Instead of:
... and many have been reluctant to accept the results of the supernovae teams.
Now, a team of 27 astronomers led by Professor George Efstathiou of the University of Cambridge has published strong evidence for the existence of dark energy using an entirely different technique. They used the clustering...
there should have been something like
< ... and many < have been reluctant to accept the < results of the supernovae teams. < < However, several teams from around the world < have published strong evidence for the < existence of dark energy using entirely different techniques. < < One of these is a team of 27 astronomers led by < Professor George Efstathiou of the < University of Cambridge. They used the clustering...
Wouldn't this have been more honest?
YES, IT CERTAINLY WOULD!!!
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?
[...]
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
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do good science, I think that if one or more people were willing to
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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... ;-)
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.? 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.... :-)
-- Andrzej