Science communication media for scientists and the public

Abstract

In the August issue of EMBO reports, Matias Pasquali raised the issue of how best to communicate scientific research and results and argued for a more important role for video (Pasquali, 2007). For generations of scientists, the traditional medium of communication has been the scientific manuscript. Replacing “inky marks on shredded trees” (Gates, 1999) has been difficult to imagine, yet, with the advent of the Internet, many journals have moved towards the total electronic management of publication—from submission to peer review to editorial management to publication and distribution. However, the fundamental unit of scientific publication is still a self-contained manuscript, albeit enhanced with links to the literature, commentary and supplementary materials—“the primary means by which scientists communicate with each other has remained frozen in time” (Bachrach, 2001). Scientific data generation, collection, analysis and visualization have all improved through technological advances, while the communication medium of results to peers and the general public has remained essentially unchanged, which limits the ways in which science is propagated and disseminated. Although the Internet revolution has offered certain enhancements to the publication process—notably, the speed of publication and open commentary—various problems, for instance URL persistence, remain (Cheung, 2001). Nonetheless, both established journals and new, online-only publications challenge the traditional model of publication, not the least because they have a certain appeal for authors and readers, such as open access. In addition, as Pasquali points out, online video publication greatly enhances the amount of extra information that can be communicated with a paper. One of the consequences of the new online journal models and the huge amount of scientific information available on the Internet is that the credit system of citations is increasingly inadequate—the manuscript remains the unit of citation currency, and the use of software modules (States, 2002) or curated database entries (Lynch, 2004) cannot be readily acknowledged. Remarkably, a recent study suggests that scientific publication is buried among a plethora of non-authoritative material (Schroeder et al, 2007). Therefore, despite the advances in technology, data sharing, standards, open access initiatives and user interaction, scientific publication remains problematic. Ignoring the issues of documentation, such as efficient information extraction or adequate document technology, the fact remains that, due to information overload or information fatigue, science might not be communicated to its target groups as effectively as it should be. As Pasquali suggested, the effective and honest communication of science for the next generation of scientists will require the use of other media. The success of web communities such as Del.icio.us (http://del.icio.us) and WebSphere (http://www.websphere.org), or user-driven sites such as YouTube (http://www.youtube.com), might point the way as they offer both a community and media-sharing tools. Today's graduate students are probably more familiar with these web resources than any similar site with scientific publications. Science communicators should therefore aim to connect with these young scientists who would rather watch a ‘science' video than sift through masses of written information. Moreover, to counteract the detrimental effect of scientific misinformation from non-authoritative sources, journals might also need to consider adopting such media for broadcasting research results to a wider audience. In our own experience, we have struggled to communicate a fairly complex piece of research in comparative genomics to our peers and the public. The original manuscript describes the Net of Life—an intricate network of horizontal and vertical gene flow patterns across the microbial world (Kunin et al, 2005). Despite excellent editorial handling, it was the traditional medium of the manuscript that limited the presentation of the data, algorithm and the visualization of the results. During conference presentations, we therefore demonstrated the complexity of this work by a simple sequence of alternative views of the gene flow network. To present the main results to our peers, students and the general public in an aesthetically more engaging way, we created a science communication video—the result of a collaboration between our research group and a digital media company (http://www.thesecondmethod.com/nof.wmv). In the near future, it seems possible that journals will look more like video collections that, after peer-review and editorial processing, users can evaluate using a star-rating system. These clips could represent the entry points to the scientific work; first triggering the curiosity of the reader, then directing them to the relevant material and enhancing their interactive experience. The publication medium might change along the lines whereby a traditional manuscript might truly become the ‘supplement' browsed only by experts interested in the gory details while the general communication and consumption of data might rely on video and the Internet. In fact, videos have an even greater potential than just enhancing communication among scientists. As Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google pointed out: “And the argument is simple: people are using video clips everywhere. They're sharing them. They're building communities around them” (Vogelstein, 2007).