Tag Archives: science policy

为环保，别离婚。

ResearchBlogging.orgLiu, J. (2010). China’s Road to Sustainability Science, 328 (5974), 50-50 DOI: 10.1126/science.1186234

这期Science的Policy Forum有一篇讲到了中国的环境问题和可持续发展。大话题没有什么新意，但里面有些信息比较有趣。

中国政府在近三十年来十分注重环保，但有的措施的结果并不符合期望。

例如在干旱风沙地区大量植树，使得土壤仅有的少量水分被树吸光了，反而加剧了土壤风化。所以越植树越沙尘暴。前几天我还看到一行国家领导人在北京一个全是沙的地方植树……

又例如，旨在控制人口的计划生育政策，本来应该能减少资源的开采程度。但实际上，独生子女的增多，家庭规模变小了。以前一家人叔叔婶婶什么的都一起住，资源的使用是比较高效的。现在基本上一对夫妻就是一个家庭，实际上家庭数量的增加，又大大增加了资源浪费。再加上离婚率升高，很多人单身，一个人就是一个家，还有好多人包二奶三奶，一个人有好几个家……

所以作者在文中建议中国政府为了环保事业而控制离婚率，并提倡尽量所有家人都住在一起，以提高资源的使用效率。

现在很多浪漫主义，不食人间烟火的无知少年在跟什么“低碳生活”的时尚风，所有“低碳生活”的时尚活动一律色调年轻，语言俏皮，旨在吸引年轻人——即又无知又有钱的人群——的加入。其实，他们只是玩玩。如果来真的，为了他们所青睐的“低碳”、“乐活”、那种新亮干净简洁现代的意象，叫他们不许过二人世界，结婚后跟公公婆婆住，他们绝对不同意。他们喜欢的只是挂着“低碳”羊头的后工业时代浪费式时尚狗肉。实际上越老土的东西越低碳。原始社会最低碳。

Science社论创新激励

ResearchBlogging.org

Science的Editorial是open access的。大家可以自己去看。

在科学网上谈创新，很可能会一堆民科过来回复，陷到那里面去。但是这个问题是一个很简单的科学标准共识的问题，不是那种迴避了就啥也没法讨论的核心问题，因此迴避。这篇社论题目很大，但是核心内容主要谈的是经费申请中的同行评议问题。过于谨慎的经费发放标准导致保守的科研氛围，这已经不是什么新鲜论调，不会值得写一篇09年的Science社论，因此这篇社论的亮点在于NIH的一个新举措——The New Innovator Awards：

To be eligible, an applicant must have received a doctoral degree no more than 10 years previously. Each investigator was asked to propose “highly innovative approaches to a high-impact problem,” with no preliminary data required. In addition, an explanation was requested for why this work was unlikely to be funded through normal review mechanisms.

其实，抱怨基金委不给钱给新想法或冒险想法是永无结果的。搞科研要钱，这一事实本身就限制创新。如果科研所需的资源是无限的，那这里就就完全不存在经济学——一门基于资源稀缺性的学问了；然而，“投入产出”的核心问题，在面对未知世界的时候，是伪命题。正是这两者的根本矛盾，导致把欠缺创新的问题归因于基金委或者同行评议将永远纠结。NIH就很清醒——问题并不在于此。再怎么支持创新，也不会有人欢迎明知没戏的项目。问题是，偏偏越没有创新性的项目，你越知道有没有戏。反过来说，创新性强的项目的特点无非是你不知道它有没有戏而已，并不等于铁定没戏。发文章要用数据说话，是因为文章是要下结论的；但基金申请还要用数据说话，实际上是害怕未知因素过多，但是越创新越是未知因素多。因此NIH就直接“with no preliminary data required”。

唯一不变的是，同行评议不能抛弃。许多人对这点可能会有疑问。还是要让别人来评，而且还没有数据，那凭什么斃掉这个，批准那个，岂不是更没个准了吗？实际上，“没个准”的问题不存在于同行评议的阶段。大量“事实基础不足”的申请在老制度下很早就被刷掉了，根本落不到评审专家手上。如果是小同行，倒并不需要看很充实的数据来评判一个idea。去掉preliminary data的requirement，恰恰是帮助这些idea顺利出现在评审专家前面。另一个问题就是，很多人担心自己的想法讲得太清楚的话，会被评审专家扣住，钱拿不到，想法还被窍取。所以，NIH又加两条限制，就是这个New Innovator Awards只允许拿了博士学位不超过10年的人士参加，同时要清楚地说明该idea按正常程序是无法获得批准。这就使得评审专家门就算想窃取idea也没办法自己搞到钱了——他们自己没办法参加New Innovator Adwards因为超龄了，按正常程序这个idea又申请不到钱，知道了也没用。

这样的办法，其实可以作为一般的鼓励年轻研究者的制度进行扩大推广。不知道我们国家的基金委有没有类似的制度？

Alberts, B. (2009). On Incentives for Innovation Science, 326 (5957), 1163-1163 DOI: 10.1126/science.1184848

OA week webina: China's illy defined scientific journal policy

Nature Network博客上的原文：http://network.nature.com/people/andrewsun/blog/2009/10/20/oa-week-webina-chinas-illy-defined-scientific-journal-policy

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.