<cross-post to cosmo-torun & cosmo-media, please follow up to *cosmo-media*>
Cze�� Andrzej, Thanks for starting the cosmo-media list. :) This way we can separate out public relations/marketing/propaganda questions from core research questions...
On Tue, 26 Mar 2002, Andrzej Marecki wrote:
Instead of:
...
Wouldn't this have been more honest?
YES, IT CERTAINLY WOULD!!!
Good, we agree here :).
But...
although I have no interest in defending RAS I think it is always honest to tend to narrow down the responsibility to particular persons. In this case the person to blame is the *referee* who allowed the authors to ommit the reference(s) to other groups work.
Now the good question emerges: who on Earth wrote that $&%@ PR??!!! The authors of the original paper themselves?
I don't think blaming individuals would be effective (supposing that we were to "investigate" this particular case). I think it's much more likely to be a systematic problem.
[...]
Well, I don't know about spaceflightnow.com in particular, but since our research work does not directly threaten any large authoritarian corporations or authoritarian governments or democratic governments, except indirectly because it shows that people in a non-US/UK country
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^do good science, I think that if one or more people were willing to
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
spend the time talking to journalists and explaining stuff to them, e.g. via cosmo-media, then there's actually a fairly good chance they would publish stuff.
IMO the best way to show that is... to publish in US/UK journals. If Roukema, Mamon & Bajtlik paper were published in MNRAS and not in A&A then maybe... ;-)
I'm not convinced. My ApJ papers have barely been cited at all. But anyway, this is about the research community, it's different to the general public.
But OK, you're right, we have to talk to journalists and explain things to them. Preferably we have to talk to US/UK journalists... Because if we talk e.g. to Polish journalists then there is hardly any impact. Example: recently Udalski et al. discovered a few dozens of extraterrestrial plants in "one go". There was a large (front page) coverage of this discovery in the largest Polish daily newspaper. Now how about spaceflightnow.com et al.?
There was a lot of impact in Poland - random people I met (e.g. on the train) had heard about this. But apparently even you ;) have fallen into the media trap of attempting to explain things in an easy way and introducing errors...
I think this is the article you are referring to:
http://de.arXiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0202320
in which case *none* of these 42 multiple transit detection Jupiters/brown dwarfs/M dwarfs are considered confirmed as planets!! So even if the result is exciting, the Polish journalists jumped ahead of the research results.
NOTHING! So maybe there *is* an Anglo-American mafia censorship. But maybe not. If only Udalski et al. published in ApJ or MNRAS and not in Acta Astronomica.... :-)
Regarding this whole discussion, in case you didn't notice it ;), I was offered a faculty position in a university in Poland, called UMK - and I accepted it.
I accepted it because not only does Poland have a rich scientific and cultural tradition, but it is also materially and socially a rich country. By the financial exchange rate, Poland is a middle ranked country, and it is simply wrong to say that Poland is poor. It is poorer than the richest countries in the world, but is richer than the poorest countries.
And I would prefer to support these local traditions and existing structures (and their decentralised, networked evolution) rather than contribute to their destruction. It is true that their are big problems such as unemployment and the destruction of social services etc., but I think that the underlying social fabric and infrastructure is still very strong.
I think that accepting the idea that everything is centralised in the US/UK would just be following the Soviet (ZSSR) tradition of centralisation. Poles had to accept the dominance of the ZSSR when forced to, but I don't see why we should accept the dominance of the US/UK any more than we really have to.
In terms of our scientific publications, I think that publication in A&A is realistic and supportive of Poland as part of Europe, and since it has a significant amount of cosmology articles, I don't see any reason not to support it. (I don't mind submitting a few co-authored articles to MNRAS or ApJ, but it's a priority for me.)
For popular articles/press releases, if you really have time to invest, then I think that local support should be a priority. That doesn't mean that we should ignore UK/US popular magazines, but I think that distributing our information locally in a way that locals can directly support us makes sense. In any case, if I find a moment to spare this is what I would like to do... And thanks to the mailing list cosmo-media, if the local magazines stuff up (convert correct, clear explanations into confusing and/or wrong explanations), then at least those people with internet access and curiosity can find where/how the stuff-ups occurred...
[BTW, I happen to have had contact with a US magazine because they contacted me, and I also happened to do a French->English translation of a book on exoplanets for Cambridge Uni Press. So I admit compromising here. ;) But I would prefer to balance this by local publications if I have time...]
Pozdrawiam serdecznie Boud