At the risk of giving you the impression that Idaho is full of backwoods uneducated types, I’m going to mention a recent article about the “vaccination debate” here in Idaho.

The article tells the story of a group of anti-immunization crusaders in Northern Idaho through the lens of two contrasting women. One of these is the leader of the anti-immunization folks, Ingri Cassel. The other is state epidemiologist Christine Hahn.

I’m not going to wade into the depths of the vaccination debate except to say that the vast majority of research points to vaccines being effective, and as a scientist, I like to make decisions based on data, rather than just speculation (when data is available, at least).

But what I will wade into is the communication debate. The article says about Cassel that she’s a “heart-on-her-sleeve rabblerouser who takes on everyone.” It says about Hahn that she “has no desire to engage in a heated debate over vaccinations.”

And that, my friends, is why science is going to loose a battle, yet again.

If you’ve noticed the alarming trend towards science loosing battles against all manner of crazies, you’ve got your reason why in the two quotes above.

The non-science folks are passionate. They tell stories. They pound the pavement. They “market” their ideas.

And most of the scientists on the other side just sit there thinking that “the facts will speak for themselves.”

No, facts don’t speak. Not now, not ever.

The public doesn’t care about the subtle nuances of immunogenicity or fancy buzzwords like that. They listen to passion and stories (yes, anecdotal ones).

If you think this problem is isolated to just a few loonies in Northern Idaho, think again. This is a significant trend that we’ve seen happen in the climate change debates, in the evolution vs creationism, and many more.

If science is going to prevail, scientists are going to have to start being passionate communicators for the value of what they do. Otherwise, we may be doomed.

What is the cost of Open Source publishing?

Recently the International Society for Computational Biology put out a request for feedback on their draft Literature Open Public Access Policy Statement.

The goal is laudable: encourage all computational biology researchers to publish their work where it can be openly accessed by all.

This goal makes sense as long as the public is paying for the research being done. When the public pays, the work should be open access.

Right now, in the US and some European nations, the public pays well for science. The NIH alone doles out somewhere north of $10 billion per year in extramural, R01 style funding. And, the NIH has a public access policy in place, that mandates Open Access to the results supported by these monies.

I agree that federal granting agencies should mandate open access publishing, precisely because the funding comes from the public.

However, the ISCB’s policy seems to imply that, regardless of funding source, all results should be “open access” (which usually means the author has to pay to publish and share his/her results).

There’s a particular myopia among many scientists I know that our recent economic woes are just a little “blip” and that soon we’ll return to the good old days of solid, reliable public science funding.

If only it were so (I’d love nothing more than that).

But the reality is, every Western government (and some eastern ones, like Japan) are groaning under unprecedented debt loads. These are debt loads that range from 50%-200% or more of the GDP (note that these numbers don’t account for the massive US stimulus and bank bailouts, which by some estimates are on track to more than double the debt numbers).

Historically, countries carrying those kind of debt loads always run into economic troubles. Not of the minor kind, but of the major kind (depressions, currency collapses, bank panics, rampant inflationary bouts, etc).

Witness the recent turmoil in Greece. That turmoil is only the tip of the iceberg. Some argue that USA’s debt position is actually worse than Greece’s, as a percent of GDP (for a sobering look, have a read here).

Why should you, the scientist, care?

Because, when this debt comes calling, governments are going to be looking for things to cut. Lots of things to cut. (Either that and/or governments will inflate our way out of this, meaning that your grants won’t get cut, but your dollars will buy only a fraction of what they do now).

How does this relate to ISCB’s call?

Because it appears to reflect a line of thinking that is based on the present situation of relatively lavish public funding. It is projecting the recent past (30 years of great science funding) into the future (the next 30 years are unlikely to be like the last 30!).

However, if or when the funding becomes less lavish, who will pay for our science? And if someone besides the government is paying (e.g. companies, investors, crowdsourcing, etc), should we really be mandating “open access?”

That seems like an unfunded mandate.

I share the idealism of open access. My lab shares its software, and most of our publications are in Open Access journals (plus, now we have to, due to the NIH rules).

Yet that idealism doesn’t reflect that it costs money to do science, and that most scientists can’t fund it as a hobby out of their own pockets.

Until food and housing become Open Access, the economics of mandating Open Access publishing without identifying how it will be paid for it seems doomed to failure.

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One quick note: if this is too doomerish and gets you into a depressive funk (like I was in for about two years when I learned how deep our economic doo doo is), don’t let it do that to you. Instead, take action to insulate yourself!

It is part of a natural cycle. There are great excesses in the systems. They will sort themselves out.

In the meantime, you need to be quick on your feet, adaptable, and entrepreneurial. Those attributes will get you through the coming challenges much better than if you’re ill prepared.

But, don’t expect to just sit by and have this leave you unscathed. It won’t.

And that is why I’m writing a book about “marketing your science” — to add entrepreneurial skills to the average scientist’s toolbox (the book is going well, I just finished another chapter).

Academics have a love-hate relationship with money that, I think, can sometimes impede forward progress.

I bring this up because of an email conversation with a friend and colleague of mine. I had asked this person about doing an interview for my online grant writing course, and I said I would compensate him for it. He’s someone who has done very well with grants.

He responded telling me that he was uncomfortable with the idea of “charging” for his grant writing wisdom.

I understand that because I previously held an attitude much like that.

Then I started a business (that one was to turn recycled plastics into kayaks and sailboards). It failed. I dumped thousands of hours into it, put my graduate work on hold, and spent 10′s of thousands of dollars on it – all down the tubes.

So I had to ask myself, what was the payoff for that investment? The reason I had made that investment in the first place was for the hope of a dual payoff:
1) Helping the world by finding good use for recycled plastics
2) Making some money in the process so that I didn’t have to scrape by any longer on a graduate student stipend

It didn’t work out. The only payoff was the lessons that I learned (boy, I can still remember that smell of plastic as it bakes in a rotomolding oven!). But I’d never have risked it if it were for just #1 alone. It was the combination of #1 and #2 that kept me going at it.

Flash forward to today. I’ve invested 100′s of hours creating a website, developing advice, working on a book. I’ve taken time away from my lab, from my family, and from my other business. I’ve been stressed out, up late many nights, and have taxed my finances to get it going. I haven’t done the one thing that I love most (whitewater kayaking) in well over a year. Instead, that time has been spent developing this content to help people (like #1 above).

Would I have done all this simply out of charity?

I’m sorry, no.

I like helping people. But there needs to be an economic payoff for doing so – particularly when it involves such a huge commitment. Number 2 above is an integral part of the equation.

If it were just a matter of giving a bit of advice here and there, I’d do that for free (and I often do, both on this blog and on my mailing list).

But when it comes to really helping people with a difficult skill like grantwriting – it takes more than just a few moments. I’ve spent at least 50 hours of my time developing my online grant writing course. And I continue to develop and refine it to try to improve the ways in which it helps people become better at expressing themselves.

I would never have committed that time to it if there weren’t some kind of economic payoff. I think it would be a bit crazy to help other people compete better against me in the pool for grants, just out of the kindness of my heart.

I do want to help, but setting up the infrastructure to really help people in a meaningful way costs money.

Have you ever wondered why, when you ask your colleagues for help, they often don’t have time to help you?

I’ve wondered about that often – and that question relates to this one of money.

As academics, we’re expected to do all sorts of stuff, “for free”. By “free,” I mean, doing things that don’t bring the grants in that often pay our salaries – things like teaching, mentoring, committee work, service work, etc. As a result of all the “free” stuff we do – it becomes very difficult to really do any of it very well, or very deeply.

Young scientists need a lot of mentoring. But that is another “free” activity on the part of the mentor. Some mentors find the time to do a lot of it anyway. Many do not. This is particularly true once you join the ranks of faculty. I had very little in the way of active mentoring. While I’ve made a big deal here of my interactions with Marshall Edgell, who helped me learn effective grant writing, we’re talking about 10-20 hours of total interaction over a span of 8 years. That’s not much.

Because it is “free”, it gets thrown in with all the other “free” stuff that needs to get done, of which there is always too much for the available time. So, it often doesn’t happen. I talked to at least four people at this NHGRI meeting I’ve been at who felt that they had almost no mentoring, and regretted the lack.

On the other hand, if someone comes to me and pays for consulting, or pays for my grant writing course, that changes the dynamic entirely. First, they’ve shown a serious commitment to get help. Second, I’ve now received their money, so I have a strong ethical and business imperative to deliver meaningful value for them. Am I perfect about that at all times? No – but I strive to get as close to that as I can, given my insanely busy life.

In fact, I’m now in the process of hiring an additional support person to keep up with all the issues with running a business like this (I already have one person helping out). That will free me up to develop new products. I have some great ideas to help you, but I can’t make them happen until I can free up some time.

And here’s the thing: I can’t pay those people with vapor. No, I have to pull out that checkbook and send off some big checks. That requires money flow, which requires charging for stuff. And if I’m charging for stuff, then I feel obliged to pay my interviewees for their time.

So, to help people in a deep way, I’ve concluded that there must be an exchange of money. Through that exchange, I’m able to help people more than the “free” model for two reasons:
1. I have a stronger imperative to do so through having received that money; and
2. The person on the other end is usually a better student, because they’ve made an investment of hard earned dollars to improve themselves, hence they strive to maximize the experience.

In contrast, I often see students in my department’s grant writing class taking the learning for granted. They won’t have to write “real” grants for many years (if ever). It is not an immediate need for them. Plus, it is paid for as a deduction from their stipend, so they never feel the pain of investing the money in the education that they’re getting. It feels “free” (even though it is technically not free), so it is not taken as seriously. If we made them pull out the checkbooks every semester for each class, they’d probably take it more seriously.

I think that there’s plenty of room in this world for good, free information. But for deep information that requires a real investment of time and energy to develop and keep up to date, the “free” model doesn’t work well.

At least I can’t figure out how it is supposed to work.

I think that by focusing too much on “free” sharing of information in academia, we’re forgetting the massive monetary infrastructure that supports that “free” – tuition, taxpayers, grants, etc. It is not actually free at all, but we think of it as free because we don’t see the costs.

As Mark Joyner talks about in Simpleology, it requires time, money, or energy to accomplish anything in life (or some combination thereof). Without one of those three, you’ve got nothing.

The only way I can think of to make the time available to help people is by getting paid to do so.

What do you think? Is there another way? Let me know in the comments.

A reader writes in with the question: “I’ve been putting my head down and working hard on my science for the past few years, trying to avoid “politics”. Now a situation has come up that has forced me to realize that I’m not being recognized for the work that I did, and the politics are getting ugly. Will I always have to pay attention to politics in the future to avoid this?”. Morgan takes this on using the example of one of her own “political” struggles.

I just met up with a friend of mine who teaches at a small(ish) western university. It was interesting how much our stories intersected about some of the job challenges we both face – even though our respective University environments are quite different.

Both seem to stem from a fundamental lack of respect for what scientists and faculty do. We get squeezed from both sides. At the small college, they try to squeeze more teaching out with ever less resources.
At the large University like my own, they try to squeeze more research out of us with less and less resources.
A while back, I calculated an interesting thing. I am bringing in over $300k in “Facilities and administration” money this year to my university.
That is “extra” money that is tacked onto research grants to cover things like:
- Administrative personnel
- Space
- Office equipment
- etc.

I’ll just tell one story here that shows how much of that money comes to support my work.
About a year ago spring, I was hiring more people and had no place to put them.
So I needed to buy some new desks to cram them in.
We attempted to be frugal by going to University Surplus – but there weren’t any desks that would fit.
So we went to Ikea and found a desk set for $500 that would fit perfectly – and allow me to put two new people into my limited space.
What happened when I asked about this?
My department said, “Sorry, you can’t spend that much – the limit is $200″.
Do you notice any mismatch between the numbers here?
I bring in $300k of “Facilities and Administration” money.
The University refuses to pay for $500 desk – limit $200. (It is not like I was asking for a bunch of other stuff!)
My goal isn’t to complain – I realized a long time back that complaining does no good.
But my goal is to highlight something: that certain University administrations seem to have entered a sort of collective insanity. At my own University, it is an insanity of expecting us to bring all this grant money in – but giving nothing in return.
At my friend’s small University, it is an insanity of expecting people to teach so much that they can’t do any research – and hence, there are no opportunities for graduate students to get hands-on training.
These aren’t like the days when my father was in academia. Back then, people looked up to what scientists did, and wanted to support them.
Now they care more about pop stars and fast cars.