Wednesday, March 6, 2019

House Committee AGAINST Science, Space, and Technology?

[This is a copy of my blogpost, previously on thespectroscope.com.]
I just stumbled into the twitter account of the House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space, and Technology. This is the Committee with jurisdiction over NASA, NSF, EPA, NOAA and many other agencies. I realize that the Chair is Lamar Smith, a famous climate-change denier. I know that he has been abusing the Committee to harass scientists with subpoenas. I know that AAAS and several other science societies just sent a letter to Smith warning that the actions of his committee "threaten to inhibit the free exchange of ideas across scientific disciplines not only for NOAA, but for other government experts and the academic and industry scientists with whom they collaborate."
I know all of the above, and yet I was stunned to see the twitter feed of this Committee. The chair is a Republican, but this is supposed to be a bipartisan Committee acting in the interests of science and technology. As is, I wonder if their Twitter account has been outsourced to someone from FoxNews. 
A quick search shows 12 tweets from FoxNews. What about from the New York Times? Just 1, critical of the EPA.
And if we search the Committee's tweets on "NSF", instead of highlighting amazing discoveries, we get mocking such as:



Sci, Space, & Tech GOP
✔@housesciencegop

Chairman @LamarSmithTX21: should not reward 's frivolous use of taxpayer money with even more money. http://ow.ly/xojf5 

6:13 AM - May 29, 2014
Twitter Ads info and privacy

See Sci, Space, & Tech GOP's other Tweets

Other highlights from a quick scan of the Committee's twitter account:
Yes, this is the same Committee skewered by Jon Stewart (starts at 2min:45sec):
COMMENT
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Is sexual harassment less common in biology than in astronomy?

[This is a copy of my blogpost, previously on thespectroscope.com.]
Recent news is full of headlines such as Congresswoman Proposes Bill to Fight Astronomy’s Sexual Harassment Problem, Astronomy’s snowballing sexual harassment scandal picks up even more cases, Astronomy’s sexual harassment problem gets Congressional attention, Astronomers Are Finally Doing Something About Sexual Harassment and countless others. Painful and powerful stories are being shared under #AstroSH. This creates an impression that as an academic field, astronomy may be an outlier in sexual harassment. I am not sure this is true.
A professor wrote to me yesterday, "Lenny, I'm hoping things are not so bad on the bio/biomed side of research. I've not seen any examples this bad, also there are better safeguards in the med schools that I've worked in. Hoping that is not unusual." I really want her to be right. I want to think that sexual harassment in biology is infinitely less common than in other fields. But I think the same structural issues that plague astronomy are present across all research disciplines. 
I looked up two molecular biology professors that were accused of sexual harassment [see correction below]. Both were pushed out of their schools (one a medical school and one a university). Where are they now? One is a full professor at Columbia U. and the other at U. of Chicago. And when Arnold Levine, president of Rockefeller U., stepped down due to inappropriate sexual contact with a student, he transferred to Rutgers. 
I don't have any statistics about the frequency of sexual harassment, by academic field of study. Not sure such stats exist. But it's pretty clear that the same things are going on in biology - it's the abusers rather than the victims who are protected. I'm glad that Buzzfeed's Azeen Ghorayshi, Cat Ferguson, and Virginia Hughes are dedicated to investigating these cases (see here and here). Glad that Representative Jackie Speier is focusing on this. And I hope none of us file this into the "it's not in our field" mental drawer.
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[Correction 1/15/15]
In the original post, I wrote, "I looked up two molecular biology professors that were found guilty of sexual harassment in the last ten years. Both were pushed out of their schools (one a medical school and one a university)." I had wrong information about one of them, and the details are complicated. I corrected the wording to, "I looked up two molecular biology professors that were accused of sexual harassment."
[Update, 1/14/15]
Several people reminded me about this study on sexual harassment in field work:
Clancy KBH, Nelson RG, Rutherford JN, Hinde K (2014) Survey of Academic Field Experiences (SAFE): Trainees Report Harassment and Assault. PLoS ONE 9(7): e102172. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0102172
Of the 658 survey respondents, 64% reported being targets of sexual harassment, and over 20% of sexual assault. So it's very possible, given frequent field work in biology, that sexual harassment is even more frequent than in astronomy.
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When good nonprofits collide: the battle between Open Access and Academic Societies

[This is a copy of my blogpost, previously on thespectroscope.com.]
 "Money Plant", TaxCredits.net, CC-BY
Many academic societies do wonderful things for science, scientists, and society. They advocate, educate, support trainees, organize productive conferences, act as publishers whose goal is to improve rather than reject any given paper. As a geneticist, I have attended many of the GSA’s yeast conferences since 2003, and they were always a highlight of my academic training. The GSA was and continues to be an early and key supporter of our protocols.io startup. I am a big fan of Stefano Bertuzzi, the head of the ASCB, and I worship ASCB’s career improvement workshops at the annual Cell Biology conference. I am also volunteering for the SSE’s diverse careers task force to bring ASCB-like career mentorship to the Evolution conference. I am a track chair for the 2017 SLAS conference.
I am a big fan of academic societies. I am also a big fan of PLOS and open access. As such, I find myself torn between entities that are fundamentally at odds with each other. The societies are threatened by open access and many senior scientists detest PLOS and PLOS ONE for “sucking up all oxygen and undermining society journals.” The problem is that for many societies, the majority of their revenue comes from subscription publishing, and PLOS and open access are a real threat to the financial sustainability of these societies.
As I converse with editors and executive members of these societies, we often start with a general argument over open access. I’ve lost count of the number of times I have heard “almost everyone who needs access has it; subscription paywalls really don’t hurt anyone.” I push back strongly against this, because this line is deeply flawed. And then, invariably, we end up at “But our society journal cannot go open access. We would need to charge $4,000-$5,000 for each paper, and we could never compete with PLOS ONE and the other PLOS journals in that case. But unlike PLOS, our society does a lot of good for scientists.”
I can write pages and pages on the good that PLOS has done for science and society. But instead, I want to focus on a simple argument – if scientists won’t pay $5,000 per paper to publish with you, you are charging too much. Open Access publishing model brings this cost to light, and scientist rebel. Subscriptions hide the cost to everyone except the librarians, propping up the 30%-40% profit margins that Elsevier, Wiley, Springer and many professional society journals enjoy.
I cannot accept the argument that because societies do a lot of good, charging $5,000 for a paper with a 40% profit margin, is somehow justified. Paywalls to research hurt scientists and non-scientists alike. They hurt patients, journalists, teachers, academics who are not at elite institutions. The Gates foundation is right to require OA-only publishing starting in 2017 from all scientists funded by its grants.
To argue that societies do good, hence we shouldn’t move to OA and we should continue to pay exorbitant fees to publish and access the research papers – that is like arguing that because medical schools do a lot of good in education, it’s acceptable for hospitals to overcharge patients. It is not. I worry about the academic societies because they do provide a valuable service. I worry that many of them might evaporate over the next 10-20 years because publishing will become entirely open access. I hope the societies can find alternative sustainable revenue sources. But I aggressively reject the argument that we need to prop up subscription publishing for the good of academic societies.
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Note: I am not making an argument that the society journals are not useful. Many of these journals are good communities that serve their fields well. They care deeply about improving science and they review to improve the papers and the science in them. As I recently wrote, there is a lot of important work that a good journal does. I do not want society journals to die. I want them to switch to open access and for their societies to figure out how to be sustainable without overcharging for the publishing work.
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What is the ethical compensation for nonprofit executives? (Should you boycott PLOS?)

[This is a copy of my blogpost, previously on thespectroscope.com.]

Over the last week, there's been a storm over the executive compensation and financials at the Public Library of Science (PLOS). It was started by a series of tweets from Professor Andrew Kern, looking into the financial disclosures of PLOS and learning that they pay good salaries and have operating margins. Andrew then concluded:
PLOS's financials reveal that they are merely trying to maximize their personal and corporate profit, like any company. They are padding the wallets of their executives and taking our grant money and putting in in the stock market. They are merely another Nature or Science that aims to maximize profits while cloaking itself in the white robes of OA.
Not surprisingly, many scientists were outraged and accused PLOS of being evil. I was puzzled by the strong negative reaction to the fact that PLOS pays the people who work for it competitive salaries. Clearly, many academics were shocked to learn that six figure salaries are normal for executives of large nonprofits. It doesn't seem "fair" to many. So, I asked:
Simple question to Andrew Kern and all upset with PLOS salaries - if YOU were on the board of PLOS, how would YOU set exec salaries? (No doubt there's been corrosive excessive growth of CEO salaries for decades now. But for a given organization that you want to see succeed, given market executive salaries, what would YOU do?
The are many who replied to me. It was a good discussion. But the concerete answers to my question were of the type: 
Let's pick one of them - Andy Kern's maximum of "5x of graduate stipend". That's about 5*$30,000 = $150,000/year. So if Andy ran PLOS, he would pay the executives at most $150K, and that means Andy would simply run PLOS into the ground because he would lose all the talented executives. And since Andy is an advocate for open access, I don't understand why he would want to destroy PLOS. Sure, he says that executives who would leave are simply "not into the mission," so good riddance. 
But, I am genuinely puzzled over how people who support the push for open access can simultaneously advocate for the destruction of PLOS. Looking at 990 forms of other societies, it quickly becomes clear that the executives at PLOS have competitive but not at all obscene compensation. Quick check, comparing salaries from 990 forms at PLOS, ACS, AAAS.
Those are comparisons to other large non-profits. How much lower can PLOS go in paying its executives before they leave to be publishers at other nonprofit societies or to Elsevier/Wiley/Springer?
While much of the outrage was centered around the salaries, some people were upset that PLOS has margins and savings. Again, this seems to stem from the misunderstanding of how nonprofits work. All successful societies have operating margins and reserves. In fact, as Michael Eisen writes, most scientific societies have larger "assets to expenses" ratios than PLOS.
So my plea to everyone who is outraged by PLOS finances and threatening to boycott publishing there - please think about the above as though you are running PLOS and want open access to succeed. Remember that when it comes to publishing, many societies are making $5K-$6K per published paper, from combination of subscriptions and publishing charges. These societies have often 30%-50% margins on the publishing, compared to the 20% at PLOS. And at the end, the papers are locked behind subscription paywalls.
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P.S.
Randy Olson was one of the people upset by the high salaries. Instead of answering my question of what he would pay, he replied that what bothers him most is that PLOS isn't trying to make publishing cheaper. And that's another puzzle. First of all, PLOS already made publishing cheaper at ~2K/paper instead of the average $6K that subscription publishers get. Second, it's clear that PLOS is investing the extra capital into infrastructure, and I imagine the goal of this is exactly to lower the publishing costs. After all, PLOS has to compete with PeerJ, F1000 Research, and a sea of other open access journals. Because PLOS pays its employees well and has devoted and talented folks, I'm sure they are keenly aware of the need to reduce the publication charges.
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An open letter to the Scientific Advisory Board of Elysium, the anti-aging supplement company

[This is a copy of my blogpost, previously on thespectroscope.com.]


Dear Members of Elysium's Scientific Advisory Board:
I am a geneticist and have been absolutely fascinated by aging research since 2003. I write to you to ask you to reconsider your participation in the scientific advisory board of Elysium Health, Inc.
The amazing research into the genetics of aging is undermined by a premature rush to consumer pills. Particularly, the reputation of the field is compromised by the association with the supplement industry. As Dr. Derek Lowe just wrote, 
It [Elysium Health] makes the legitimate research in this field seem a bit less respectable, which isn’t good, and it makes the supplement hawkers seem a bit more respectable by association, and that’s probably not what Elysium was planning on, either.
By lending your names to Elysium Health, you help to give confidence to a supplement pill that has zero evidence of doing anything to delay aging in humans. The supplement industry thrives on evidence-free placebo effects, to the point of generating $25 billion in sales per year. With Elysium prominently featuring each of you on their website, there is a sense of scientific gravitas and anti-aging promise that is unheard of in this industry.
Considering the ease with which supplement producers already take advantage of the consumers with the marketing of placebos, Elysium is in a remarkable position to take such behavior to a new level. With your names backing the company and the natural human quest to delay aging and death, Elysium stands to make billions of dollars. Elysium could make these billions long before there are any data to indicate whether the $50 per month the consumers will spend has any benefit for their health.
I respect each of you as scientists, and I sincerely hope that you will weigh the impact of your affiliation with a rush to market of an anti-aging supplement pill.
Kind regards,
Lenny Teytelman, Ph.D.
CEO, protocols.io
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The /team page of the Elysium website features each of you prominently.



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On the company landing page:
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 The problem with the nutritional supplements industry:


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