On 9:45 Tusday GMT+8 a webina was organized by Zhiming Wang, editor of Nanoscale Research Letters. In the webina Patrick Brown, director of PLoS, gave a talk to the Chinese audience on the OA strategy and the single paper metrics feature of PLoS website.

A surely relevant topic of the survival and development of any journal is the highness of its ‘impact’. Highly concerned by Chinese effort to boost the development of local scientific journals, Patrick criticized strongly, agreed by all Chinese audience, on the ill institution of current Chinese science policy and its destructive effect on journals. In China, number of papers published on higher-impact journals is linked with the promotion and funding of the authors, that is, personal interest. This renders journals with additional economical status, either favorable or unfavorable determined by their “highness of impact”, because personal interest is never met for free in a free market society. An invisible bargain exist between every pair of journal and authorship. By “highness of impact”, one means simply impact factor in China. This, as mentioned by Patrick, conducts a “very destructive punishment” for all new journals, including esp. OA ones. Journals don’t have ISI impact factors for at least two years even they have been indexed. Some journals with ‘experimental’ way of peer-review or distribution process are even not indexed by ISI (e.g. PLoS one). Under China’s current reality, authors get punished if they publish their results on these journals. I wondered how many submission from China does PloS one received each year compared with other non-OA, ISI indexed journals. Patrick had to look up a bit but he answered that in general China ranks almost the lowest in publishing on new journals.

Although the single-paper metrics feature of PLoS journals can be a better alternative to the impact factor of the whole journal when it comes to grading a person in science community, the reason behind the ill policy is much more general and is also influencing other scientific process badly in China; evaluation of a person or institute’s scientific achievement is still to a large extent not conducted by peers but general, ‘macroscopic’, administrative roles, who have nothing more to rely on except quantitative measurements such as numbers of paper, ISI impact factors, h-index. Instead of only referring to the advantage of these measures, they rely on the whole of them including their negative effects which are surely larger.

An atmosphere that appreciates the status of scientific peers, either administrative and cultural, is highly needed, which though is not possible in the current state of education system of China.

Polymer science is more unique in its physics rather than chemistry. All reactions in various polymerization known today are not unconceivable in the scheme of organic synthesis. There is no new concept in reaction mechanisms. In contrast, the unique properties of polymer materials mainly stem from chain topology rather than detailed chemical structures, which have led the polymer physics research from Flory’s mean-field theory, in a statistical physical scheme, to de Gennes’s scaling theory, in a fractal and non-equilibrium physical scheme. This strand of study have long been stimulating the synthetic effort for precise, monodispersed model polymers for experiment, because most theories that are mathematically tractable assume a monodispersity presumption.

However, stories from the industrial world may be a little different. Broader molecular weight distribution, for example, is favorable in rubber processing, for the resulting plasticizing effect from the lower molecular weight portion. Branched structures are also desired in many cases of polyolefin applications, i.e. blends. In some rarer cases, unknown additives during processing can affect the product properties so significantly that alternative routes assumed to result in the same product would mysterious give a very different product in fact. In the theoretical aspect, empirical equations, derived by phenomenological methods, are also more favored by engineers, although most of these equations have little to no physical meaning. The above mentioned differences between industrial and academic studies constitute a large part of the reasons for the depletion of the two fields. And researchers in the former fields may know much less about the latter than they should be, while not necessarily vise versa.

In the latest issue of Science, a special one of industrial chemistry, Phillip Hustad told a colorful story¹ about how industrial research effort, under additional constraint of cost or price, give rise to new commercial polyolefins which continue the legend of polymeric material after a century of development. The article is also thought-provoking for academic research, trying to inform us a long-been-neglected origin of innovation.

The article mainly focus in one ongoing innovative process in the industry, namely Olefin Block Copolymers (OBCs), describing why early research failed when commercial consideration comes in, and highlighting the ideas that lead to recent commercial success. It is an amazing story. But more invaluable of this article are some in-depth words by the author that really tell some truth:

[T]he development of polymeric materials is much more challenging when practical constraints are imposed and success is defined by commercial viability. It is often the case that overcoming one obstacle simply leads to another, but useful innovations can stem from explorations of these perceived contradictions…It is common sentiment that “precise” and “useful” are directly correlated in polymeric materials. This may be tru for many applications, but the required level of precision ultimately depends on the material’s desired function. With biological systems, a single mistake can have drastic consequences, but in simpler polymeric materials, the penalties for imperfections are far less grave.

However, knowing now the difference in results between academic and industrial research, it is still impossible and unnecessary trying to extend the academic kind of research wisely and replace the industrial labs, because of their different in motives.

Industrial and academic R&D differ in a number of ways, most notably the motivation behind them…The difference between the two missions is evident in the way success is measured. In industry, success comes with commercial sales of the material, but in academia, success is measured by winning grants and publication of results in high-quality peer-reviewed journals. The academic researcher is less constrained with respect to practicality, scalability, or final product price; creativity is the bottom line. The industrial researcher, on the other hand, knows that even the most creative scientific breakthrough must ultimately lead to a commercially viable product for the company to realize an economic benefit.

Between lines, this comparison implies that the trait of academic research has been determined by the whole system, the journals, the publish-or-perish rule, and the peer reviewers — ourselves. Industrial labs have less pressure to publish, which allow the researchers with time and patience to identify and solve real world problems. Possibly the detached of academic research from the real world and ordinary life also causes the misunderstanding of scientists among the public. Most modern products which ordinary people enjoy have distant and vague relation to the ongoing research of pure science, while the creativity of academic researchers reported by various press releases is just “useless”, if not “dangerous”. In addition to strenuously explaining the relationship between the cutting-edge scientific breakthrough and the ordinary life for the public, as some scientists and science writers have been trying to do, maybe the research system itself should also consider a change that includes more real world problems, which makes the impact of research more obvious both for peer-review journals and for the mass.

¹ Hustad, P. (2009). Frontiers in Olefin Polymerization: Reinventing the World’s Most Common Synthetic Polymers Science, 325 (5941), 704-707 DOI: 10.1126/science.1174927

This is an alternative title I would put on the latest Chemistry World news HP under fire for failing to phase out harmful chemicals, because the only simple event that caused this new is

On 28 July, Greenpeace representatives painted the words ‘Hazardous Products’ on the rooftop of HP’s headquarters building in Palo Alto, California, US.

Greenpeace is not a science group, nor does it care much about science. Greenpeace is another power after polymer industry that cannot wait for science for any minute. A worried prophet, it always chooses what human researchers have implied but haven’t yet got time to confirm as basic of its campaigns. By Greenpeace, what’s unknown is defined as known danger, not to mention what’s implied.

Greenpeace’s strange tendency is not unique. It is common among the population who think that human being has sinned and/or is inherently likely to sin, and thus should be monitored by God, ethics, laws or whatever. It is this kind of view that leads to not only various religions but also other conservative Republican groups over there. Because the unknown part of the world has been defined as known danger, they believe curiosity is dangerous, and thus so is science.

They can prove their argument that the unknown is known danger quite well, with the help of multiplied attributive clauses with subjective mood. Oftentimes we are told that something may contain A, B, and C, which may cause serious I, II, and III, and may be fatal. This seems to mean that that thing is directly fatal, if not noticing the tricky altering of subjects. For instance, in the Chemistry World news, it reads

PVC plastic is known to contain dangerous chemical additives – including phthalates, lead and cadmium – which can be toxic to children, causing damage to the liver, central nervous, respiratory and reproductive systems as well as potentially contributing to developmental disorders. Research has indicated that BFRs may negatively impact the developing brain and reproductive system.

So what? PVC plastic kills children, kills liver, kills central nervous, respiratory, reproductive, and also circulative (who knows) systems. PVC kills people!

So they can certainly prove their ultimate creed similarly: the unknown may contain danger, which may be fatal; therefore the unknown is fatal, and is known danger. Only things that are known to be safe is not danger. Anything out of this, known or unknown, is known danger.

And, after all, most of us hate danger.

For people who don’t hate danger, for those who love danger, they curse them. People who like to risk things are cursed. They are the unstable factor of our population, known danger, and defiant against God, ethic, law, etc. They are members of Fight Club, or lately Project Mayhem.

Wait…who curse who? Let’s roll back a little. People who hate danger curse people who love danger. —Yes. Religions and Greenpeace belong to the group who hate danger. —Yes. So it is religions and Greenpeace who hate the people who love danger, isn’t it? —Yes. So they would also hate the members of Project Mayhem, people who create disorder, right? —Yes.

Then why did the Greenpeace perform such a Project-Mayhem liked activity over the headquarter of HP?

This kind of irony is not rare among them, in fact. Terrorism is one example. I once watched a Republican movie which describes how high technology creates disaster in the year 2xxx. In the movie who leads to the disaster and by what? The answer is scientists and science. In the movie who saves the earth finally and by what? The answer is a scientist, and his science.

But I think a more logical ending for this movie should be that finally the modern civilization is eliminate and people who love danger, especially scientists, all died in a disaster. The rest is fine with primitive society. They sing and dance and pray and live happy lives forever!

The editorial in the July 24 issue of Science¹ informed me with a report by the Nanional Academies of the US, Ensuring the Integrity, Accessibility, and Stewardship of Research Data in the Digital Age. I can obtain full text of the report for free because I’m a reader from developing country. But I only had time to read the summary section.

The report gives several recommendations to different roles in the modern scientific infrastructure. Two main ideas shared by these recommendations is that to use digital technology to fight digital frauds, and that higher transparency of both the research and peer review process is needed. However, the recommendations also show a layered strategy to fight digital frauds, from individual researchers, institutes to journals and stakeholders. Whereas indeed no single layer of effort can stop the scientific frauds once and for all, neither can the sum of them cover up the whole process, because these layers only represent the “production” part in the industry of science research. In the “mass production” age of science research, to discover with only occasional defective products cannot be successful without the help of “consumers’” feedback, which means the whole groupof readers of the research report. The wholeness should be most ensured because we are talking about very rare cases which may affect a small number of people. We are less probable to discover them if we only receive part of the report from the consumers.

The current assembly line from researchers to journals is quite perfect already, in ensuring a high percentage of qualified product of research. To discover still very rare cases of frauds, two or three reviewers invited by a journal and before publication is obviously ineffective and insufficient. The idea of “using digital technology to fight digital frauds”, or better put, "using IT (Information Technologies) to fight IF (Information Frauds, and also, maybe cleverer, Impact Factor), applies here. To break the space limit of printed journals so that all rather then essential research data are avaialable to the public rather than the subscribers, we have to embrace the Internet which provides us with unlimited storage space, and also allow for real open access. We also need to encourage the role of Web 2.0 activities like blogs and social network the accelerate the discovery of occasional faults and frauds in the ocean of published papers.

The recently response in the blogosphere to the JACS paper which describe the oxidative property of NaH best exemplified the above idea, although in this specific case there need not be a scientific frauds.

¹ Kleppner, D., & Sharp, P. (2009). Research Data in the Digital Age Science, 325 (5939), 368-368 DOI: 10.1126/science.1178927

Paul, blogger of TotallySynthetic and column writer at Chemistry World, replied in my other science blog about ResearchBlogging.org:

Perhaps I can explain why I didn’t / don’t use ResearchBlogging.Org when writing on my blog, TotallySynthetic. In the past (perhaps a year ago, or a little more), I started using research blogging on every post I wrote. Given that more than 95% of my posts relate to a specific paper, it seemed to fit my purpose rather well. However, I must say that I found the forms used to identify papers awkward, and the output HTML annoying as it messed-up special characters in the authors names. Couple that with a paucity of referred traffic and the fact that the ResearchBlogging website was frequently unavailable – I soon lost interest. Has much changed?

ResearchBlogging.org has recently improved the paper searching form. You can not only type in DOI but also search with key words to find a paper in the website. It has also cooperated with PubGet. And I seldom encounter server failure when using ResearchBlogger.org since I started using it. But indeed, the web site is still not user friendly enough. They should rethink the human-machine interface design. In fact ideas of improvement need not to be new. Releasing plugins for Wordpress, Blogger.com and other major blogging service is good enough to allow more users. The current way often creates a who’s-helping-who or who-needs-who confusion.

I have been busy setting up the Chinese language version of ResearchBlogging.org. To explain how research blogging can be meaningful and important to the Chinese bloggers I have to provide several points and examples in an introductory webpage.

One of the best example is the recent blogging review on a NaH catalyzed oxidation reaction published on JACS¹. The unexpected property of this reagent stirred up a number of synthetic chemists who repeated it and reported on their blogs. Chemistry World even reported this reviewing action from the blogosphere. This event best exemplified the role blogs can play in the “post-peer review” process — peer review on a published research work, during especially controversies in the academic community.

If ResearchBlogging.org — a Web 2.0 tool to syndicate research blog posts into tagged, searchable, RSS-feeding, and DOI-linked network — has gained supports from major chemistry blogs, this oxidative NaH events must have some records in it. However, I did a search in ResearchBlogging.org for that JACS paper but no blog post was related. Blogs I know which wrote about this paper — Totally Synthetic, Carbon Based Curiosities and PeterMR’s blog did not use ResearchBlogging.org to spread the discussion. My post here may be the first on ResearchBlogging.org linked with the controversial JACS paper.

These blogs may not need to use ResearchBlogging.org since they have had enough visits and comments as were shown under their posts. Indeed, they, not and well without ResearchBlogging.org, led and accelerated this discussion. However, ResearchBlogging.org and its readers may lose an opportunity to join this discussion. After all, Web 2.0 is about the effect of collective behavior of unknown contributors, instead of led, concentrated effect by several famous individuals. Though the latter may still be important, but more interesting is the former, which ResearchBlogging.org seeks to promote.

As a blogger you may care no other’s view and be as independent as possible among the WWW, but as a researcher you have to be the opposite, and only in this case ResearchBlogging.org can be helpful and attractive to you.

UPDATE: Here’s Paul’s reply.

¹ Wang, X., Zhang, B., & Wang, D. (2009). Reductive and Transition-Metal-Free: Oxidation of Secondary Alcohols by Sodium Hydride Journal of the American Chemical Society DOI: 10.1021/ja904224y

There have been constantly something I feel strange but couldn’t identified what when reading everyday’s title feeds in Google Reader. The overall feeling can be called as ‘a wrong direction, opposite to science, that today’s chemistry research is on’.

We seems to prefer unpredictable things to predictable ones. Now, we don’t like things to be predictable or expectable. By making our system more complex, adding more building blocks, messing around, and seeing what will happen, we are more likely to publish papers on JACS and Angew. Chem., whereas these research efforts can hardly raise the interests of physicists, who have been providing theories for us chemists, who now consider the works of nowadays chemists as ‘dirty’ and meaningless.

We seems to give up the intention to understand the world in a precisely predictable way after complexity spread across all angles of observation. We are now complacent with messing around among this complexity in search for random, casual ’gotcha’s’.

Unpredictability has high impact. Understandable unpredictability has even higher impact, by understandable I mean the case that the authors succeeded in giving a plausible explanation for their unpredictable results; these deserve being on Nature, Science or PNAS. If the explanation is lousy, explain less, and you can still hit JACS at least. Take some photographs, take a movie if possible.

No, we are not going to response to prediction of any theory. Because if we confirm a theory, we help the authors of that theory, not us, in citing rate; the theory is more likely to be accepted thanks to our experimental confirmation. And if we disagree that theory, we contribute nothing; after all that is only a theory, how strange is it that it fails in one particular dirty experiment, with this or that factor not consistent with the theoretical presumption? And in such a complexity of Nature, how can an experiment be conducted in a ‘tidy’ enough way, so that it really fits a theory’s presumption perfectly well and capable to (dis)approve it? The hypothesis-experiment game is difficult, time-consuming, and therefore boring.

So now we turn our interest to publishing experiments without any hypothesis, experiments that are really hard to hypothesize anything from, experiments that, after reading it, people would say nothing other than ‘well, ya, you guys are really lucky’. Everyone is seeking for crazier ideas, and the ability to realize your idea, to show that it works (better by such visual impact as movies) is enough for you to be on Angew. Chem., etc. You don’t have to pretend that you knew in advance what you would get based on some theory. You are neither answering a question nor asking one.

So, why not ABCDE five-block copolymer? It must self-assembly. Take photos, explain a bit based on the patterns, then I assure you Macromolecules. After all, it has five blocks! Besides this, stimuli-responsive ‘smart’ things still rocks, more so if it changes color, or moves. Combination of click chemistry with ring-opening polymerization or RAFT, better on a surface, even better on the surface of nanoparticles, even much better luminescent, also rocks. Believe me, you can do this. Don’t fear the complexibility. With the old-schooled NMR, MS, light scattering, TEM, AFM, etc. techniques you can always meet the standard of supporting evidence, by putting all these boring things in the supporting information section, leaving colorful photos in the graphical abstract. Putting a .mpg movie in the supporting information section to distract people from the NMR and MS containing boring PDF is just sweet. Who cares why and what causes it to work? Watch that—it just works!

I regret the above cynicism without a single piece of example. Any example is offending actually. And I apologize if I disturbed someone. What I am sharing is just my feeling. I feel that my interest in chemistry is somewhat different from what’s heated today, or what I’m interested in is actually physics, not chemistry.

One

There were many ‘swimming’ events studied in the latest issue of J. Phys. Condens. Matter. See the preface by the guest editors.

Two

I have been mute here for long. So, I have devoted most of my time in experiment, haven’t I? No, I haven’t. Do you have some ‘graduate criteria’ in your countries? Here, one criterion is that the journals of your published papers should have a total IF greater than 2. What’s the IF’s of Rheol. Acta, J. Rheol. and J. Non-Newt. Fluid Mech., respectively? These are the major journals in my field — polymer rheology. I remember none of them has IF>2. My supervisor therefore needs me to publish a piece of crap on Progress in Chemistry (Prog. Chem.), an English review journal based in China, so that I can earn some additional IF. So I’m busy preparing a ‘review’ on large amplitude oscillatory shear (LAOS) for Prog. Chem.

Prog. Chem. is a good place for Chinese grads to earn IF points. It is indexed by SCI, having an IF of around 0.5, and generous in acceptance. Therefore it is a common practice that reviews are written and published by graduate students just like class assignments.

I wish my ‘class assignment’ on LAOS can look more like a review, by trying to answer such questions as ’what’s the core issues of this field?‘, ’how did people solved them previously?’, ‘were they successful?’, ’what’s new?‘, etc. Of course my answers are never important because as a humble student I’m not engaged enough in this field. But who care, after all? It is just Prog. Chem.!

Preparing this review is meaningful for me, at least. It provides me an opportunity to have a complete bird-eye view on the playground I’m in. So it’s not so time-wasting.

And I’m also starting some experiments now. They haven’t provided me any suggestive results yet. But the other day my boss murmured ‘it would be nice if we can have a PRL (Phys. Rev. Lett.) from it’. I believe he totally overestimated my luck. And, if he believed I could have at least one paper on PRL (whose IF (6.9) is enough for me to graduate three point five times), why did he ask me to write one more for Prog. Chem. (which only enable me to graduate four times)?

Anyway, ‘the more the better’ rocks, if not ‘publish or perish’.

In China, I always presume the social problems I encounter everyday are only the results of the ‘developing’ nature of my country. I comment on these essentially in Chinese (in another blog). This column on NewScientist made me believe that the problem of media distortion of research report is also prevailing in western society, and my point previously proposed in Chinese also applies here.

The problem is rooted in the audience/readers. They are not really interested in science as we scientists define. They are only interested in the ethical, emotional, political, or fictional by-product of science, instead, which are products of various interest groups other than scientists. That’s why impartial, plain and trustworthy interpretation of a research result is always far from enough to put on the news page. Readers of The Guardian, not JACS, are simply not finding science. How would you expect The Guardian interpret science like C&EN? How would you expect its headline writer to tolerate a plain, modestly-put title and subtitle?

Scientists deal with only hypothesis, by means of experiments. We live with hypothesis, with uncertainty, with the unknown. The public do exactly the opposite. How would you expect the readers be pleased with a science news that fails to confirm or ensure anything for them?

No one is really interested in science except scientists. Modern society is only trying to eliminate this hopeless situation by creating additional interesting by-products of science. But improvement from this situation should not start from trying to present in any way the ongoing frontier research. Steps should be followed instead. A systematic, long-run agenda is needed. Unfortunately, no media dedicates itself in this career. They sell themselves to the readers, not just us. Why should they listen to only us instead of the majority of the readers? The majority of taxpayers, not the professional minority, lead the society, especially in the more democratic western world. That’s why scientists have no reason to blame others. Instead, they should stand outside their comfortable, automatic justice of peer-reviewed community and face the vast majority of public by themselves. Otherwise more shits happen.

“I didn’t know”, said the author after being revealed of self-plagiarism by Science magazine, “that this is improper. I thought it might help informing the Chinese audience of the latest findings of the world.”

How sorry she was, afterward!

But, do we also do nothing before guilt is finally committed in other ethical aspect, except asking people “Please! Please be good!”—?

Science today has outgrown the age when scientists were only wealthy nobles with amateur interest in it. We are not dealing with a spoonful of Cavendish’s or Faraday’s, but unmanageably huge piles of papers and proposals by employees who only work for their salaries and seek promotions. Punishments upon disclosure case by case only teach a lesson that somebody is simply unlucky. And who listens to the preaching, any way?

Saints who are immune to fame and fortune are rare, as well as wisemen who always foresee the long-term consequence of an act. That’s why the most part of our society is managed in the current way, except in science community where we seem to rely too much on self-discipline solely.