The C-word

I used to moan from time to time about how so many of the results of publicly funded research used to be hidden behind commercial paywalls. Whereas now, for the sort of stuff that I am interested in, this is no longer true. A lot of such research is published in open access form and a lot of what is not leaks out, in part, I suspect, because the authors want to be read. The average reads-per-paper is quite low enough - of the order of one or two? - without putting up barriers.

And given that researchers don't find time to read each other's stuff, maybe even fewer find time to actually review somebody else's work, so maybe peer review is not all that it is cracked up to be.

That, however, is not where I am at today. Today is the cautionary tale of a Chinese team who used the word 'Creator' three times in the course of a paper about the mechanics of the human hand, the general idea of which seems to be that the hand is a very clever bit of machinery. It would be hard to do a better design job than that turned in by evolution.

This use of the C-word has, it seems, triggered a big row in the world of PLOS, one of the biggest players in the open access movement. See reference 2. To the point where the paper has been retracted (hence the bit of red banner visible in the illustration above), although not removed from the PLOS site. So perhaps we will get the eating disorder effect noticed yesterday at reference 3, with this paper actually getting read on account of its notoriety. Maybe it is a good paper and all the publicity will make the careers of the authors. Which is all well and good, but which might well start a race to the bottom, a disease which affects many public affairs. Aka market forces.

But without making any attempt to judge the merits of the paper - which looks just like many others out there, full of fancy statistics and diagrams - see, for example, figure 5 - I suppose that all the fuss reflects the sensitivity of scientists in the US to anything which smells ever so faintly of creationism, given the large numbers of serious creationists in the US. Creationists who cause a lot of trouble in places such as schools - which, in part in consequence, turn out more of the same. How can you run a sensible country when so many of them hold such bizarre beliefs?

So I can see the point. But maybe in China the word is just a shorthand for something far more vague than our Creator, as set down in the Testaments, and not really a threat to science at all. Maybe, even, they were just attempting some humour, an attempt to liven up what would otherwise have been the normally safe & leaden  prose of science - in which case it all goes to show that you need to be very good at a foreign language before you try to be funny in it.

Reference 1: googling 'Biomechanical Characteristics of Hand Coordination in Grasping Activities of Daily Living' will get you there.

Reference 2: https://www.plos.org/.

Reference 3: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/pro-eating-disorder.html.