Slashdot Mirror
Buffy and Dr. Varnus
Here's an Internet riddle:
What do fans of "Buffy The Vampire Slayer" and Dr. Harold E. Varmus, the director of the National Institutes of Health, have in common?
Both are unlikely social revolutionaries.
Both are, in wildly divergent ways, showing us how almost everything we understand about information -- who makes it, shares it, sees it, owns it - is changing.
Both are hailed as heroes by some and seen by others as impulsive, impatient and irresponsible.
For nearly all of human history, information has been a valuable commodity and a political tool. It has always been controlled by powerful elites who have been willing to fight, even kill for it. Centuries ago, the guardians of information were referred to as The Holy Circle.
Last week, it was the WB's turn to learn what the music industry and Wall Street now know: the Net is changing the rules. Now it's the medical researchers turn.
The worst nightmare of the people who control information is, of course, the Net. Many millions of individuals connected to much of the information in the world. And it turns out that their worst nightmares about the Net are becoming truer by the day. Last week, "Buffy" fans used the Net to distribute tapes and transcripts of the show's season finale, postponed by the show's craven blockhead producers in the post-Littleton hysteria (maybe George Lucas ought to yank "Phantom Menace" - Anikin does plenty of Federation and droid-bashing).
Tuesday, it was a government official, Dr. Varmus, who proposed another radical step towards democratizing information by proposing to Congress that the NIH launch E-biomed, an electronic publishing operation that would be part of the NIH's website and that would permit scientists and researchers to disclose and disseminate the results of biomedical research on the Internet, making the full texts of their reports available for the first time to anyone with a computer anywhere in the world.
Dr. Varmus? proposal touched off a furious debate among medical journalists and researchers. The editor in chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, which has 240,000 paid subscribers, said "E-biomed could have a disastrous effect on clinical journals." He said subscribers would have no reason to subscribe to magazines like his - many of which cost thousands of dollars - if they could get the contents of journals free on the Internet.
But Dr. Varnus gets the Net, it's inevitabile growth and and potential for freeing up previously unavailable information. Journals can find other ways to generate funds, he told The New York Times. Societies, he said, "should not be seen as slowing a revolution in publishing that could make all journals more accessible."
Good for Dr. Varnus. One wonders how he ever got so far up the scientific and governmental food chain. His vision is far more intelligent and power than any advanced by any newspaper editor, music industry executive, TV producer or most government officials over the past few ears.
The E-biomed debate quickly took on a familiar ring. Researchers were bitterly divided about Dr. Varnus? proposal. One University of Wisconsin professor called it "among the very worst ideas I've ever heard," saying all sorts of unsubstantiated junk could be posted on the NIH website without the traditional, sometimes laborious process of peer and editorial review.
But Dr. Varnus said the new website would include some form of scientific screening and review. He said the site would have two components. Articles published in the first compartment would be subject to scientific review by members of the editorial boards of various journals. Another component would permit the immediate posting of medical research on the Net, prior to any formal peer review. Medical and scientific research could be greatly accelerated, he hoped.
Varnus said that for work to be disseminated in this way, researchers would need approval from two individuals with appropriate credentials. These credentials, he said, would be broad enough to include several thousands of scientists, but stringent enough to provide protection of the data base from extraneous or outrageous material. He said E-biomed would be a general repository of medical research where virtually any legitimate work could be posted for anyone in the world to see, from researchers to patients to ordinary citizens - the ones footing the bill for most, if not all, of the NIH's funded research.
Varnus hopes E-biomed will not only give the public access to medical information previously available only to medical professions, but that it will also accelerate its dissemination to the world. Many elites, from media to medicine to lawyers, have always argued the public is too wanton or dumb to handle so much information. They needed interpreters - like them. But the Net is proving them wrong. All sorts of information is available online that wasn't available at all a few years ago, and society seems to be holding together.
E-biomed would, Varnus said, offer instant, free access the latest reports on biology and medicine, saving money for individual scientists, libraries, labs, and Government agencies.
Physicists and mathematicians already can instantly post many of their findings, prior to publication in a journal, on a Web site operated by the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico (http://www.xxx.lanl.gov). But some doctors opposed to E-biomed say biomedical research, especially clinical research, is different because it can influence care of patients.
As with the rest of society, it's striking to see just how divided professionals are about this encroachment of the Net and the Web into the turf of powerful enclaves like medicine.
While many American doctors and medical journalists said they were unhappy about E-biomed, an Australian researcher drew an analogy to the spread of literacy and printing in medieval Europe centuries ago. "Were all books going to be authoritative and accurate? Were some dangerous to society? We can imagine priests saying, "Mass printing and wide dissemination of books is O.K. so long as we insure that every book is approved by a priest review process."
If he lived in America, he wouldn't have to imagine that. That's more or less the idea most members of Congress have about how the Net and Web ought to work. That's why they passed not one, but two Communications Decency Acts.
Information visionaries like Dr. Varnus - people who can see beyond the understandable anxiety but sometimes outrageous mis-information and rhetoric - have been few and far between, especially in powerful, mainstream institutions.
It's hard to get your head around an information revolution in which the fans of "Buffy The Vampire Slayer" and the head of the National Institutes of Health are making a seminal point much of society still doesn't really want to hear. That would be this: the Holy Circle of interests and institutions that has controlled information for most, if not all, of human history, is going to have to share.
I have yet to see a dislay that is even close to usable as a substitute for paper. The closest is an active matrix laptop display, and it still needs to at least double (150dpi) , and probably quadruple (300dpi), the linear density before it's really a substitute. And I don't know if there even *is* a density at which a CRT could do it.
Also, the whole idea is not a threat to the existence of journals. It *is* a threat to expensive paper-based journals. There is no reason for these to exist any more, rather than converting to electronic distribution for printing at their end-destination.
>I can read fine on my 15" at 1280*1024 with text and pictures?
I'm not denying that the text *can* be read on current screens. The problem is clarity/resolution/flicker. It's just plain harder on the eyes than paper, it isn't a substitute.
I even end up printing out source code so that I can find things--and this is with an excellent monitor.
For a quick reference, a screen can be useful. For regular reading, it just doesn't cut it.
I have no idea where my reading glasses are, but I'm still 20/20 without them (20/15, iirc). But I've had to give up early three times in the last two weeks because my eyes were running too much to focus.
Disclaimer/information point: I work for an organization which publishes over 120 biomedical journals on the Web (Highwire Press, http://highwire.stanford.edu/ )
:) who are working on solutions which take these issues into account. But it's a hard problem, and one which libraries and publishers are taking very seriously.
4 /a
The archive issue is a real one. One of the biggest problems in scientific publishing right now (and the reason that Highwire was started here at Stanford) is that it's getting too damn expensive for libraries to subscribe to all these journals -- not just the subscription costs, but also the storage costs, etc. So the solution of simply continuing to publish paper journals isn't necessarily the best one. More and more stuff gets published every year, and there just isn't enough money to support the entire print publication cycle -- even the cost of paper is a huge issue.
Tapes degrade over time, as do CDs and other current electronic media, so even these aren't long-term solutions. I know of groups (dunno how much more I can say
IMHO, the main feature of journals that deserves to survive is the peer review process. I'm very interested by the rise of eprint servers in physics and now in biomedicine; it'll be really interesting to see how it ends up happening.
Anyway, here's some articles from the British Medical Journal which discuss this further, for one view from journals:
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/318/7186/75
Later,
Adam
I am Jack's complete lack of surprise.
That /. is a "reviewers website"? While few, if any of us are truly *your* peers, the stuff that is posted here gets reviewed in a ruthless fashion. The peers also review each other. "the crew" also seems to come to consensus rather quickly as to whether the stuff posted is legit, bogus, or simply worthless. This kind of discussion works much better when dealing with scientific or technical subjects(AKA the real world) than it does when dealing with subjective stuff such as whether or not Jon Katz sucks.
I say go for it Doc V., there are legions out here that can and will review the material. Build your own Biodot website and the readers, reviewers, skeptics, cynics, those that are actually qualified to criticise, along with those that are naive enough to make enlightened suggestions will come.
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
- W. Wriston, former Citibank CEO
I suspect redistributing the Buffy episode may be illegal, and I'm certain it's pissing off the WB, but it's hardly immoral.
Don't get me wrong - I believe in intellectual property, I even believe license writers should be allowed to enforce any and every wacky fascist provision they can sucker a customer into agreeing to - but those are cases based on mutual agreement. If you don't like a software license, don't buy the software. If you think Hollywood is ripping you off with $7 movies, don't buy a ticket. If you're pissed that you can't photocopy or web publish a copyrighted book, write your own content. And if you distribute warez, whether it's commercial software or an mpeg of The Matrix, you are basically distributing stolen property.
I'm much less concerned about the morality of republishing a TV broadcast. There's no agreement, stated or implicit, made by someone whose only activity was to intercept radio waves streaming through their own homes and save a copy of the data. There is an exchange which occurs with every other distribution of copyrighted data (hell, even with cable & encrypted satellite broadcasts technically); an exchange that just doesn't occur with broadcast media. If WB wants to retain control over their TV programs, they should have asked us before sending those programs to millions of households.
The idea of peer-reviewed websites for dissemination of medical/scientific information seems like a good idea. People (including me!) already go to the web to look for information, spending many on-line hours sifting through numerous 'health-related' sites. In the case of health care, unfortunately, the gamble of trusting non-peer-reviewed information can be dangerous.
There will be struggles as the medical and scientific communities try to come to terms with a change as large as the dissemination of information electronically (rather than in paper-based journals), but this change will happen despite the FUD of the establishment.
Unfortunately, despite some superficial similarities, drawing a parallel between Dr. Varnus and 'Buffy' may only trivialize what is likely a significant advancement in communication of biological/medical information.
YS
"Arrr! The laws of science be a harsh mistress." -- Bender
This may sound weird, but it's how I feel.
I really don't care too much about Buffy The Vampire Slayer. I've watched the show every now and then if I happen to catch it on TV and there's nothing else decent on. I don't follow the storyline and I don't consider myself a fan.
However, as soon as I heard that there was an episode that was deemed unsuitable for air in the United States yet was aired in Canada at that time, I really knew I wanted to see it. Why?
Because I wanted to see for myself exactly what was so bad about this episode that the WB felt necessary to keep it from American eyes.
Because I wanted to see for myself.
To me, it's not about wanting to see how Buffy and her pals turn out. It's not about feeling upset because I can't see my favorite TV show. It's about being able to view, for myself, the episode in question, and make a decision as to whether or not the material I saw was objectionable. The fact that it was shown in Canada at the appropriate time also furthers my desire to want to be able to judge for myself -- if those in Canada could, why not me?
And besides, what of those who live near the border and can pick up Canadian television?
I guess it's a personal first for me -- to be denied the ability to view or experience something because I'm American. Still doesn't keep me from seeking out the mechanisms already in place to view what has been denied me.
*shrug*
Didn't care too much for the episode once I viewed it, anyhoo.
Being a scientist myself, I feel that E-biomed is a great idea. Finally someone of the establishment challenges age-old ideas and tries to explore new territory. E-publishing (not the kind of 'yeah, we also offer paid access to online versions' of the journal publishers) will curb the rising costs libraries and individual subscribers face, it will do away with the signing away of copyright to publishers AND it will significantly challenge the peer review system that we are all so fond of (or are we?). Let me tackle each one:
Cost: Libraries have complained for many years about the rising costs of print subscriptions. Many have been forced to reduce the number of journals they subscribe to, all the while the number of journals being published has actually risen. Reasons for rising costs are many, but one chief contributor is the pressure on scientists to publish more - publish or perish is the key word. As a consequence, research results are being broken down into 'least publishable units' and pushed out into papers.
E-publishing in the E-biomed sense, while not necessarily curbing the proliferation of published papers, will at least significantly cut the cost of publishing and accessing papers.
There is also a growing amount of data that cannot be easily published in paper form, nor does it fit established scientific databases such as Genbank. E-publishing lets us put this stuff out there and make accessible to anybody who wants it.
Copyyright: It has long irked me and many scientists I know that many publishers require me to sign a copyright transfer agreement which robs me of most rights to my own output. If I decide to reuse a figure in an overview article, I actually have to go and ask permission to do so. Granted, I ususally do get that permission, but it bugs me to no end that I have to jump through such hoops just so that I can get into a first tier journal. It was my creativity, planning, execution and insight that enabled the publication in the first place. The publisher's contribution, while not negligible, is relativeley minor. E-publishing, if done right, will let me retain copyright of all my works.
Peer review: As many other contributors to this discussion have pointed out, peer review guarantees quality of content. However, science being an endeavor of humans, peer review is fraught with perils. It is mostly an old-boy network and hence new people, new ideas, unorthodox approaches and new interpretations of old data have a very hard time getting past the reviewers. By its very nature peer review resists change. Furthermore, because 'peers' are also mostly competitors, and because the review process is confidential, the system invites fraud on the part of the reviewers. Be that stealing ideas or simply slamming a paper in order to slow down the authors, it is not in the spirit of furthering science, but definitely occurs quite often.
Now contrast peer review with the experience we have been able to gather with the pysics eprint archive. Eprints are not reviewed formally, but despite this the eprint archive is highly regarded in the field and is probably the most widely used dissemination vehicle. Why? The wide readership and instant feedback that is enabled by the system essentially guarantees that authors are very careful to not make fools of themselves. This is not an oligarchy of the establishment as in peer review, but rather democracy in action. I'll take that anyday over peer review.
Christoph Weber
The quality would actually improve as with software. 10,000 people reviewing an article are more apt to find flaws that 10. Along those same lines, even if research is flawed it may inspire others to do a better job, as in "an interesting idea, if we just fix up this part." Also the the fact that they are using a 2 tiered approach: unreviewed (aka beta test) and reviewed (aka release version). The parallels are interesting.
And as far as fraud goes, anything published in an open community is much more likely to be spotted as fraudulent (sp?) than in a closed community.
Let a thousand flowers bloom.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
The E-biomed flap is highlighting a lack in U.S. (at least) society's educational/social system. We try to teach our children all manner of facts and algorithms, but I've never seen (short of college) an explicit attempt to teach the need to evaluate information, and more importantly the methods for such evaluation. As the state of the nation demonstrates, we desperately need such.
The rise of the Internet has only exacerbated a pre-existing problem, as the existance of sleazy politicians, Ponzi schemes, and homeopathic medicine amply demonstrate. Until we get up off our arses and start looking into the information we receive and the biases of those supplying it, we will be putty in the hands of scum.
But, we can't check everything ourselves, we must delegate some of the examination to others, and the question we're missing is: ``How do we evaluate the trustworthiness of an informant?''
Such an evaluation is a case of diminishing recursion: Those we already trust can point us to informants they trust, but if we're wise we invest less trust the further the chain extends. But whom do we trust de novo? I claim that the only way to develop trust is through memory of previous information that has been checked afterward.
Did ``trickle-down'' economics work? Ask yourself how your situation changed during the Reagan-Bush years, then apply what you've learned to the trustworthiness rating of those supporting it. Does /. supply unerring information? Check up on the items you're interested in and adjust your trust accordingly. Without the effort to remember and evaluate, we're no better than animated bags of prejudice.
Now, down to cases: Why do I trust the New York Times reporting more than that of the National Enquirer? Because they've been proven to be full of malarkey less often. (Too frequently, but still less often.) Why do I trust the Merck Manual more than the local herbalist's gazette? Because the Merck tries to base itself on replicable data instead of anecdote. Does that mean one's gospel and the other's fish-wrapping? No---trust is not a binary value. It runs the gamut from nearly zero (but, if a fool says the Sun rises in the East, it's no less true) to almost complete (but even I'm fallible).
We need to start teaching trust evaluation. One of the major problems in this day and age is the value placed on quick information. Evaluation and verification takes time, and information immediately available is inherently less trustworthy---something many on /. ignore. For most information, speed is not of the essence, accuracy is. The only way we can trust speedy information is if we trust the informant, and in e-info, the informant is all too often someone we've never heard of. If Alan Cox reports a kernel bug that can wipe my hard drive, I'll act on it a lot faster than if it comes from a /. AC.
But, trust also has subject limits. I'll listen respectfully to Mr. Cox on the kernel, programming, etc., but when it comes to investment information or medical treatments he's just another tyro until I've evaluated his abilities in those fields.
[This is one reason I'm happy that we have accounts available on /.---I certainly don't know who really signed up for the LTorvalds account (if such exists), but if an account holder is reasonably careful with the password, I can trust that the DonkPunch I heard from last week is the one posting today, and can apply the trust rating I previously developed for that poster to the current post.]
Thus, information evaluation is based on how long the info's been available for evaluation, and the track record of those who've evaluated it (if I'm unable to do so personally). Teach that to society, and we'll all live better (except for the scoundrels out there).
As for Dr. Varmus, it indeed sounds as if he's got his head screwed on straight. He's setting up a system where information is explicitly separated by speed of availability and depth of examination---take whichever you like, but remember to apply the appropriate assessment based on where you got it.
As people begin to pay more attention to reliability of information, we'll see more such web sites develop---they may not have the rumors that came through in the last 30 seconds, but they'll be the places you go when it really matters.
I refuse to believe corporations are people until Texas executes one. -- desert rain on http://www.dailykos.com/user/
I can't speak for clinical researchers, but I haven't talked to anyone doing basic research who isn't in favour of having everything possible available online. The problem is archiving. Ten, twenty, one hundred years down the line, we still need to be able to get at the document. Computers aren't good at that.
Leaving aside the difficulty of keeping exabytes of data accessible, computers are always in a state of flux, up to and including file formats. Opening a document that was created even two years ago can be an adventure -- imagine what that will be like in a century. We have options, of course: we could take documents over a certain age off-line, and resign ourselves to dealing with a certain format for decades to come. The latter is a lousy choice (from experience); and the former negates all the benefits that Katz is praising.
Printing them on paper solves a lot of these problems. (For most people, journals are freely accessible, if not convenient: it's just a matter of finding the closest university library.) The ideal case would be that E-biomed also published its articles in journal form, or that everything that went to E-biomed was also published elsewhere. The problem is that journals are very, very expensive to publish. They're not high profile enough to attract good advertising budgets, and the subscription charges are already too high. Most bio journals already charge the author a massive per page cost to have the article published. If subscriptions to these journals end, then I don't know where they could make up the revenue.
E-biomed is good, but we can't simply let the journals vanish. They do fill a role. If freely accessible information is good, then information freely accessible for centuries is better. For a change, let's try to plan this move all the way through.
There is a broad public perception that newer == better. And that if it's the latest research, it must be the best. I worry that people in desperate (or not so desperate) medical need will read preliminary results, or mis-interpret the conclusions, and immediately act on that (mis)information as if it were the best treatment. So far the general public has shown an alarming lack of understanding of even the basic conceptual framework on which most of this research is based.
Does anybody remember the run on shark cartilage capsules and additives after preliminary info showed that sharks seldom got cancer. (Even though there was no evidence that ingesting the stuff was at all helpful, and there was lots of reason to believe it wasn't.) There are also plenty of cases of patients demanding antibiotics of their physicians when they're suffering from viral infections, thereby not treating the real illness while at the same time providing a perfect breeding ground for drug resistant bacterial strains like the drug resistant TB strains croping up all over.
Maybe the long term answer is to educate the public in research practices and critical thinking, as well as improve science education in general, but I fear that the short term result will be bad decisions, and litigation arising from those bad decisions which will hamper research rather than help.
I find it humorous that the medical research community is so against this. Wasn't Arpanet converted into a public internet to more or less circulate research material to scientists and educational institutions? This is one area I didn't ever think the net would get any flak from, but evidently the medical community is made up of political types. It is true thoough, those that control the information, control the world...
First, the taking of copyright material and distributing it isn't really a blow for freedom. Rather, it is a blow for crime. Or is it?
After all, the Buffy episode in question was to be the second part of a two part program IIRC. Yanking it could be construed as fraud.
That aside, as a libertarian I believe that the producers generally DO have the right to restrict distribution of what they produce and defend against those that would "steal" same to distribute under their terms. But, they have to bear the costs of such defense. When they pull a bonehead move, and anger enough people, the fact that some will no longer respect their property rights and attempt to steal from them should come as no surprise.
Bottom line: do something stupid and your defense costs go up. With the net, they can go WAAAY UP, to the point of not making it economical to mount a defense.
Governments are supposed to restrain such "mob rule", of course, but all too often the cure is worse than the risk of disease. Ultimately, the founding fathers of the U.S. believed that a focused "mob" was safer than an all-powerful government, hence the right to bear arms so as to facilitate the overthrow of same, in extremis.
Because I'm a libertarian, I have to deal with issues such as "What if someone got to own most of the water, or air? Should we respect their property rights, lay down, and die?" Morally, yes, if they didn't lie and steal to get all of such an important resource -- we're to blame for not collecting our own as well. Of course, many wouldn't see it that way, and mount an attack, which the "air-owner" couldn't resist. Again, the cost of defense when you tick people off limits just how much you can tick them off to make it worthwhile.
The net has lowered the bar where it becomes impractical to get others annoyed. I see this as a good thing.
Second: whenever change is afoot, there will be those, who, benefiting from the status quo, will seek to oppose it (Machiavelli, "The Prince").
Some profit from hoarding what they know. Others wish to share. Those others now have a relatively cheap distribution channel. They WILL be opposed by the former, lest their knowledge be diluted in value. Look for greater attempts to control, and license, this distribution channel (the internet) all in the name of the "public interest", of course. Let's strive to keep it as diversified as possible, shall we?
In Liberty,
Rene S. Hollan