Communications experts suggest that the best way to get a conversation going with someone you disagree with is to ask them to talk about themselves. Unfortunately, I have found that asking “What the heck is wrong with you??!?” is really not a good way to start a productive conversation. But I am not ready to abandon it entirely.
My most recent voicing of that question was in response to last week’s announcement that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, under Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., had canceled its subscriptions to the 3,000 or so scientific journals published by Springer Nature. According to Andrew Nixon, the HHS spokesperson, “All contracts with Springer Nature are terminated or no longer active. Precious taxpayer dollars should be (sic) not be used on unused subscriptions to junk science.”
As a former editor at Nature Publishing, I would quibble with Nixon’s misinformed assessment of the quality of science published in the peer-reviewed Nature journals, and the central importance of most of those publications for overall scientific knowledge and progress. I suspect his real objection to the Nature titles (or the objection of his boss, whom he is obviously parroting) is not that the published science is junk, but rather that it contradicts the pseudoscientific brain-worm droppings of the HHS secretary and those around him. In that context, “What the heck is wrong with you?” seems like an eminently reasonable thing to ask.
To be fair, there is a lamentable increase in the number of scientific papers being published that can only be described as, well, “junk science.” This contamination of the literature includes an alarming proliferation of outright fraudulent publications in an expanding avalanche of new digital-only “science journals.” The primary reason for this rapid growth is the unrelenting pressure on scientists to publish often and in as good a journal as possible to earn tenure, hire post-docs and techs, keep grant money coming in, and maybe even found a biotech pipe-dream company. Publication count and quality have pushed aside virtually all other metrics of scientific worth in many places.
Sadly and predictably, despite ongoing efforts to stop it, publication quality has suffered as the quantity has increased. About two million papers across all science publishing history were indexed in the main publication databases in 2016. Five years later, three million papers have appeared, despite a drop in the number of new PhD students and researchers. Fewer scientists are writing and/or reviewing far more papers than ever before: an unsustainable situation. As a result, the quality of peer review — the primary guardian of scientific quality — suffers, which in turn leads to crappy papers and the not-entirely inaccurate statements like those of HHS’s Nixon.
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But to focus solely on the negatives of what is an overwhelmingly positive aspect of the scientific enterprise is exactly what the Trump administration wants. They are proficient at ferreting out the less-desirable facets of many of our institutions and programs and turning them into the defining features for public consumption. Although I can’t entirely dismiss HHS’s formal claims about junk science, I can insist that over-emphasizing the extent of those claims is only distracting from the much larger overall good provided by scientific publishing.
Being constantly on defense over trumped-up negatives, whether on this topic or on immigration, gender identity, health care, etc., is exhausting. It is also demoralizing to see most of our elected representatives mired down themselves in defensive, almost apologetic crouches rather than pushing back — hard. Maybe we can start changing the current “on-our-heels” dynamic by going on the offense, including asking publicly and loudly where appropriate, “What the heck is wrong with you?”
Fintan Steele is an ex-Benedictine monk and priest with a Ph.D. in biology/genetics. He spent most of his life in science communications, including scientific publishing and, most recently, for biopharma and academic centers. He and his husband live in Hygiene. Email: [email protected].
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