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Select Committee on Science and Technology Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 420 - 428)

WEDNESDAY 5 MAY 2004

PROFESSOR SIR KEITH O'NIONS, MR RAMA THIRUNAMACHANDRAN AND PROFESSOR JOHN WOOD

  Q420  Paul Farrelly: Would you agree that it would have been helpful to have somebody responsible for competition matters from the DTI coming to the Committee?

  Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: Given the nature of the conversations we have had this morning and some of the areas where the three people in front of you have been less than helpful, either because we do not have the experience or the responsibility, it must be right. There must be others that you could have usefully spoken to.

  Q421  Dr Harris: Turning to the issue of public interest and public policy, which is more OST than DTI, you will be relieved to hear, do you think it is reasonable that public money should be spent in, for example, but not only, biomedical research where a question is asked, the result is negative, therefore, in a sense, not of positive interest and that is never published?

  Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: When you say that it is never—

  Q422  Dr Harris: It is the problem of publication bias basically, that negative results, publicly funded or otherwise, are not published, so that is a huge problem. If you have 20 studies you could get one with a 5% chance of showing a positive result but if that is the only one published it looks like evidence when, in fact, it is not.

  Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: As a general assertion, I do not think I can agree with you. The whole nature of experimental science and research is that negative results are published and they are extremely important because of that. If something does not work, that is a very useful piece of knowledge which often is published because it tells somebody else "don't bother to go and do this" or if perhaps you believe it should have worked you will have another go at it. As a general assertion I do not think I can agree with you.

  Q423  Dr Harris: I am quite surprised, I thought it was generally agreed that there was a problem, not that every negative result was not published but that many were not. I am talking about funded money through the Research Councils or otherwise being used for a project where one does not insist on publication and, therefore, the researchers when they get a negative result do not have to write it up, they can move on to something that hopefully will be positive and high impact and more RAE based. I am just wondering whether there should be a system whereby all results from publicly funded research grants are published and the Government should facilitate there being a journal, for example, of negative results where this could be done. Clearly peer review needs to take place but I would be surprised if peer review said "This is not positive, get out of our journal". Has that been thought about and discussed? This is topical in the science community, certainly the bioscience community.

  Professor Wood: I have read an awful lot of papers which have got nothing in them because nothing happened. I am sure others have as well.

  Q424  Chairman: You have published a few!

  Professor Wood: If I have I will not admit it.

  Q425  Dr Harris: You just have to read the abstract.

  Professor Wood: I would say that the Research Councils do demand publication in as much as that all research after it is finished is assessed and one of the key criteria for whether the work has been done properly is how much dissemination there has been of those data. That does feed back in quite strongly. There are some areas where more speculative research is undertaken where the initial proposition is almost essentially totally flawed. I can think of one which I was involved in which took eight years to sort things out, but we managed to publish an awful lot of papers on the way to finding that it was totally flawed.

  Q426  Dr Harris: This is tied into open access, is it not? Because of what you have just said, and you were joking about it, it is not a gripping read and, therefore, you are not going to sell many journals that are full of things that have not worked, whereas open access would be a way of ensuring that could be done, although there is still a cost to pay for.

  Professor Wood: I think you are probably being a bit too black and white here because some negative results can be extremely useful and journals do accept that. Personally I can think of—

  Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: Just take cold fusion.

  Professor Wood: I did not publish that.

  Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: Nor did I. Many, many articles on negative results were published. Can I just shift that a little bit. A great deal of research in universities is done by people working for their PhDs and when people write up their PhDs they are usually fairly fulsome and do report a great deal of things that may not have gone right, negative results and so on. I think there is probably a higher proportion of that sort of result in that domain perhaps than from people who are further on in their careers. That material is available, it is not published but it is all available from universities and so on. I think quite a lot of things that are perhaps not as exciting do actually end up being written up and are accessible.

  Q427  Dr Iddon: I do not think we could finish this session without referring to the university end of the public libraries. They are under great pressure because of increasing usage and, indeed, the increasing amount of published work, particularly in the research area. Certainly, in my view, the money awarded to university libraries in particular has not kept pace with those developments. This morning we have been discussing the transition period which is obviously going to increase costs on everybody who wants to buy in publications, whether they be hard copy or on the internet. Do you agree with me that university libraries are going to be grossly under-funded if we do not offer them some special assistance during this transition period?

  Mr Thirunamachandran: I have already given the figures regarding the funding which goes into university libraries. University libraries will always claim, and with some justification, that prices of certain journals and certain books have gone up well ahead of the retail price index so that means they are struggling to keep pace in real terms. What we have done is to try to ensure that institutions collaborate more in terms of what they can do in provision. There is a small fund of just under five million which we provide called the Research Library Access Fund which is specifically aimed at those institutions which are prepared to collaborate and provide access to neighbouring and other institutions to improve access and to be more cost-effective in that way.

  Professor Wood: From our perspective, this intermediate area is a problem for us and we are looking at it and populating various scenarios. In the end I think open access with institutional repositories is the way to go and then we will start to see savings, but in the meantime it is a problem.

  Q428  Dr Iddon: Will the move to "author pays" help or hinder this situation?

  Professor Wood: Again, it depends on the cost. This goes back to copyright and all the other things that have been mentioned, the cost of archiving. It could go either way.

  Chairman: Can I say to the three of you, thank you very much for coming along. I hope the discussion has engendered some enthusiasm to get back there with some alacrity to get a move on to get some decisions and hopefully our report will play a part in that as well. Thank you very much for taking the time.





 
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