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Manchester University physicists Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw
Manchester University physicists Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw. Cox said bloggers 'often see themselves as the hero outside of science'. Photograph: Katherine Rose/Observer
Manchester University physicists Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw. Cox said bloggers 'often see themselves as the hero outside of science'. Photograph: Katherine Rose/Observer

Brian Cox is wrong: blogging your research is not a recipe for disaster

This article is more than 12 years old
The physicist's implication that scientists who blog about their research are trying to circumvent peer review is unfair

A few days ago, the Guardian ran a Q&A session with Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw. Cox and Forshaw are professors of physics at the University of Manchester, both involved in research with the Large Hadron Collider at Cern. Cox is of course well known for his wonderful media exploits on the BBC. Forshaw and Cox have written a book together, their second collaboration, which is coming out this week.

In an emailed question for the Q&A, reader Stephen Marks asked: "How do you feel about scientists who blog their research rather than waiting to publish their final results?"

Brian Cox: The peer review process works and I'm an enormous supporter of it. If you try to circumvent the process, that's a recipe for disaster. Often, it's based on a suspicion of the scientific community and the scientific method. They often see themselves as the hero outside of science, cutting through the jungle of bureaucracy. That's nonsense: science is a very open pursuit, but peer review is there to ensure some kind of minimal standard of professionalism"

Jeff Forshaw: I think it's unfair for people to blog. People have overstepped the mark and leaked results, and that's just not fair on their collaborators who are working to get the result into a publishable form"

Well, that's a little disappointing. As a scientist who enjoys writing about my own work and that of others in my field, I'm obviously a little biased. But this was a very one-sided answer that doesn't really do the vibrant online science community justice.

I agree with Cox that peer review deserves our respect. I don't think it works as well as it should, but right now it's the gold standard for getting decent quality science into our journals. For better or worse, we're stuck with it.

His "recipe for disaster" remark is surprising, considering his own field of work. Virtually all high-energy physics literature is made publicly available by the community via postings to the popular preprint repository Arxiv. Many of these papers are posted prior to peer review, are non-reviewed conference papers or simply comments on other work.

A quick search this morning revealed over 40 Arxiv articles in response to the Opera project's measurement of neutrinos that appeared to be travelling faster than the speed of light, reported last month, none of which carry an indication of their peer review status. The neutrino result itself is not yet peer reviewed, yet it became one of the biggest science stories of the year. Arxiv is just as open as any scientist's blog, and the service only exercises a basic level of quality control. In many cases, the difference between an in-depth, thoughtful blog post and a posting to Arxiv is really just semantics.

The majority of scientists writing online about their work are not anti-establishment mavericks with a hero complex. It's not about taking a shortcut through "the bureaucratic jungle" of peer review. In my experience, when scientists write online about their own work they want to provide context, explain their research to a non-specialist audience (perhaps the undergraduates they teach), or even keep a public record of their research notes.

A great example of the last type is Canadian microbiologist Rosie Redfield's Research blog, in which she reports her daily findings in the lab. Astronomy professor David Hogg writes short summaries of his day-to-day work on his blog, several times a week. Brief as these postings are, they're informative and fun.

For the Milky Way Project, a citizen science project I'm involved in from the Zooniverse family , we keep in touch with our volunteers by writing on the blog about how we're producing scientific results from the information that they supply. With the Polymath projects, mathematicians use the web as an entirely open research forum to try and solve mathematical questions on blogs and wikis.

For the majority of scientists, publishing in peer-reviewed journals is the way we get credit for our work and, tortuous as the process can be, it's the road to recognition and career success. Anyone who tried to "circumvent" that process by simply posting their results on their webpage, expecting to reap the rewards, would find themselves mistaken and quite possibly unemployed. Many scientists complain that the pressure to publish is a flawed system that hands too much power to the journals, but for now it's the way things are done.

Leaking a colleague's new results online before peer review and without permission clearly falls short of basic standards of professionalism or even common decency, but such occurrences are not at all representative of the majority of science writing on the web.

News of controversial or exciting results presented at conferences often travels fast through the community rumour mill. With so many scientists now using online social media like Twitter, or writing on blogs, these rumours rapidly reach a global audience far beyond their immediate peers.

On the whole this openness enabled by the web is a good thing: society isn't well served by research carried out entirely behind closed doors. But it does raise important questions about the right way to discuss new science in public forums and how to best talk about results that haven't yet been peer-reviewed.

I was pleased to see these questions raised in Notes & Theories today by UK science minister David Willetts. He talks about the value of science writing but references the findings of the recent Public Attitudes to Science Survey to highlight some potential pitfalls of the proliferation of science writing online. The abundance of voices and opinions risks muddling the minds of those not equipped to judge the science for themselves. Ensuring that good quality scientific information gains the most visibility is arguably the biggest challenge we face in this respect.

If we agree that science writing is valuable to society, scientists should share the same responsibility as journalists to provide comment and information in a clear and balanced way. Despite some examples to the contrary, there's an awful lot of science writing on the web – about established results, preliminary findings or work in progress – that aims to do just that. The widespread coverage of the Opera neutrino results, much of which was excellent, is a great recent example. But it's important not to ignore the exceptions, and figure out how to deal with them.

The view that scientists who write about their work online are somehow trying to subvert the scientific process is unfairly narrow. The web offers great potential for a rich and vibrant scientific debate reaching beyond the research community. We should work towards maximising that potential rather than rein it in.

Sarah Kendrew is an astronomer at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany

More on this story

More on this story

  • Science: writing the future

  • Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw explain the big bang

  • Scientists should be allowed to check stories on their work before publication

  • Scientists should not be allowed to copy-check stories about their work

  • Time for change in science journalism?

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