Slashdot Mirror
Scientific Publication Condemns Photo-Manipulation
valdean writes "According to a recent article in the New York Times (registration and short biography required) scientific journals have begun to respond to a growing problem of photo-manipulation in submitted manuscripts. At The Journal of Cell Biology, a test developed in 2002 revealed that 25 percent of all accepted manuscripts had one or more illustrations that were manipulated to the point of violating the journal's guidelines. Examples included the duplication of images for re-presentation as a control experiment, making pictures prettier with the clone stamp tool, use of the contrast tool to hide data, and merging portions of several images so that they appear to be a single image. How were many of these scientists caught? They submitted layered Adobe Photoshop files that showed exactly what they had done."
If they submitted multi-layed photoshop files, most of them probably were not concerned with getting caught. So they must not have thought what they were doing was unethical. And having the journal come up with some guidelines and a review process for images is hardly going to make a difference.
The problem is the attitude. If they think that modifying these images isn't unetherical, then how about the data? And how will you ever catch those people? It's just a sad state of affairs in this scientific community.
I do believe (and hope) that most of the photo-manipulators were simply unaware of the journal's guideline. It is in fact a gray area of the scientific publication ethics. For example if I take a phtography of a rock for a geology publication, I am surely allowed to tweak contrasts with photoshop in order to show clearly the structure of the rock. But I suppose that the exact same manipulation would be unethical if I were to hide details that could serve as a counter-example of my thesis. While in doubts, it is probably better to send a photoshop file to the journal, showing all the (hopefully) minor photomanipulations made to the image. If the journal thinks that something is abnormal, one can discuss about it, most of the time a polite conversation can probably solve these issues.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
A retouched microscope shot would erase critical data such as molecule clusters, etc. A scientific journal must not allow this. In other words, magazine girls are NOT used as basis for developing new medical treatments that might heal or kill someone.
Agreed. It sounds like, though, that most of the incidents here were more like if you included your foot in the bottom of the picture of the rock and edited it out. The editors said that only a very small subset of the violations were deliberate attempts at fraud.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Always flatten your images before submitting them.
(OK, not really, but you know some people of less-than-sterling ethics are going to walk away with that instead of the real lesson, i.e. don't fudge your data.)
All photographs are manipulations. None capture the exact data represented by the obect in real life.
Before photographing the item it lit, framed, lensed, exposed, and captured at a point in time. Plenty of room for manipulation.
So what's the difference between physical manipulation before the capture and digital manipulation after?
There is only honesty and dishonesty. Manipulation is a given.
You can mod me down, but you cannot call me a coward.
So, my original statement is completely true, most of the photos were doctored strictly to make them look better, not for fraud. I never said there was no fraud, only that most of the submitters didn't care if they got caught altering pictures, because they only did it for aesthetics.
Finding other idiots on
Altered photos are a good thing IF they are clearly labeled as "photo-illustration," "enhanced photograph," "composite photograph," or the like, with the original photos made available to the publisher and the peer reviewers or better yet to the general readership.
When studying a scientific photo, I don't want to be distracted by less-interesting bits of information - I want my attention drawn to the point the author is trying to make.
You only have a problem if the reader thinks he is looking at one thing when in fact he is looking at something else.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Unfortunately it also raises privacy issues. While you're talking about implementing the quasi-steganographic approach for a limited subset of camera models (I'm assuming here we're talking about the CCDs used to photograph off microscope feeds) I'm sure it wouldn't be too long until the watermarks started appearing in consumer camera models.
A little less tinfoil-ish consideration is that any watermarking done to the image is necessarily a manipulation of the image, and doing it on the hardware level prevents the photographer from seeing the actual, unaltered photographic image. That is, if you change pixels before you've ever seen those pixels, you might unintentionally alter necessary pixels. And while steganography has gotten pretty adept at changing imagery in ways that do not affect the visible image, odds are the risk of an inaccurate image like the ones that appear in scientific journals is too high to be acceptable.
Further it's a bit drastic of a solution to what is, hopefully, not that widespread a problem.
In microscopes I have used (of the electron and scanning probe variety), often automatic image processing is used when you save an image. We've had to be very careful to make sure that we have disabled anything we can, and in some cases, have had to scrap software and write our own to make sure we weren't losing data.
Really, the problem is that there isn't room in a scientific paper to put dozens of images proving your point. When you're given 3 pages, you select the best image or two that you have. Ultimately, an editor or reviewer can ask for supplemental information if there is any doubt in the result. Perhaps the problem is that reviewers aren't asking to see (or people are not providing) the supplimental data which a good scientist uses to determine truth.
> As more and more people use digital cameras and then PhotoShop (or other programs) the 'art' of photography goes away
:)
Ok, so it was a little before my time, but I seem to remember hearing that the whole idea that photography could even be an art form was rejected at first, especially by painters. Frankly, while I'm willing to concede that photography most certainly can be art, it seems to me that digital image manipulation provides at least as much, and possibly far more, room for artistic expression.
Seems to me like there's a bit of poetic justice here. (Is poetic justice a form of art?) I bet there's a bunch of dead painters who would (if they could) be rolling around laughing at the irony of a photographer complaining about people who take advantage of technology to make their art "too easily".