Plausible Accuracy

My post from yesterday seems to have gotten attention… from the subject of the post, John Wilbanks.  He emailed me to say that he attempted to comment, but it didn’t go through, so he followed up on his Nature Network blog.

I’m really excited about his response, and I’ll just briefly mention a few of my thoughts.  First of all, he points out the crux of the matter:

It’s a point I have actually removed from my talks recently because I was finding it misconstrued – it’s a little subtle and hard to grok sometimes, and it’s an example of how hard it is for the lawyers and the scientists to understand each other.

To be honest, considering the fact that I was so on board with just about everything else he had to say in the talk, I had a hunch this was the case. Perhaps I didn’t make this clear enough in my original post, but my point was not that I really thought he was saying scientists are all uncreative robots, but that this was how I thought many would parse what he was saying.

He goes on to clear things up in a way that makes sense to me:

The copyright on the overall article, that comes from the connectors and the clause structures, is being used to control the movement of the facts of the experiment

This is an excellent point, and one that I think is a major issue (although to be sure a bit harder to include in a casual talk).

To be honest, my traffic is so low that it’s probably best to move the conversation over to his blog, in order to expand the audience as much as possible.  I’ll continue my own thoughts in the comments there.

Of course comments will be open here as well (assuming you can get them to wind their way through wordpress).  Actually, now I see that Nature Networks requires signup to use, but PA is a bit more open :)

Also, some link love from Open Access News.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 27th, 2008 at 4:02 pm and is filed under open science, practice of science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.