Defining science bloggers: Casey Luskin and BPR3

Wikipedia has a policy page which outlines What Wikipedia is Not. While it is possible to define Wikipedia in positive terms (it is an encyclopaedia and an online community of people working to write that encyclopaedia), it's more useful to define it in negative terms - not a dictionary, not a soapbox, not a publisher of original thought... After Casey Luskin's recent (mis)use of the ResearchBlogging (formerly BPR3) logo on a post at Evolution News & Views, a debate sprung up over the issue of his use of the icon. The ResearchBlogging icon is supposed to be used for blog posts about peer reviewed research. I first came across the issue yesterday when Mike Dunford raised the issue - among the issues with Luskin's use of the icon was the fact that, instead of registering to the site, it was downloaded to the Discovery Institute's server and hosted there, with no backlink to ResearchBlogging.org.

There's a more fundamental question of whether Luskin's post meets the guidelines for its use. While some people raised the issue of whether a review article meets the requirement of "peer reviewed research" and questioned whether EN&V can be called a blog (since it lacks a comment section), two other issues were more important:

• The post author should have read and understood the entire work cited.
• The blog post should report accurately and thoughtfully on the research it presents.

Luskin's post does not appear to meet the second guideline - that the post reported "accurately and thoughtfully". There's the quote mining issue - that bits were picked out of the paper to support a specific agenda. Couple this with the fact that Luskin put words in the mouth of the author that weren't in the paper, and the end result was that the post did not accurately reflect the paper.

In trying to define science bloggers, I suggested that

1. Science bloggers blog about science because they find it interesting
2. Science bloggers are interested in communicating their field of interest to people outside of their immediate field
   
3. Science bloggers are frequently motivated by a desire to defend science against pseudoscience and denialism

In my opinion, Luskin's work can't be called science blogging - it's agenda-driven blogging which seeks to discredit science. Rather than making it more accessible to the public, Luskin leaves his readers with a misunderstanding of what the paper was trying to say. Given that my original set of criteria were based largely on intent, I think it may be more useful to recast them in terms of what science blogging is not.

Posts on this issue

• Is this post following our guidelines? - Dave Munger, BPR3 blog. This is the central hub for discussion of the issue, and the how ResearchBlogging community should proceed with issues like this.
  
• Blogging About Peer-Reviewed Research at the Discovery Institute - Mike Dunford, The Questionable Authority. This is the post where Mike introduced the issue (at least to me).
  
• Luskin and the Peer-Reviewed Research Icon - the Saga Continues - Mike Dunford, The Questionable Authority. Mike talks about Luskin's "I didn't know, it's not my fault, I didn't realise it was copyright" reply.
• Oops! Another Discovery Institute Abuse & Misuse - Kevin Z, The Other 95%. Kevin Z has a good analysis of Luskin's post in the context of the ResearchBlogging guidelines, and then goes on to discuss the Origel article that Luskin quote mined.
  
• Dishonesty Institute - John Pieret, Thoughts in a Haystack.
  
• Casey Luskin is a Douchbag - Mister DNA, CBEB's (whose icon I'm stealing). He points out the irony in Luskin doing this so soon after his use of cease-and-desist letters to get Les Lane to take down a picture of Luskin (irony is lost on this man, isn't it?)
  
• BSpr3 -BullShit on peer reviewed research - SPARC, molecular B(io)LOG(y). SPARC suggests that we need a new icon for stuff like Luskin's paper.
  
• More Discovery Institute Shenanigans - Jessa, Impolite Conversations.
  
• Why I Love the BPR3 Icon and Hate Creationists for Abusing It - Greg Laden, Greg Laden's blog
• Casey Luskin demonstrates "fair use" doctrine - Joe McFaul, Law Evolution Science and Junk Science. He makes some very interesting points about fair use (Luskin's use is not) and how Luskin's use "affect[s] the market" of the ResearchBlogging brand. Fascinating stuff.
• Casey Luskin Demonstrates that ID Stands for Insidious Deception - Mike O'Risal, Hyphoid Logic. Mike makes a good point - while it's bad to use the icon inappropriately, the real problem is that he is unwilling to allow feedback. And, of course, it's a perfect encapsulation of the main problem with ID - their refusal to present their ideas for peer review.
  

Other people who mentioned the issue

• Science Smackdown - Bug Girl, Bug
  
• links for 2008-02-05 - Janet Stemwedel, Adventures in Ethics and Science
• Skepchick Quickies for 2.05 - Amanda, Memoirs of a Skepchick

How many blogs does a person need?

T. Ryan Gregory asked that question yesterday, as he launched his third blog at Nature Network. In the post, he mentioned his second blog, DNA & Diversity at Scientific Blogging. So I went over there to have a look - and realised that I had just registered at that site the previous day. At the time, I knew nothing about the site, but now I poked around some more, and it seems reasonable and credible. So I now have a sixth blog, Tropical Ecology Notes (ok, in reality it's my fifth, since I can't really count a blog I don't update).

Scientific Blogging seeks to be science-only. At the very least I can cross-post my tropical biology posts over there. It might be nice to put together a collection like that. Since everything gets a short while on the front page, let's see if anyone reads it. If so, great. If not, well, I'm not creating content specifically for that site, at least not yet, so the marginal cost of adding a post there is very small (unlike here, where I am blogging for almost no readers). We'll see - it could be fun. And it could fill a useful niche - there don't seem to be too many people blogging about tropical plant ecology.

Update: Gregory mentioned that Scientific Blogging was a way to reach a wider audience than he currently has at Genomicron (which is probably many times the readership that I have on my WordPress blog). Based on the one article I have posted there, I think he's right.

Defining science bloggers

Jeremy Bruno of The Voltage Gate does an excellent job of tying together some of the ideas I was playing with in my post on the Boxer article and my post on responsibilities to readers. Commenting on Brian Switek's response to Boxer, Jeremy says

Brian goes on to say how science bloggers are different, basically that we haven't fallen for the dressed up dumbed down money trap, even since the move to Sb. I'd like to riff on this idea for a bit, coming from the perspective of a writer.

Jeremy points out that there are several reason why science bloggers are different from your average bloggers, at least when they are talking about science - in part, because the community is relatively small (there aren't that many people who are really qualified to talk about science), and at the same time, there are enough knowledgeable people out there that

If something is wrong in your blog post, expect that someone in the science blogging community will pick up on it and tell you why you're wrong...Fluid physics and phylogeny take an instructed understanding to discuss properly, while the ills of liberalism or war in Iraq can generally be commented upon by anyone. A political scientist or a historian might be more eloquent and be able to cite specifics, but in general, politics can be approached by anyone with half a brain.

(Which is reflected, I suppose, in the fact that science bloggers spend a lot of time commenting on politics, but few political bloggers spend much time talking about science - DarkSyde at dKos being a notable exception. Of course, that does raise the question again of "what is a science blogger?" Is DarkSyde a science blogger on a political website, or a political blogger who writes about science?)

The contrast between ScienceBlogs and other paid bloggers may reflect a difference in where they are coming from. Jeremy agrees with Boxer that professional journalists who blog at blogs set up my newspapers and magazines tend to fall flat (or, to use his far more evocative language "forced, boring and stink of the inverted pyramid"). But these are people who got the job because they are journalists, not because they are bloggers. The people at ScienceBlogs earned their reputation as bloggers. It isn't like Seed went out and recruited people based on their reputation as scientists. That is likely to be the reason why Boxer's assessment of paid bloggers falls so far off the mark when it comes to ScienceBlogs.