Nature really a scientific journal?
Absolutely. It carries some top science. It is cross-disciplinary, though, so it's supposed to be accessible to all scientists. The Nature Publishing Group is big business, and has a bunch of subsidiary journals that are also well-respected. For example, in my field, Nature Neuroscience publishes a lot of the top articles. Nature Neuroscience alone has a paid staff of about 10-15 people I think.
--- But how will all those poor Scientific journals continue to make money off of publically funded research?---
And then how will every scientific society that is funded by journal profits continue to exist and do positive things for their community?
---Roughly speaking, there are no expenses.---
Your statements show a very naive, if not completely incorrect understanding of what goes into publishing a scientific journal. There are lots of costs involved, and nearly every journal that exists has a score of paid employees.
---The editor is usually a volunteer---
Not true in most cases. Most journals have a paid full time editor (at least this is certainly the case for biology journals). There is usually an editorial board made up of scientists. These people are sometimes volunteers, but are often paid a stipend for their contributions.
---The editor sends your manuscript to two or three referees, who mark it up and write him a report. He then takes their names off the reports, and forwards them to you, with his decision (usually either ``forget it'' or ``revise and resubmit''). All this is done electronically, so costs are nil.---
First, a decision has to be made as to whether the article is worth reviewing. This is done by the editor who reads the paper and assesses its initial value. If favorable, the paper is then forwarded to reviewers. Due to the large volume of submissions seen by most journals, an administrative assistant usually oversees and tracks this process. Some journals have indeed switched to electronic submission and review systems, while many haven't. Such systems are very expensive to set up, and expensive to maintain. One such system is run by Stanford University's Highwire Press (who also help journals publish online). Care to see how many people they employ?
---Aside from a secretary for the editor (not all publications have this), the only paid employees are the guys who run the printing press and the fat cats who take your checks to the bank.---
Um, no. Most journals have a publication staff. These people are responsible for layout and formatting of accepted articles, reviewing and correcting artwork, copyediting, cover designs, dealing with legal permissions, sending out reprints, and inumerable other tasks. As far as the fatcats go, many journals are run by scientific societies who rely on journal profits to fund community activities like scholarships and meetings (Protein Science is an example). Other journals are published by universities and research institutes, and all profits go into funding further research and support for the scientists working there (MIT Press for example). Yes, there are plenty of Elseviers and other greedy publishing empires out there, but don't tarnish all journals with the same broad brush.
---and in return, the publisher takes the copyright---
Many journals, such as those published by the Nature Publishing Group, give the authors full copyright in return for an exclusive license for the article.
What you say about the space sciences tends to be true for all sciences (in my experience so far, at least). Of course nobody will read all the papers, but unless you're really studying something out in left field, there are usually some researchers in your area of specialty that will be interested in what you publish. There are even overlaps of things with no apparent connection. For example, some high-energy physicists realized some fluid-dynamics equations describing microscopic interactions of specific liquid crystal systems are very similar to general relativity on universal scales. I don't know how these two seemingly unrelated groups happened to find their common connection, but obviously some scientists have their eyes open.
You are correct that papers with the overall number of citations tend to be by older authors (usually written by men), but if you normalize the standard to number of citations per year, or something like that, you will get a better idea. Also - the main point of the thread's parent is not to find out who has the BEST paper, but to distinguish the 'real' science from the pseudoscience.
Who was the well-respected scientist that you mention in your post as having written an article that was "total garbage"? Is it 'garbage' because it's been proven wrong, or posits a highly contentuous theory? Or does it just have erroneous conclusions? Did the author write a followup? This is research is all about, the idea isn't to be right all the time, but to refine or change hypotheses to match with newly-available data. Even the best scientists will make mistakes, but a worthy scientist will acknowledge and learn from his/her mistakes.
As to citing your own work, in the current rankings I believe it counts as a cite, but self-cites shouldn't be counted in such a system. Similarly, repeated cites from within a small circle should be weighed less, to prevent colleagues from bolstering each other unneccessarily.
Regarding actually reading papers you cite, do you actually know that many people that cite a work without looking it up? I don't know where you do research or who you work with, but the physicists I work with, especially those in my group, have folders and folders of papers, going back many orders of recursion to the citations of the citations of the citations, etc. My advisor, and other paper authors I've spoken with, all know to great detail the specific papers that they cite. If your colleagues have questionable scientific standards, my advice would be to just to the best job you can, and be as honest to yourself and the Art as you can, and you're career will eventually make it's way.
make world, not war
As for the "well-respected" scientist who published a paper I thought was total garbage mentioned in my earlier post, I am afraid to say who it was in a public forum. It wouldn't be that difficult for someone reading my posts on Slashdot to figure out who I am, and giving such a strong opinion of this person publically could ruin my career. I think the paper was garbage because it was not based on data analysis or simulations of any kind. The paper did cite many older papers, but it was not intended to be a review, as the well-respected scientist basically re-interpreted all of the earlier papers into a really bizarre framework that had no bearing on reality or the currently accepted paradigms. If I or another junior scientist had submitted this paper, it would have been rejected immediately because the theory had no support and the paper was not very well written. Because the scientist was alredy well-established when the paper was written, it appears that it was accepted by the journal editor mainly based upon the scientist's reputation. I have not seen this person publish anything else similar, and he continues to be highly regarded within the space sciences community.
When I read papers, I often will look up some of the papers cited. I have a whole file cabinet full of papers I have looked up as well as a big disk full of pdf files. I have discovered so many papers that incorrectly summarize the results of the papers they cite that I have lost count. I even reviewed a paper once that incorrectly cited one of my own papers. It sure feels horrible when the only person who bothers to cite your paper misrepresents it and may not have actually read it. Some papers that are commonly cited in the space science journals are in obscure journals or conference proceedings that are extremely difficult or even impossible to obtain. I have been told many times by senior scientists in my field that everybody thinks people should reference some of these "classic" papers, but that no one really goes back and reads all of them.
I have had my Ph.D. for about 5 years and I am still stuck working as a post-doc due to the politics of the space sciences, in spite of having published several long papers and giving dozens of presentations at scientific meetings. I get asked to review journal articles/proposals every couple of months, so people know I am here. On the surface it might seem like I am becoming established in my career, and I am earning the respect of the scientific community. However, if you dig a little deeper, you will see otherwise. Even though the reviewers of my papers generally have had good things to say about my work, my papers have not been cited much at all. There are so many papers published in the space sciences, it is difficult for a younger scientist to be noticed among all of the famous names.
It sounds like you are having a much more positive experience as a graduate student in your field than I did in the space sciences. There recently was a big report on ethics in Physics Today, I think in either the October or November 2004 issue. I have either witnessed a lot of the types unethical behavior described in this article myself, or know other scientists who have been victims of it. It sounds like you work in a pretty good group now, but you may not be so lucky later on in your career. I suggest taking a look at the Physics Today article on ethics to prepare yourself for the vast scientific battlefield that lies ahead.
How does a money losing strategy by the PLOS to fund their journals result in money being raised to fund unrelated scientific societies?
Bzzzt! Incorrect. The meaning of milita when the Constitution was framed was not the same as today. Amend II is not self-contradictory. That is why every gun-hating nut rants in the manner they do.
If you favor the GPL then you favor full public access to government funded research including free access to data, source code, etc.
I don't know if your doing scientific research at the moment, but money is extremely tight in this age, and with the current administration. Hoping for donations of 10's if not 100's of thousands of dollars from cash strapped scientists is wishful thinking at best.
You might find this interesting:
If you consider the citation network as a directed graph, the degree of the nodes follow a power law. See authors Strogatz, Albert, and Barabasi for the details.
One of the familiar results of power law networks is that, out of all papers, only 20% of them are cited 80% of the time. The famous get more famous and the obscure stay obscure.
IANAGT - I Am Not a Graph Theoretician
Thank God!
Favorite
That's fine, but you need to realize that in order to get to that state you are going to need to get Congress to repeal a law that many are convinced is working quite well.
It's so handy, I tend to use it instead of hunting up the paper copies in my 'box of printouts'. Yes, it's actually faster/easier to find something I've already read by getting it online, than to hunt in a file cabinet.
And they have excellent search, reference chasing (you can find all papers that cite a given paper, or simply see all references a paper uses), and even persistent searches (email me everytime a new paper comes up on 'target X').
Some astro journals are still, alas, subscriber-only (usually with university block subscriptions), but the bulk are open to anyone.
But astronomy has always been a field where amateurs and professionals can both participate.
A.
It's a nice thought, but I have a hard time believing that the general public is going to spend a lot of time reading high level journal articles that are often difficult to comprehend for those actively working in the field. There's a reason why the average person doesn't subscribe to the Journal of Neuroscience, other than a lack of interest, it's that scientific papers are really hard to read for non-scientists. You also have to remember that many of these societies serve smaller scientific communities and their work is probably not going to catch the eye of the public. How many people do you think would send a PayPal donation to the RNA society after reading their exciting papers about RNA structure?
I agree with what you're saying, but science journals are not the right place for public outreach. Journals are for communication between scientists, for the review and publication of results, not for helping the public to understand.
I can relate to your complaint about being cited in inappropriate or disappointing ways. Twice now one of my papers has been cited, and an exact phrase I used in my paper was directly quoted. Fine, except that quote was not at all the point of my paper. The interesting thing is, both people quoted exactly the same phrase, so I think what happened is the second person read the first person's paper who quoted me, and then simply cited the same quote from my paper. It really makes me wonder if the second person even ready my paper.
I haven't read that second paper yet, only glanced at it, but I'll be reading it shortly, since the journal sent it to me to review it!
Oh, and I have seen utter crap published in decent journals now and then. One of the worst examples I remember was not from scientists who were known to me, so I don't think their paper passed peer review simply based on their reputations. I think you must realize there is a large degree of stochasticity in the review process -- you can write a great paper, but when 3 people review it, for whatever reasons, one or even two of them may simply decide they don't like it, then you're out of luck. If you could re-submit it to the same journal and have them select 3 new reviewers, there's a very good chance they'd all like it (of course, journals don't allow you to do this, but you can submit the same paper to another journal of equal "quality" later and all the reviewers may love it, even though you didn't change a thing).
So I can believe that a crap paper can pass review just by luck sometimes, if it happens to get a cohort of "easy" reviewers assigned to it. Although admittedly, in the example you mention, the reviewers may very well have been swayed by the author's reputation. I don't have enough experience yet to say whether or not the journal editor was also likely influenced in this way, but I'd really like to think he/she wasn't.
My most brutal trip through peer review was last year, when one journal had 7 (!) people review my paper. I don't believe it was because the paper was of questionable quality, either. I think maybe they asked a bunch of people to review it, figuring X% of them would say "yes", but that in fact they ALL said yes. I got back a MOUNTAIN of comments to respond to. Then, right after that I banged out a little paper in a few weeks and sent it to another journal of equal standing, and they wrote back in about a month and said they'd publish it as-is, with no changes at all (and in fact I didn't even get any reviewers' comments back). Now I know that second paper wasn't as "good" as the first one, but it was 100 times easier to publish it.
Oh, and just to put all this in context, I got my PhD 3 years ago, and am in my 3rd year in a tenure-track position, and my field is theoretical biology.