| The blue revolution at BBC Science | Martin Robbins With the BBC now providing links to the scientific research it reports, will 2010 be the year when science journalists discover the web link?It's funny how things can be connected. I was looking up the recipe for Worcestershire sauce last night and ended up idly clicking through Wikipedia. It turns out that the sauce is made from anchovies, which can cause amnesic shellfish poisoning, a brain-damaging illness that may have caused thousands of frantic seabirds to invade towns in Californian in 1961; events that may have provided some inspiration for Hitchcock's film The Birds. I found all this because of links. Links are the foundation of the world wide web. They take us beyond whatever we happened to be looking for, on journeys to places we never even imagined existed. Every minute of every day, millions of curious apes click billions of links, each travelling on their own miniature voyages of discovery. Of all the differences between science blogging and mainstream media reporting of science, one of the most profound is the use of links. Science bloggers often come from a scientific background, and as scientists we were drilled on the need for citations. Any factual statement or assertion you make in a research paper should be backed up with a reference to primary evidence supporting the claim. It's a habit that translates well into journalism, a profession which, like science, should be concerned with studying the world and reporting its findings on behalf of the public in an open and accountable way. By providing links to sources (or indeed posting full interview transcripts), journalists can show that they're honest, open and trustworthy and allow the reader to judge whether the interpretation they've presented of someone else's work or words is the correct one. And links can do much more than that. By embedding links in text, journalists can turn their articles from static descriptions of the world into platforms that open up avenues for exploration and discovery to their audience, tapping into rich veins of knowledge and intrigue to provide the reader with far more value than one journalist could provide on their own. Links are beautiful, so why are newspaper websites so utterly reluctant to use them? In particular, why do science journalists who write about scientific papers so often fail to provide a link to a copy of the paper in question? It's an issue that Ben Goldacre raised with the BBC earlier this year, but with apparently little success. As Ben pointed out at the time: "It's very important that the public are able to get access to information, especially since media reports – for many structural reasons – can be light on information, or even contain errors."But now the Beeb seems to have relented. It has come to my attention, courtesy of the commenter soveda, that the BBC are – occasionally at least – now adding links to the original research in their articles, for example in the 5th paragraph here.This is to be congratulated. It's easy to moan when journalists get things wrong, but fair play to the BBC here – they've listened, and they appear to have changed their practice. For that they should be congratulated, and if you give a crap about news outlets linking to research (and if not, why on Earth are you still reading this?) then you should go immediately to their feedback page, and leave a friendly comment. So will other organs follow the BBC's lead? Unfortunately, the scientific journals themselves are putting barriers in the way of journalists who want to link to the original research, as the science editor of the Times Mark Henderson told me earlier:"I think it's good practice to provide direct hyperlinks to journal articles where practical, but this isn't always easy to achieve. The main problem is that while some journals (eg Nature) provide such links on their embargoed press releases (or tell you how to work them out using DOI numbers), others do not. It can thus take time you don't have to establish the correct link.Worse still is that some journals (PNAS is a particular offender) don't have papers available online when an embargo lifts. It is thus impossible to link even to an abstract."Embargoes themselves are a difficult and controversial subject best left to the likes of Ivan Oransky, but clearly there's a problem with the way that PR officers at some major journals are operating – by failing to support busy journalists, they're failing the public. One simple solution would fix this problem, as Mark suggests: "I would encourage all press officers dealing with journal articles to include a hyperlink to the paper, that will go live when an embargo lifts, on their press releases as a matter of course."Let's hope that the BBC's decision will start putting pressure on journals to do just this. But let's not forget the wider problem here. As blogs and mainstream media draw ever closer together – a long-term shift epitomised by my own move to the Guardian – there are opportunities for each to learn from the other. One of the most obvious things that bloggers can teach mainstream media journalists is the proper use of the link. It's not enough for journalists to simply report on the world, they need to let people see it for themselves.Martin Robbinsguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
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