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Wissenschaft für alle (ppt, 4.4 MB)

We publish materials from the forum “Science Journalism: Features of the Profession and Training Opportunities”, held by the German Cultural Center. Goethe in Moscow as part of the “Popular Science” project on March 5, 2012. Below is a report by a specialist in new media and sociology of media, a member of the research group for the study of access to information at the School of Arts and Sciences of the University of Sao Paulo, publicist Dr. Ra Volker Ralph Grassmuk.

Ivan Zasursky : Now I ask our last speaker, Volker Grassmuck, to take a seat and finally talk about the future, what is happening now with new media. The topic that started is D eutsche Welle, perhaps in practical terms. I hope Volker will give us a different perspective.

Volker Ralf Grassmuck : I would like to start with science communication. I will talk about how communication takes place within science, then I will talk about open access, educational opportunities, open data and, ultimately, science for everyone.

Three weeks ago, the Budapest Open Access Initiative celebrated its tenth anniversary. In December 2001, a small group of scientists and scientific publishers gathered at the invitation of the Open Society Institute, and thus declared a new page in scientific communication.

This is what their statements look like:

• Old tradition and new technology merge together to produce a new social product.
• The old tradition represents the willingness of science and scientists to publish the fruits of their work free of charge in the interests of research and in the interests of science.

We are talking about the electronic distribution of licensed literature, as well as unlimited access to this information by teachers, schoolchildren, students - anyone interested.

In order to realize your potential,

The Budapest group proposed a two-pronged strategy: publishing a so-called open access journal, the so-called “Golden Path,” and allowing all subscription journals to use archiving of their own essays.

In this case, we turn to a social institution called “allmende”; there was such a concept in Roman law. Allmende included both land and various production resources, as well as a theater and even a hippodrome. Based on this concept, in the European Middle Ages, “Universitas magistorum et scolarium” emerged - this is a society of students and teachers, that is, in fact, our university, which had its own right to manage its resources. It was also about freedom of learning and research. And the oldest university was created in Bologna in 1200, and another university in Coimbra in Portugal in 1290.

The self-regulatory mechanisms that were then created were described by Robert Merton in 1942, and formulated in the four pillars of a democratic, egalitarian scientific ethics. They are collectively called " CUDOS ": Communism (communism), U for universalism, D for lack of interest, OS for organized skepticism. And I would like to present to you three short paragraphs from the chapter on communism, and you can imagine that in 1942 this work was written in the USA, of course, it was a real provocation. Communism in the non-technical and expanded concept of common ownership of products is another pillar of scientific ethics, and the knowledge of science is a product of social cooperation, and is thus transmitted to society. The demands of science and the need of the scientist to have his own scientific or spiritual property are limited by the recognition of value, that is, eponymization. In this case, Darwin's theory or Ohm's laws prescribe the name of the researcher and the same applies, for example, to the computing power of $1 computer chips, which doubles every 18 months. The institutional concept of science as a part of knowledge is thus linked to the imperative of communication.

Thus, there is pressure to expand the research findings. And this is connected with the institutional goal of expanding the boundaries of knowledge. But, on the other hand, the basis for recognizing this is the publication of knowledge. In this case we are talking about the social nature of science. Newton is credited with this expression: “If I have seen anything better than others, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants.” In this case, we are talking about the cooperative and cumulative quality of the result of scientific action. This is what the situation looked like at the end of World War II. Academic journals were not independent businesses, but were part of the academic structure. And from the first scientific journal, which was created by Henry Oldenburg in 1661, it was called "Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London", they served as a public register for scientific breakthrough, and thus answered the question of who stood on whose shoulders. At the time copyright was created, it was first recorded in the Statute of Queen Anne in 1710, a public register similar to a patent office. A self-regulating meritocracy does not simply delegate quality issues to an external committee or jury, but deals with them itself. And this is the very scientific “allmende”. Of course, we are talking about double peer review.

Another tool was developed by Eugene Garfield in 1960, first from a theoretical and then from a practical point of view, thus creating the Institute of Scientific Information. The idea looked like this, it was simple: it was those articles that were often cited that had to be processed as follows - if you count all the citations, then they, in fact, provided a certain daily practice for scientists and created a common unified code, an index, which called Science Citation Index (SCI). This situation was also called the impact factor . And for scientists, the decisive question is: in which journal should you publish your article? This can be compared to whether you are currently publishing or not publishing on Facebook .

In 1960, there was an increasing desire to quantify research, and Garfield's supposedly objective index was well suited for this purpose. And there was also talk about how much academic careers are recognized and whether scientists are given the appropriate funds to work. And the branding of published research becomes much more important than the publications themselves. Jean-Clone Guidon wrote about this in his work, which was called "The Long Shadow of Oldenburg." And the thing is that it is

Just as scientists were required to read certain journals, libraries therefore had to purchase them.

Of course, these major magazines had very high subscription fees, and they were constantly rising.

In 1970, the crisis began. Thus, university libraries had to stop paying for this high subscription plan. This characterizes the so-called Bayh-Dole Act , which was published in the USA in 1980, namely, a system was introduced where innovations were increasingly transferred to patents. This situation also occurred in Germany. It must be said that in Germany they have increasingly been saving money, and now there is growing criticism towards German companies that take part in the financing of public universities. Public universities that receive funds from private companies are often criticized. At the same time, the Budapest Open Access Group proposed another technology. The Internet has evolved to make scientific collaboration and scientific “allmende” more open so that more people can benefit from information. In this case, we are talking about Denis Ritchie and Ken Thompson, who developed their own instrument, the so-called in - house tool . Since the telecommunications monopoly was prohibited from moving to other markets, UNIX offered in - house for a nominal price tool to universities, and a large number of computer scientists took part in the development of this product.

When ITT went out of business in 1984, the UNIX product could continue to be sold. And this system was licensed, it changed significantly, and a large number of different systems that fit UNIX appeared on the market. It would have been possible to continue to exist in this world if hackers had not refused to participate in the development of this product. So, Richard Storman worked at MIT and in 1983 began developing the UNIX project . To prevent this free operating system from becoming privatized, he, among other things, developed a special license called GPL ( General Public License ). You can see the main provisions of this license agreement on the slide. He defined 3 degrees of freedom. The most important thing is that all changes must return to this general knowledge, to this general area of ​​​​knowledge.

In fact, it became an echo of Robert Merton's rules in the software world. A whole market has emerged for different versions of UNIX and Linux , here you can see the names of companies that develop free software based on GNU Linux ; The free software market is not limited to them, of course. In this world of knowledge, a new knowledge infrastructure for science is emerging. In 1991, the website http://arxiv.org/ appeared ; today it is the largest repository of e-prints in physics and mathematics. This site is now operated by the Cornell University Library on a volunteer basis. Thanks to the digital revolution, the scientific community now has the opportunity, at its own expense, to create similar resources where scientific articles are published. In 1998, the site coalition was founded in the same spirit - an international alliance of academic libraries. This alliance began publishing its own journals on a free access basis.

In 2001, a petition was issued calling on all scientists from around the world to no longer publish in subscription journals without their articles appearing in freely accessible archives over time. And from this petition came a public scientific library, which also publishes journals in the public domain. And what's more, it publishes the largest peer-reviewed journal, not only a free journal, but also the largest of all peer-reviewed journals, called PLoS ONE. All these magazines are distributed under a Creative Commons license. Then the Free Access Initiative began in Budapest in February 2002, followed by the Berlin Declaration of Free Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities in October 2003. The point was that a certain consensus had been reached on free access to information on the social, public and human sciences.

To this convention, to this Berlin declaration Leading institutions like the German Research Society joined. In 2007, the German UNESCO commission published the “Free Access” directory, I will say a few words about it a little later. Nowadays, more and more, those who support science are directing scientists to publish in such presses. For example, British Economics Minister David Wilets said that in Germany this provision now applies to all state-supported scientific research. We recently found out that the German Scientific Society has not yet joined this movement, has not taken this step.

According to current estimates, more than 30% of scientific texts published in 2001 are in the public domain, 2/3 of them are in the so-called “green path”, and another 1/3 are published in “golden journals” in the public domain.

Of course, there are still certain barriers here: barriers in institutions, but also barriers in heads. However, it seems that science is going the right way. And in this way we can realize the old community of knowledge, the idea of ​​this community of knowledge, with the help of new media technologies of the 21st century . Before I move from scientific journals to science journalism, I would like to make a number of points about free, open, public educational resources. It may seem to some that science and education are very closely related to each other, but a little more time passed before free educational resources appeared.

An important breakthrough occurred in 2002, when the Massachusetts Institute of Technology called on its staff, professors, teachers to prepare all their study materials, syllabuses, lectures, reference lists, exam assignments, etc. for publication on a freely accessible Internet site. A consortium quickly formed around this OpenCourseWare project, which now includes more than 2,000 universities. Texas Rice University's Connections department creates learning modules that can be combined in a variety of ways. An important source of inspiration here was the free software of Christopher Kelly, who was part of the Connections project and wrote a dissertation on the program. On February 1, the “ Connections ” project launched a new initiative, “ Opentext ” it is called, this project is developing educational materials and textbooks.

A final example in this area is the PTP University in Cape Town, founded by Schmidt. The main principle is openness, a community of peers who learn something together. Certification of students and peer review of research are carried out by peers, those who work at this university. Thus, barrier-free learning throughout life is possible, which is available to people all over the globe. In addition to free access, free educational resources, there is also such a term as “free data”. This is the youngest movement. It all started with the Swede Hans Rosling, who can be called the Elvis Presley of statistical science.

It looks like my mind doesn't match my data set. This means you need to upgrade either one or the other. When I talk to students and listen to what they talk about during breaks, they always say: “Oh, us and them.” I ask: “What do you mean, what does this opposition mean? This turns out to be the same opposition as the West and developing countries. How can we define these two concepts? After all, everyone knows that they exist.” So one girl told me: “You know, it’s very simple: the Western world is made up of small families that live a long time. Developing countries, on the contrary, are large families that live little.” And this is how we try to transform a set of data from our memory into a set of computer data. Here you see, on this axis we have family size, the number of children each woman has, and here we see life expectancy: 40,50,60. And indeed, what the student said is quite consistent with the concept of peace.

The website gapminder.org is a fantastic resource, you can use it yourself, it contains a whole set of data, and depending on the point at which this data was collected and accumulated, you can see the dynamics of the development of a particular indicator. Data is usually taken from UN organizations like WHO, International Telecommunications Organization, World Bank and so on. We are, of course, talking about global databases here. However, their number is limited. In 2006, the British daily newspaper Guardian launched the " Free Our Data " campaign. The point was to facilitate access to all data under state control. On the one side,

this campaign was aimed at officials, so that they make all data freely available, on the other hand, this campaign was aimed at ensuring that the necessary laws for this appear.

They have achieved success, primarily at the European level. It says here that a directive on the use of public information is coming soon. This directive was adopted in 2003. In this way , the Guardian became a pioneer of new data journalism. Here's one interactive example - a visualization of UK greenhouse gas emissions is shown on this slide.

The prerequisite for this is free access to the original data, free access, without restrictions on their use. This data must be in an open, machine-readable format. One more video with Rosling, which I probably won’t show now, and we’ll go straight to “Science for Everyone.”

The Budapest Declaration of Free Access is a publicly accessible set of scientific literature that can be used by all scientists, teachers, students, and just anyone who is curious.

Access to it is not limited. As part of my political socialization, I took part in the anti-nuclear energy movement for many years. This led to the fact that I actually studied for three years at the physics department, because as I participated in this movement, I had to learn a lot about uranium mining, about uranium enrichment, about different types of reactors, right down to the storage issue that was not resolved at that time radioactive waste. A few critical comments from scientists who did not then work for nuclear energy played a very serious role in this transfer of knowledge, information, and, of course, many critical journalists played a colossal role in this process. The Fukushima disaster was mentioned several times today, and it once again demonstrated what we are talking about here. A concern that does not make its internal data publicly available, and a public that does not know where to go, ends up facing the consequences of the disaster alone.

Alternative energy sources, genetic technologies, new forms of energy, data protection, nanotechnology, climate change, computer science, economics, banking laws - all this is a very complex set of scientific data. We therefore require informed action and citizen consent so that our policies can be informed by knowledge. And I see three characters here. Firstly, these are the scientists themselves - we have already talked about how they can make their knowledge more accessible, these are the resources of free education. Another opportunity is your own lectures or participation in such free resources, free knowledge banks as Wikipedia, which has now become an indispensable tool for many studies. The Wikipedia Ambassador program should encourage many students and teachers to make Wikipedia better and richer. The German scientific community still does not require its members to publish in open sources, but in 2008 it supported the initiative to publish video diaries of scientific research, and the results were presented on this site. The second group of actors is, of course, journalists who write about science. These are journalists from private and public media. Many previous speakers have already explained in detail what this is, so I will immediately move on to the third group.

The third group is citizens. Citizen journalism, such international networks as Global Voices , have already become an absolutely integral part of our everyday life and the overall functioning of the media around the world. These are topics such as human rights, environmental protection, Internet activism, but they also write about science. There are specialized scientific blogs, more and more of them. Often these blogs are written directly by scientists. It happens that they are taught by students of relevant disciplines, but sometimes they are taught by people who are not directly related to this science. The Open Edition blog in France is a blog portal for the humanities ( hypotheses.org ).

And here I want to summarize:

freedom of science and freedom of the press must be guaranteed by society. The vast majority of scientists and the vast majority of public channels are funded, after all, by the public.

At the same time, they have a privilege, they are under special protection, however, they bear a special responsibility to society. The press, radio and television often consider themselves a fourth branch of government beyond the three classical branches of government, they are something of a critical gatekeeper, a critical guardian of the public interest. Thus, they have an even greater responsibility for how discussions on scientific or technical topics look. Mr. Grabowski has already spoken about this. Primary publishing is becoming more and more accessible to more and more people through open access. True, society does not immediately and not necessarily directly grasp their significance for social development. In order for this meaning to become clear, an additional intermediary is needed.

We must not forget the increasing and growing influence of religious fundamentalists around the world. Nobody touched on this topic today because it is on the periphery or even outside the brackets of what we are discussing here. However, it still seems important to me. This movement is due to the fact that enlightenment is becoming less and less reliable. Jürgen Habermas, in his speech “Faith and Knowledge” at the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade in 2001, spoke of two directions: “On the one hand, there is the productive force of science and technology unleashed by capitalism, and on the other hand the restraining forces of religion and the church.” This unknown dialectic of enlightenment is still on the agenda, and science journalists should not forget about it. Social and legal channels: television, radio and other media are also a serious factor influencing the formation of public opinion. It directly influences the fact that we have new spaces for the articulation of new scientific topics. The fifth estate, namely civil society, the citizens themselves, thanks to the digital revolution, have become another pillar of critical discourse about the society in which we live. Wikipedia has demonstrated what collective intelligence can achieve. And, of course, one of our central tasks is to support this collective intelligence and its projects.

The environment in which social and legal channels operate is largely the Internet. The pressure of private TV and radio stations - in Europe at least - has led to the fact that things are published only during the week, they should not be similar to press reports, they should not compete with what the private media offer. The UNESCO Guide to Free Access contains an article by the then Secretary General of the first channel of German television ARD , Verena Wiedemann. She concludes that digitization, in general, makes it possible to open up free access to the ARD archives. The basic principle should be:

The content that citizens paid for through the TV tax should be made available to them through all possible platforms at no additional cost, so that citizens have a platform for remakes, that is, the basis for creative endeavors.

Wiedemann calls free access a model for discussions about opening up free access to archives. She points, however, to the main problem - copyrights, intellectual property rights, which largely impede the opening of archives. Even the BBC faced this experience when it launched its major Creative Archive initiative. TV and radio companies want it. Those who pay tax on television and radio want it too. Therefore, I believe that we should succeed. Therefore, it seems to me that the two theses that are written on the slide should give impetus to the emergence of new legislative frameworks for how knowledge is transferred from person to person. I am confident that we must fully exploit the opportunities that the digital revolution gives us and use them to the fullest. Thank you very much!

See also: New ways of science journalism How to teach popularization of science Science journalism for journalists “A website is the best way to win an audience” Knowledge from Der Spiegel