Tag: public-policy

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Submission to the Royal Society Enquiry

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The Royal Society is running a public consultation exercise on Science as a Public Enterprise. Submissions are requested to answer a set of questions. Here are my answers.

1. What ethical and legal principles should govern access to research results and data? How can ethics and law assist in simultaneously protecting and promoting both public and private interests?

There are broadly two principles that govern the ethics of access to research results and data. Firstly there is the simple position that publicly funded research should by default be accessible to the public (with certain limited exceptions, see below). Secondly claims that impinge on public policy, health, safety, or the environment, that are based on research should be supported by public access to the data. See more detail in answer to Q2.

2 a) How should principles apply to publicly-funded research conducted in the public interest?

By default research outputs from publicly funded research should be made publicly accessible and re-usable in as timely a manner as possible. In an ideal world the default would be immediate release, however this is not a practically accessible goal in the near future. Cultural barriers and community inertia prevent the exploitation of technological tools that demonstrably have the potential enable research to move faster and more effectively. Research communication mechanisms are currently shackled to the requirements of the research community to monitor career progression and not optimised for effective communication.

In the near term it is practical to move towards an expectation that research outputs that support published research should be accessible and re-usable. Reasonable exceptions to this include data that is personally identifiable, that may place cultural or environmental heritage at risk, that places researchers at risk, or that might affect the integrity of ongoing data collection. The key point is that while there are reasonable exceptions to the principle of public access to public research outputs that these are exceptions and not the general rule.

What is not reasonable is to withhold or limit the re-use of data, materials, or other research outputs from public research for the purpose of personal advancement, including the “squeezing out of a few more papers”. If these outputs can be more effectively exploited elsewhere then this a more efficient use of public resources to further our public research agenda. The community has placed the importance of our own career advancement ahead of the public interest in achieving outcomes from public research for far too long.

What is also politically naive is to believe or even to create the perception that it is acceptable to withhold data on the basis that “the public won’t understand” or “it might be misused”. The web has radically changed the economics of information transfer but it has perhaps more importantly changed the public perception on access to data. The wider community is rightly suspicious of any situation where public information is withheld. This applies equally to publicly funded research as it does to government data.

2 b) How should principles apply to privately-funded research involving data collected about or from individuals and/or organisations (e.g. clinical trials)?

Increasingly public advocacy groups are becoming involved in contributing to a range of research activities including patient advocacy groups supporting clinical trials, environmental advocacy groups supporting data collection, as well as a wider public involvement in, for instance, citizen science projects.

In the case where individuals or organisations are contributing to research they have a right for that contribution to be recognised and a right to participate on their own terms (or to choose not to participate where those terms are unacceptable).

Organised groups (particularly patient groups) are of growing importance to a range of research. Researchers should expect to negotiate with such groups as to the ultimate publication of data. Such groups should have the ability to demand greater public release and to waive rights to privacy. Equally contributors have a right to expect a default right to privacy where personally identifiable information is involved.

Privacy trumps the expectation of data release and the question of what is personally identifiable information is a vexed question which as a society we are working through. Researchers will need to explore these issues with participants and to work to ensure that data generated can be anonymised in a way that enables the released data to effectively support the claims made from it. This is a challenging area which requires significant further technical, policy, and ethics work.

2 c) How should principles apply to research that is entirely privately-funded but with possible public implications?

It is clear that public funded research is a public good. By contrast privately funded research is properly a private good and the decision to release or not release research outputs lies with the funder.

It is worth noting that much of the privately funded research in UK universities is significantly subsidised through the provision of public infrastructure and this should be taken into consideration when defining publicly and privately funded research. Here I consider research that is 100% privately funded.

Where claims are made on the basis of privately funded research (e.g. of environmental impact or the efficacy of health treatments) then such claims SHOULD be fully supported by provision of the underlying evidence and data if they are to be credible. Where such claims are intended to influence public policy such evidence and data MUST be made available. That is, evidence based public policy must be supported by the publication of the full evidence regardless of the source of that evidence. Claims made to influence public policy that are not supported by provision of evidence must be discounted for the purposes of making public policy.

2 d) How should principles apply to research or communication of data that involves the promotion of the public interest but which might have implications from the privacy interests of citizens?

See above: the right to privacy trumps any requirement to release raw data. Nonetheless research should be structured and appropriate consent obtained to ensure that claims made on the basis of the research can be supported by an adequate, publicly accessible, evidence base.

3. What activities are currently under way that could improve the sharing and communication of scientific information?

A wide variety of technical initiatives are underway to enable the wider collection, capture, archival and distribution of research outputs including narrative, data, materials, and other elements of the research process. It is technically possible for us today to immediately publish the entire research record if we so choose. Such an extreme approach is resource intensive, challenging, and probably not ultimately a sensible use of resources. However it is clear that more complete and rapid sharing has the potential to increase the effectiveness and efficiency of research.

The challenges in exploiting these opportunities are fundamentally cultural. The research community is focussed almost entirely on assessment through the extremely narrow lens of publication of extended narratives in high profile peer reviewed journals. This cultural bias must be at least partially reversed before we can realise the opportunities that technology affords us. This involves advocacy work, policy development, the addressing of incentives for researchers and above all the slow and arduous process of returning the research culture to one which takes responsibility for the return on the public investment, including economic, health, social, education, and research returns and one that takes responsibility for effective communication of research outputs.

4. How do/should new media, including the blogosphere, change how scientists conduct and communicate their research?

New media (not really new any more and increasingly part of the mainstream) democratise access to communications and increase the pace of communication. This is not entirely a good thing and en masse the quality of the discourse is not always high. High quality depends on the good will, expertise, and experience of those taking part.There is a vast quantity of high quality, rapid response discourse that occurs around research on the web today even if it occurs in many places. The most effective means of determining whether a recent high profile communication stands up to criticism is to turn to discussion on blogs and news sites, not to wait months for a possible technical criticism to appear in a journal. In many ways this is nothing new, it is return to the traditional approaches of communication seen at the birth of the Royal Society itself of direct and immediate communication between researchers by the most efficient means possible; letters in the 17C and the web today.

Alongside the potential for more effective communication of researchers with each other there is also an enormous potential for more effective engagement with the wider community, not merely through “news and views” pieces but through active conversation, and indeed active contributions from outside the academy. A group of computer consultants are working to contribute their expertise in software development to improving legacy climate science software. This is a real contribution to the research effort. Equally the right question at the right time may come from an unexpected source but lead to new insights. We need to be open to this.

At the same time there is a technical deficiency in the current web and that is the management of the sheer quantity of potential connections that can be made. Our most valuable resource in research is expert attention. This attention may come from inside or outside the academy but it is a resource that needs to be efficiently directed to where it can have the most impact. This will include the necessary development of mechanisms that assist in choosing which potential contacts and information to follow up. These are currently in their infancy. Their development is in any case a necessity to deal with the explosion of traditional information sources.

5. What additional challenges are there in making data usable by scientists in the same field, scientists in other fields, ‘citizen scientists’ and the general public?

Effective sharing of data and indeed most research outputs remains a significant challenge. The problem is two-fold, first of ensuring sufficient contextual information that an expert can understand the potential uses of the research output. Secondly the placing of that contextual information in a narrative that is understandable to the widest possible range of users. These are both significant challenges that are being tackled by a large number of skilled people. Progress is being made but a great deal of work remains in developing the tools, techniques, and processes that will enable the cost effective sharing of research outputs.

A key point however is that in a world where publication is extremely cheap then simply releasing whatever outputs exist in their current form can still have a positive effect. Firstly where the cost of release is effectively zero even if there is only a small chance of those data being discovered and re-used this will still lead to positive outcomes in aggregate. Secondly the presence of this underexploited resource of released, but insufficiently marked up and contextualised, data will drive the development of real systems that will make them more useful.

6 a) What might be the benefits of more widespread sharing of data for the productivity and efficiency of scientific research?

Fundamentally more efficient, more effective, and more publicly engaging research. Less repetition and needless rediscovery of negative results and ideally more effective replication and critiquing of positive results are enabled by more widespread data sharing. As noted above another important outcome is that even suboptimal sharing will help to drive the development of tools that will help to optimise the effective release of data.

6 b) What might be the benefits of more widespread sharing of data for new sorts of science?

The widespread sharing of data has historically always lead to entirely new forms of science. The modern science of crystallography is based largely on the availability of crystal structures, bioinformatics would simply not exist without genbank, the PDB, and other biological databases and the astronomy of today would be unrecognizable to someone whose career ended prior to the availability of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Citizen science projects of the type of Galaxy Zoo, Fold-IT and many others are inconceivable without the data to support them. Extrapolating from this evidence provides an exciting view of the possibilities. Indeed one which it would be negligent not to exploit.

6 c) What might be the benefits of more widespread sharing of data for public policy?

Policy making that is supported by more effective evidence is something that appeals to most scientists. Of course public policy making is never that simple. Nonetheless it is hard to see how a more effective and comprehensive evidence base could fail to support better evidence based policy making. Indeed it is to be hoped that a wide evidence base, and the contradictions it will necessarily contain, could lead to a more sophisticated understanding of the scope and critique of evidence sources.

6 d) What might be the benefits of more widespread sharing of data for other social benefits?

The potential for wider public involvement in science is a major potential benefit. As in e) above a deeper understanding of how to treat and parse evidence and data throughout society can only be positive.

6 e) What might be the benefits of more widespread sharing of data for innovation and economic growth?

Every study of the release of government data has shown that it leads to a nett economic benefit. This is true even when such data has traditionally been charged for. The national economy benefits to a much greater extent than any potential loss of revenue. While this is not necessarily sufficient incentive for private investors to release data in this case of public investment the object is to maximise national ROI. Therefore release in a fully open form is the rational economic approach.

The costs of lack of acces to publicly funded research outputs by SMEs is well established. Improved access will remove the barriers that currently stifle innovation and economic growth.

6 f) What might be the benefits of more widespread sharing of data for public trust in the processes of science?

There is both a negative and a positive side to this question. On the positive greater transparency, more potential for direct involvement, and a greater understanding of the process by which research proceeds will lead to greater public confidence. On the negative, doing nothing is simply not an option. Recent events have shown not so much that the public has lost confidence in science and scientists but that there is deep shock at the lack of transparency and the lack of availability of data.

If the research community does not wish to be perceived in the same way as MPs and other recent targets of public derision then we need to move rapidly to improve the degree of transparency and accessibility of the outputs of public research.

7. How should concerns about privacy, security and intellectual property be balanced against the proposed benefits of openness?

There is little evidence that the protection of IP supports a nett increase on the return on the public investment in research. While there may be cases where it is locally optimal to pursue IP protection to exploit research outputs and maximise ROI this is not generally the case. The presumption that everything should be patented is both draining resources and stifling British research. There should always be an avenue for taking this route to exploitation but there should be a presumption of open communication of research outputs and the need for IP protection should be justified on a case by case basis. It should be unacceptable for the pursuit of IP protection to damage the communication and downstream exploitation of research.

Privacy issues and concerns around the personal security of researchers have been discussed above. National security issues will in many cases fall under a justifiable exception to the presumption of openness although it is clear that this needs care and probably oversight to retain public confidence.

8. What should be expected and/or required of scientists (in companies, universities or elsewhere), research funders, regulators, scientific publishers, research institutions, international organisations and other bodies?

British research could benefit from a statement of values, something that has the cultural significance of the Haldane principle (although perhaps better understood) or the Hippocratic oath. A shared cultural statement that captures a commitment to efficiently discharging the public trust invested in us, to open processes as a default, and to specific approaches where appropriate would act as a strong centre around which policy and tools could be developed. Leadership is crucial here in setting values and embedding these within our culture. Organisations such as the Royal Society have an important role to play.

Researchers and the research community need to take these responsibilities on ourselves in a serious and considered manner. Funders and regulators need to provide a policy framework, and where appropriate community sanctions for transgression of important principles. Research institutions are for the most part tied into current incentive systems that are tightly coupled to funding arrangements and have limited freedom of movement. Nonetheless a serious consideration of the ROI of technology transfer arrangements and of how non-traditional outputs, including data, contribute to the work of the institution and its standing are required. In the current economic climate successful institutions will diversify in their approach. Those that do not are unlikely to survive in their current form.

Other comments

This is not the first time that the research community has faced this issue. Indeed it is not even the first time the Royal Society has played a central role. Several hundred years ago it was a challenge to persuade researchers to share information at all. Results were hidden. Sharing was partial, only within tight circles, and usually limited in scope. The precursors of the Royal Society played a key role in persuading the community that effective sharing of their research outputs would improve research. Many of the same concerns were raised; concerns about the misuse of those outputs, concerns about others stealing ideas, concerns about personal prestige and the embarrassment potential of getting things wrong.

The development of journals and the development of a values system that demanded that results be made public took time, it took leadership, and with the technology of the day the best possible system was developed over an extended period. With a new technology now available we face the same issues and challenges. It is to be hoped that we tackle those challenges and opportunities with the same sense of purpose.

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Open Research: The personal, the social, and the political

Next Tuesday I’m giving a talk at the Institute for Science Ethics and Innovation in Manchester. This is a departure for me in terms of talk subjects, in as much as it is much more to do with policy and politics. I have struggled quite a bit with it so this is an effort to work it out on “paper”. Warning, it’s rather long. The title of the talk is “Open Research: What can we do? What should we do? And is there any point?”

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I’d like to start by explaining where I’m coming from. This involves explaining a bit about me. I live in Bath. I work at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, which is near Didcot. I work for STFC but this talk is a personal view so you shouldn’t take any of these views as representing STFC policy. Bath and Didcot are around 60 miles apart so each morning I get up pretty early, I get on a train, then I get on a bus which gets me to work. I work on developing methodology to study complex biological structures. We have a particular interest in trying to improve methods for looking at proteins that live in biological membranes and protein-nucleic acid complexes. I also have done work on protein labelling that lets us make cool stuff and pretty pictures. This work involves an interesting mixture of small scale lab work, work at large facilities on big instruments, often multi-national facilities. It also involves far too much travelling.

A good question to ask at this point is “Why?” Why do I do these things? Why does the government fund me to do them? Actually it’s not so much why the government funds them as why the public does. Why does the taxpayer support our work? Even that’s not really the right question because there is no public. We are the public. We are the taxpayer. So why do we as a community support science and research? Historically science was carried out by people sufficiently wealthy to fund it themselves, or in a small number of cases by people who could find wealth patrons. After the second world war there was a political and social concensus that science needed to be supported and that concensus has supported research funding more or less to the present day. But with the war receding in public memory we seem to have retained the need to frame the argument for research funding in terms of conflict or threat. The War on Cancer, the threat of climate change. Worse, we seem to have come to believe our own propaganda, that the only way to justify public research funding is that it will cure this, or save us from that. And the reality is that in most cases we will probably not deliver on this.

These are big issues and I don’t really have answers to a lot them but it seems to me that they are important questions to think about. So here are some of my ideas about how to tackle them from a variety of perspectives. First the personal.

A personal perspective on why and how I do research

My belief is we have to start with being honest with ourselves, personally, about why and how we do research. This sounds like some sort of self-help mantra I know but let me explain what I mean. My personal aim is to maximise my positive impact on the world, either through my own work or through enabling the work of others. I didn’t come at this from first principles but it has evolved. I also understand I am personally motivated by recognition and reward and that I am strongly, perhaps too strongly, motivated by others opinions of me. My understanding of my own skills and limitations means that I largely focus my research work on methodology development and enabling others. I can potentially have a bigger impact by building systems and capabilities that help others do their research than I can by doing that research myself. I am lucky enough to work in an organization that values that kind of contribution to the research effort.

Because I want my work to be used as far as is possible I make as much as possible of it freely available. Again I am lucky that I live now when the internet makes this kind of publishing possible. We have services that enable us to easily publish ideas, data, media, and process and I can push a wide variety of objects onto the web for people to use if they so wish. Even better than that I can work on developing tools and systems that help other people to do this effectively. If I can have a bigger impact by enabling other peoples research then I can multiply that again by helping other people to share that research. But here we start to run into problems. Publishing is easy. But sharing is not so easy. I can push to the web, but is anyone listening? And if they are, can they understand what I am saying?

A social perspective (and the technical issues that go with it)

If I want my publishing to be useful I need to make it available to people in a way they can make use of. We know that networks increase in value as they grow much more than linearly. If I want to maximise my impact, I have to make connections and maximise the ability of other people to make connections. Indeed Merton made the case for this in scientific research 20 years ago.

I propose the seeming paradox that in science, private property is established by having its substance freely given to others who might want to make use of it.

This is now a social problem but a social problem with a distinct technical edge to it.  Actually we have two related problems. The issue of how I make my work available in a useful form and the separate but related issue of how I persuade others to make their work available for others to use.

The key to making my work useful is interoperability. This is at root a technical issue but at a purely technical level is one that has been solved. We can share through agreed data formats and vocabularies. The challenges we face in actually making it happen are less technical problems than social ons but I will defer those for the moment. We also need legal interoperability. Science Commons amongst others has focused very hard on this question and I don’t want to discuss it in detail here except to say that I agree with the position that Science Commons takes; that if you want to maximise the ability of others to re-use your work then you must make it available with liberal licences that do not limit fields of use or the choice of license on derivative works. This mean CC-BY, BSD etc. but if you want to be sure then your best choice is explicit dedication to the public domain.

But technical and legal interoperability are just subsets of what I think is more important;  process interoperability. If the object we publish are to be useful then they must be able to fit into the processes that researchers actually use. As we move to the question of persuading others to share and build the network this becomes even more important. We are asking people to change the way they do things, to raise their standards perhaps. So we need to make sure that this is as easy as possible and fits into their existing workflows. The problem with understanding how to achieve technical and legal interoperability is that the temptation is to impose it and I am as guilty of this as anyone. What I’d like to do is use a story from our work to illustrate an approach that I think can help us to make this easier.

Making life easier by capturing process as it happens: Objects first, structure later

Our own work on web based laboratory recording systems, which really originates in the group of Jeremy Frey at Southampton came out of earlier work on a fully semantic RDF backed system for recording synthetic chemistry. In contrast we took an almost completely unstructured approach to recording work in a molecular biology laboratory, not because we were clever or knew it would work out, but because it was a contrast to what had gone before. The LaBLog is based on a Blog framework and allows the user to put in completely free text, completely arbitrary file attachments, and to organize things in whichever way they like. Obviously a recipe for chaos.

And it was to start with as we found our way around but we went through several stages of re-organization and interface design over a period of about 18 months. The key realization we made was that while a lot of what we were doing was difficult to structure in advance that there were elements within that, specific processes, specific types of material that were consistently repeated, even stereotyped, and that structuring these gave big benefits. We developed a template system that made producing these repeated processes and materials much easier. These templates depended on how we organized our posts, and the metadata that described them, and the metadata in turn was driven by the need for the templates to be effective. A virtuous circle developed around the positive re-inforcement that the templates and associated metadata provided. More suprisingly the structure that evolved out of this matched in many cases well onto existing ontologies. In specific cases where it didn’t we could see that either the problem arose from the ontology itself, or the fact that our work simply wasn’t well mapped by that ontology. But the structure arose spontaneously out of a considered attempt to make the user/designer’s life easier. And was then mapped onto the external vocabularies.

I don’t want to suggest that our particular implementation is perfect. It is far from it, with gaping holes in the usability and our ability to actually exploit the structure that has developed. But I think the general point is useful. For the average scientist to be willing to publish more of their research, that process has to be made easy and it has to recognise the inherently unstructured nature of most research. We need to apply structured descriptions where they make the user’s life easier but allow unstructured or semi-structured representations elsewhere. But we need to build tools that make it easy to take those unstructured or semi-structure records and mold them into a specific structured narrative as part of a reporting process that the researcher has to do anyway. Writing a report, writing a paper. These things need to be done anyway and if we could build tools so that the easiest way to write the report or paper is to bring elements of the original record together and push those onto the web in agreed formats through easy to use filters and aggregators then we will have taken an enormous leap forward.

Once you’ve insinuated these systems into the researchers process then we can start talking about making that process better. But until then technical and legal interoperability are not enough – we need to interoperate with existing processes as well. If we could achieve this then much more research material would flow online, connections would be formed around those materials, and the network would build.

And finally – the political

This is all very well. With good tools and good process I can make it easier for people to use what I publish and I can make it easier for others to publish. This is great but it won’t make others want to publish. I believe that more rapid publication of research is a good thing. But if we are to have a rational discussion about whether this is true we need to have agreed goals. And that moves the discussion into the political sphere.

I asked earlier why it is that we do science as a society, why we fund it. As a research community I feel we have no coherent answer to these questions.  I also talked about being honest to ourselves. We should be honest with other researchers about what motivates us, why we choose to do what we do, and how we choose to divide limited resources. And as recipients of taxpayers money we need to be clear with government and the wider community about what we can achieve. We also have an obligation to optimize the use of the money we spend. And to optimize the effective use of the outputs derived from that money.

We need at core a much more sophisticated conversation with the wider community about the benefits that research brings; to the economy, to health, to the environment, to education. And we need a much more rational conversation within the research community as to how those different forms of impact are and should be tensioned against each other.  We need in short a complete overhaul if not a replacement of the post-war concensus on public funding of research. My fear is that without this the current funding squeeze will turn into a long term decline. And that without some serious self-examination the current self-indulgent bleating of the research community is unlikely to increase popular support for public research funding.

There are no simple answers to this but it seems clear to me that at a minimum we need to be demonstrating that we are serious about maximising the efficiency with which we spend public money. That means making sure that research outputs can be re-used, that wheels don’t need to re-invented, and innovation flows easily from the academic lab into the commercial arena. And it means distinguishing between the effective use of public money to address market failures and subsidising UK companies that are failing to make effective investments in research and development.

The capital generated by science is in ideas, capability, and people. You maximise the effective use of capital by making it easy to move, by reducing barriers to trade. In science we can achieve this by maximising the ability transfer research outputs. If we to be taken seriously as guardians of public money and to be seen as worthy of that responsibility our systems need to make ideas, data, methodology, and materials flow easily. That means making our data, our process, and our materials freely available and interoperable. That means open research.

We need a much greater engagement with the wider community on how science works and what science can do. The web provides an immense opportunity to engage the public in active research as demonstrated by efforts as diverse as Galaxy Zoo with 250,000 contributors and millions of galaxy classifications and the Open Dinosaur Project with people reading online papers and adding the measurements of thigh bones to an online spreadsheet. Without the publicly available Sloan Digital Sky Survey, without access to the paleontology papers, and without the tools to put the collected data online and share them these people, this “public”, would be far less engaged. That means open research.

And finally we need to turn the tools of our research on ourselves. We need to critically analyse our own systems and processes for distributing resources, for communicating results, and for apportioning credit. We need to judge them against the value for money they offer to the taxpayer and where they are found wanting we need to adjust. In the modern networked world we need to do this in a transparent and honest manner. That means open research.

But even if we agree these things are necessary, or a general good, they are just policy. We already have policies which are largely ignored. Even when obliged to by journal publication policies or funder conditions researchers avoid, obfuscate, and block attempts to gain access to data, materials, and methdology. Researchers are humans too with the same needs to get ahead and to be recognized as anyone else. We need to find a way to map those personal needs, and those personal goals, onto the community’s need for more openness in research. As with the tooling we need to “bake in” the openness to our processes to make it the easiest way to get ahead. Policy can help with cultural change but we need an environment in which open research is the simplest and easiest approach to take. This is interoperability again but in this case the policy and process has to interoperate with the real world. Something that is often a bit of a problem.

So in conclusion…

I started with a title I’ve barely touched on.  But I hope with some of the ideas I’ve explored we are in a position to answer the questions I posed. What can we do in terms of Open Research? The web makes it technically possible for us the share data, process, and records in real time. It makes it easier for us to share materials though I haven’t really touched on that. We have the technical ability to make that data useful through shared data formats and vocabularies. Many of the details are technically and socially challenging but we can share pretty much anything we choose to on a wide variety of timeframes.

What should we do? We should make that choice easier through the development of tools and interfaces that recognize that it is usually humans doing and recording the research and exploiting the ability of machines to structure that record when they are doing the work. These tools need to exploit structure where it is appropriate and allow freedom where it is not. We need tools to help us map our records onto structures as we decide how we want to present them. Most importantly we need to develop structures of resource distribution, communication, and recognition that encourage openness by making it the easiest approach to take. Encouragement may be all that’s required. The lesson from the web is that once network effects take hold they can take care of the rest.

But is there any point? Is all of this worth the effort? My answer, of course, is an unequivocal yes. More open research will be more effective, more efficient, and provide better value for the taxpayer’s money. But more importantly I believe it is the only credible way to negotiate a new concensus on the public funding of research. We need an honest conversation with government and the wider community about why research is valuable, what the outcomes are, and how the contribute to our society. We can’t do that if the majority cannot even see those outcomes. The wider community is more sophisticated that we give it credit for. And in many ways the research community is less sophisticated than we think. We are all “the public”. If we don’t trust the public to understand why and how we do research, if we don’t trust ourselves to communicate the excitement and importance of our work effectively, then I don’t see why we deserve to be trusted to spend that money.