Towards Public-Friendly Open Science: YouTube Alongside Journal Articles?

Jace Harker writes: The public has often a hard time understanding research and its relevance to society. One of the reasons for this is that scientists do not spend enough time communicating their findings outside their own scientific community," writes Authorea Chief Scientist Matteo Cantiello. "It's ironic and somewhat frightening that the discoveries and recommendations for which society invests substantial economic and human capital, are not directly disseminated by the people who really understand them." Cantiello goes on to propose a "Public-Friendly Open Science bundle": scientists who publish a paper should also draft and publish a press release, layperson's summary, and/or YouTube video. Should scientists be more responsible for communicating their results directly to the public? Or should this role be left to science journalists?

Comments

Re:As an option, OK. As mandatory, NO.

[gstoddart]

You know, many things are approachable by someone of "average" intelligence and background if you try hard enough.

The problem becomes that so much of the populace is outright anti-science, that who are you targeting?

Honestly, it's not the average person to worry about ... it's the people who outright reject that any of this stuff is real and think that "just a theory" means their opinion is just as valid.

The YouTube-ification of science would be quite sad, and probably counter productive as people try to get edgy and appeal to a youth audience .... yo yo yo boi, MC Flava Physix in da house to explain quantum entanglement might be funny once, but we don't need it to be a recurring thing.

These people aren't writing papers for the drooling masses. They're writing them for other people educated in the field.

Let's not drag the science community down to the level of YouTube cat videos.

Probably not a good idea.

[tbannist]

From a system point of view, this seems like the opposite of what we should actually want. Journal articles exist to communicate the findings of an experiment, they actually have nearly no relevance to the public, nor should they. The results of a single article should not be trusted. It's a finding and it needs to be studied and replicated before it should be communicated to the public. So, I don't think we would ever want to force every scientist who is trying to get an article published to also draft a press release trumpeting the results of their study. Even honest scientists would constantly be tempted to embellish the significance of the results.

It seems to me, that we should actually want an independent science body who's sole job is to replicate significant experiments and confirm that the results are both legitimate and significant. Taking the advertising out of the hands of the original scientist should dramatically reduce the incentive to exaggerate findings and hopefully requiring the result to be verified first would deter all but the least reliable science journalists from writing wild articles based on never repeated experiments.

There would still be major problems, this organization would have to establish themselves as the trust authority for science questions. That would be no easy task. Additionally, there is the question of who would fund this organization. It should not be a single government, nor a single corporation, or even a single industry because of the potential for political interference.