SOME WORRYING TRENDS IN SCIENTIFIC PUBLISHING RELATED TO COMMUNICATING SCIENCE TO THE PUBLIC

Several recent trends and developments in scientific publishing are complicating and inhibiting communication of science, particularly related to sustainability, to the public worldwide. Many of these are getting worse, not better, in part because of the culture of science. The first is that scientific communication and publication is now predominantly in technical English and will be for the foreseeable future. In contrast, the proportion of native English speakers is declining worldwide. Thus local scientists and the local press will need to be engaged increasingly for communication, particularly in the developing world where policies grounded in science are desperately needed for sustainability and health care. Secondly, coverage of science is waning in newspapers and magazines (which themselves are losing readership) and shifting—-often to more shallow coverage and with greater noise—-to the WWW, blogs, and podcasts. Scientists, universities, societies, and journals will need to foster these alternate means of communication. Thirdly, in the United States and elsewhere, governments are interfering with scientific publishing, for example, via OFAC and Homeland Security or by inhibiting or intimidating their scientists from communicating freely. Fourth, insufficient attention is being given to maintaining archival data sets, and up to 20% of links to such data are inactive in many publications. Fifth, recent publishing models may be threatening scientific integrity. Overall, communication of individual results works well, whereas providing an integrated view of the state of knowledge useful for local or regional action or understanding is problematic. Some approaches, such as by the IPCC, may work well but are too infrequent. Such integrated views are essential for communicating scientific knowledge regarding sustainability.