05/19/2021

Trust in Science:

Views from three experts

Today’s guest post is a recap of the recent SSP webinar, Ask the Experts: Trust in Science, by the moderator, Anita de Waard, VP Research Collaborations, Elsevier.

We frequently look to experts to help us in many aspects of life: if you need to do your taxes, you go to an accountant; if you have a headache, you see your doctor; if you want to renovate your kitchen, you talk to a contractor. But what happens when people don’t trust the experts, their processes, or the information they share? Over the past year, as the COVID pandemic took hold, people have found themselves bombarded with information about the virus, its spread, and reports of new treatments and vaccines. How do people navigate this and decide what to believe? And what can we do to help?. The Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP) recently brought together three experts from our community to consider these issues in a discussion of Trust in Science.

Tracey Brown, OBE, director of Sense About Science, Richard Sever, PhD, assistant director at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press and co-Founder of bioRxiv and medRxiv, and Eefke Smit, director of standards and technology at the International Association of STM Publishers identified several key issues: understanding and trust in the scientific method; scientist-to-scientist trust; and public trust in science. They also highlighted methods to foster trust in science: transparent peer review; tracking submissions and avoiding paper mills; equipping journalists and the public to ask the right questions and communicate the answers effectively; the need for negative data to be accessible; and starting early — teaching children about science and research.

We asked our experts three questions about ‘trust in science’: 1) how do you define it (whose trust, and in what?); 2) what is your organization doing to enhance this trust?; and 3) what do you think publishers can do to improve trust?. Here’s what they said.

Please select this link to read the complete article from The Scholarly Kitchen.