EDITORIAL EJB ELECTRONIC JOURNAL OF BIOTECHNOLOGY ....MOVING FROM SCIENCE TO
DEVELOPMENT... |
Publishing research on the Internet New responsibilities for electronic journals
In a talk I gave at the 1999 World Conference on Science in Budapest, I argued that the scientific journal will assume heightened importance in the Internet environment, where expanded accessibility to information will produce a pressing need for efficient and reliable means to distinguish between information that is reliable and useful and that which is not. All of us, scientists and citizens, have faced the need to choose among different streams of information. We tend to use personal experience and our training to make such choices. But when the latter are not sufficient, we typically rely on a source that we trust to help us evaluate the value of competing bits of information. Providing the public and policy makers with knowledge necessary for making informed decisions rises to the level of a social responsibility for the scientific community that is discharged, in part, through the scientific journal. Journals must now consider more than ever before that their readership will increasingly include lay readers thirsty for information but often lacking skills to assess its value. Thus, the authoritative role of the journal in the electronic era can be enhanced if it assumes greater responsibility for helping its lay readers to distinguish credible scientific and technical information from that which is questionable, if not patently wrong, among the vast and often undifferentiated pool of information on the Internet. This challenge is complicated further by the appearance of so much advertising on the World Wide Web that may make it even more difficult to separate scientific and medical information from marketing pitches. It is my judgment that this qualitative filtering function will increasingly be viewed as an essential normative role for scientific and medical journals. This past year, AAAS, (American Association for the Advancement of Science), collaborated with UNESCO's Commission on the Ethics of Scientific Knowledge and Technology on an international ethics survey. One question asked of researchers was "what advances in information technology do you believe will pose the greatest ethical challenges for scientists, engineers and society at large". A prominent theme weaving through the responses was concern about the quality of information on the Internet. There were fears that it could be misleading and misused by non-scientists, thereby resulting in inappropriate and perhaps dangerous actions, by the general public. Some of the following comments contributed by respondents were typical.
The task is daunting, yet absolutely essential if science is to earn public trust and confidence. I have no easy solutions, but urge that journal editors begin to consider these matters collectively in concert with members of their scientific communities and lay representatives. It makes little sense for each journal to establish policies independent of others that may only add to further confusion on the part of readers. Whatever policies are eventually adopted should be prominently posted on a journal's Web site so that readers will have some guidance for evaluating the information. This effort, it seems to me, is a critical component of science's social contract with the public in the era of the Internet. |
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Mark S. Frankel,
Ph.D. |
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