TOWARDS A PUBLIC-FRIENDLY PUBLISHING ATTITUDE IN THE EARTH SCIENCES

Society becomes increasingly dependent on applied earth sciences, among other things for fuel, base metals and the petrochemical industry. Apart from these ‘classical’ needs, society must also get rid of numerous types of waste; earth sciences must provide safe, secure and sufficient sites for disposal. A most important tendency is that the earth sciences must also provide both background data and practical solutions for the safety of our society. Floodings, volcanic eruptions and land slides are only a few of the hazards that occur, and that should be prevented or, if prevention is impossible, the negative effects of which should be minimized.

These new tasks require new research methods, and new ways of presentation. The latter is of extreme importance, because the results of much earth-scientific research are no longer aimed at fellow-geologists, other scientists and technicians, but rather at decision-makers, politicians and the lay public. This requires an entirely different attitude with respect to publishing, but it is still often considered inappropriate for earth scientists - like for other scientists - to publish in a way that is easily understandable and unambigous for people without a proper earth-scientific education.

This is expressed, among other things, by the attitude of university managers: publishing in professional scholarly journals is a must, but publishing for the lay public (which provides, ultimately, all research funds) is commonly considered as ‘not done’. Even if scientific credits are given for such publications, the practice is that the number of points given for such ‘popular’ texts are minimum compared with those given for publication in scholarly journals. This hampers the acceptance of earth-scientific research, and diminishes the influence of earth scientists if and when decisions must be taken by authorities which should take earth-scientific aspects into account. Universities should therefore not only teach how to write a professional paper, but also how to ‘translate’ such works into texts that are not only understandable for the lay public, but that are also presented in a way that is attractive and that facilitates the message to be remembered. All parties involved should change their attitudes towards earth-scientific publishing in this way.