Would providing a lay statement with each scientific publication increase public participation in science?
I would imagine this to be similar to an abstract, perhaps a little longer, and always freely available. It would be of particular benefit to the so-called ‘open source’ publishing schemes where the public can access the publication, but not necessarily at a level they could understand. This statement would be written by the authors, perhaps only for online publication (so journal space issues could be appeased), and contain a brief account of background, main findings and conclusions. It would be as jargon free as possible, but not over simplified. There is a fine line between a lay statement and a made-for-idiots explanation of the science involved. The statement could also be illustrated with one or two figures.
It sounds like a good idea to me, if only as a useful resource for University press offices and the media: perhaps getting the people who actually did the research to write, or at least participate more in the writing of, a summary pitched at the right level for the general public would help to prevent the all-to-common phenomenon of them degenerating into gibberish. I can pick out two that I read at the end of last week where some serious remedial work wouldn’t go amiss. The first describes how an earthquake in Alaska in 2002 apparently triggered some seismic activity on the Cascadia Subduction zone, off the coast of British Columbia, in the form of ‘tremor’. In seismology, tremor is a specific sort of low frequency, long-period vibration, very different from the seismic waves released in a typical earthquake (and, until quite recently, only thought to be associated with magma movement in volcanos – see here, for example). In common parlance, however, ‘tremor’ and ‘earthquake’ mean exactly the same thing, which makes it rather unfortunate that the more technical definition is not explicitly described in the release I’ve linked to. Therefore this statement:
Tremors in subduction zones are associated with slow-slip events in which energy equivalent to a moderate-sized earthquake is released in days or weeks, rather than seconds.
sounds a lot like a claim that all subduction zone earthquakes are slow slip events (in fact, that’s how I initially read it). Ooops.
The second release describes GPS measurements of deformation in a region in central America close to a subduction zone, where the Cocos plate is being pushed eastwards beneath the west coast of Mexico (see here). Just like in Japan, between big earthquakes at the plate boundary the subduction thrust is locked, and the motion of the subducting plate is transferred into the overriding plate. Therefore, you would expect the GPS to show western Mexico moving slowly east between earthquakes, and jerking west during earthquakes. Instead, in the last six months of 2006, the ground moved slowly west, without any accompanying seismic activity on the subduction zone. Does this mean that strain is being released across the plate boundary, reducing the risk of a large earthquake? Kristine Larson, who is quoted in the article, doesn’t seem to think so (although she doesn’t say why) – but that’s somewhat moot, because the article doesn’t bother to actually explain why these results even have a bearing on the seismic hazard (because they suggest strain release rather than strain build-up); instead it talks about a ‘reversal of plate motion’, which it isn’t really, and deviations from the expectations of ‘plate tectonic theory’, which, because it is about predicting long-term plate motions and not elastic deformation around plate boundaries, would actually have the region in question moving west!
So, it can all too easily go a little wrong. But before the press officers of the world start burning me in effigy, I fully acknowledge that trying to sum up scientific results without resorting to too much jargon (and, often, actually identifying jargon as jargon, which is the problem in my first example) is hard. It’s even harder when you’re don’t necessarily understand all the nuances yourself – something which is quite likely given the dominance of humanities people in media-related positions. That’s why I think that forcing the scientists who actually know what the research actually says to write it up for public as well as professional consumption, it would actually help you a little, even if their first attempt is still laden with jargon and qualifiers and doesn’t claim to have cured cancer and/or broken the laws of thermodynamics.
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