I’ve always said that being a scientist is like being a musician. There are parallels at every level, but as you dig deeper you will find that musicians are much more able to adapt to change than scientists.
The scientist performs a experiment while the musician writes a song. The scientists ‘hustles’ at poster displays and (rare) oral presentations; the musician hustles on stage. The scientist is recruited, and (somewhat) funded by a research institution, the musician by a record label. The research institution is responsible for the direction of the research carried out by the investigators and providing the infrastructure to for the investigator and their mignons to carry out their work. Likewise, the record label has to provide an infrastructure for recording albums, technology, organization, and human resources necessary to take a show to the road, and technology to deliver the music to the public (communicate data, if you will). Lastly, scientists have to stay abreast with changes in their field, but not necessarily with changes in technology or technology of the resources they use. Musicians on the other hand, have to say up with the latest technologies on all fronts: recording, instrumentation, live performance, and most important: accessing their fan base. The availability of home recording technology and the internet has allowed people to create and distribute their CDs. Websites like myspace and cdbaby have become staples in the music economy. Huge legal battles have shifted the playing field, and now people are buying their music online. Websites are so sophisticated its ridiculous and money is being made that could fund more research than the NIH (don’t quote me on that at all).
Why hasn’t academic science taken advantage of what the internet has to offer? We have the potential to communicate our data, expand our communities, manage our papers and our research, and not look like chumps from the ’80s! Why do web pages like this (and this) exist! There is no reason why sites can be nice like the big playas (HHMI, Cornell).
David Crotty argues that mabe the right tools have not been popularized enough, and that the available tools have not necessarily proven to be totally useful. Take my last post for example: papers and ipapers, the two reference managers, are totally useless! They crash like crazy and have more problems functioning than my 85 year old grandfather. Good in principle, but they aren’t quite there yet.
My stance is that if real change is going to be made, it has to be at the level of the research institution (record label) and not the individual researcher. The individual researcher doesn’t have time to worry about their website or how their students are keeping lab books. The research institution should set the standard. The same way a label provides the infrastructure for a musician, so should the institution provide the resources for the group of investigators that drive the research and funding of that organization. They
Interesting post, and you make a great point about lab websites.
Having an infrastructure in place that provides useful templates for lab websites, sites that are actually well-designed and informative would be a godsend. Do a random survey of lab websites and try to find mailing addresses for the lab. Even though this seems like the most basic piece of information (where would I send a letter to the lab), I’ve found this to be a 50:50 proposition at best.
For newer, more groundbreaking technologies, I’m not sure that the institution is the right level for understanding the needs of the individuals concerned here. With different needs in the Physics department than those found in the Biology department, is an institutional authority going to be able to dig up new tools to address them? I still think that really useful tools will spring up in more of a grassroots manner. Perhaps once tools are in place and established (like having a website), then yes, building an institutional infrastructure is a great way to go.
As far as the musician/scientist analogy goes, there are some obvious parallels with intellectual property, with the patent agreements one signs onto when one is part of an institution versus the record company owning perpetual rights to your songs. Fortunately for scientists, I’ve found most educational institutions to be much more supportive than record company weasels (less cocaine use and fewer prostitutes as well).