The year is 1665. At this time, most of science writing is contained in two mediums: writing letters (called the ‘Invisible College’ of letter writing scientists), and writing books. That changed, however, when Henry Oldenburg, the first secretary of the Royal Society, published Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, a subscription service that published experiments, observations, and other reports that came from members of the Royal Society. It is seen now as one of the first scientific journals, and is still publishing scientific articles today.
We’ve come a long way since sending letters or even needing to print academic papers anymore. While there are thousands of academic journals around the world that participate in the peer review process, there are also other options for sharing research that do not take the immense amount of time that publishing often does. ArXiv (pronounced ‘archive’), an open-source preprint server for scientific papers, reached an astonishing 2 million papers as of last year. The website has been compared to a ‘warehouse’ of manuscripts, some of which are eventually published in high profile journals, and is mostly used in the fields of physics, math, and computer science. The website allows for a fast turnaround on scientific research, with Steinn Sigurdsson, a professor of astrophysics at Pennsylvania State University and ArXiv’s scientific director saying, “A telescope saw something on Friday. By Monday there are papers on it. By Tuesday there are papers rebutting the papers that came out on Monday.”
Most people, however, do not usually hear about scientific breakthroughs by reading the paper that published it: rather, we consume it through news, headlines, Tweets, and posts after the fact. The shift towards a digital side of science communication has definitely brought with it benefits. Information is now more accessible than ever, and people can hear about revolutionary science as soon as it happens. Open access sources, like ArXiv, lead to a more general audience seeing a paper, which can lead to faster feedback, adaptation, and the ability to build off of previous results. Digital science has also been shown to increase representation of voices in the field of science, with one study finding that “ratio of female to male scientists on Twitter (0.62) was greater than the ratio of female to male authors on US-based scientific papers (0.43).” While by no means a solution to the problem of gender inequality in science, it is promising.
However, the rise in social media and popular science has not been all beneficial. For one, researchers have noted that the shift has put a great deal of pressure on scientists to publish papers that attract attention, rather than those that are important. In an ethical survey from the University of Cambridge, researchers found that “there’s tendency… to drive efforts to big up what you’re doing, to argue that it is earth-shattering even when it just may be important,” said plant biologist Ottoline Leyser, who worked on the study. This can cause articles with flashy titles and eye grabbing headlines to be the center of attention, causing important research to fall by the wayside in the eyes of the public. This, in turn affects everything from funding to public opinion, and can even perpetuate science denial. Modern science communication not only suffers from the hype of headlines, but also misinformation. One study from MIT, which used a data set of real and fake articles taken from Twitter, found that “false news stories are 70 percent more likely to be retweeted than true stories are. It also takes true stories about six times as long to reach 1,500 people as it does for false stories to reach the same number of people.” At no time was this information trend more visible than during the COVID-19 Pandemic, when the constant turnover of research and regulation caused a circulation of false stories and misinformation.
Whether it’s an online preprint, a Royal Society Letter, or the Stute you’re holding now, we consume scientific information in some capacity almost every day. However it is everyone, including scientists, communicators, and readers, who hold the burden of making sure information is correctly researched, correctly interpreted, and correctly communicated.
