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Hello! I'm a scientist who does outreach; I've been monitoring this list for many years, but don't generally have anything much to add to the discussion. However, the recent 'bash-a-researcher' threads made me a little upset. I've dithered about whether or not to respond to these ideas, but in the end I couldn't let it go (more fool me, perhaps). To keep it reasonably short, I'll pick two comments which I find particularly concerning. > Academic scientists can be stubborn to an extreme, and are known for doing things their way, whatever university administrators and policymakers say or instruct them to do. So what do the UK research councils do when presented with grant applications or research progress reports from scientists whose work is regarded as being of superlative quality and importance, but who refuse to fulfil their public outreach responsibilities? Employ them, and let them get on with their research in peace. Because without good research, what would there be to 'communicate'? By all means allow for also employing strong communicators with less-than-stellar researcher careers. But we need the geniuses as well. Don't put the cart before the horse. > Research Councils and other bodies can sign all the bits of paper that they like, especially when arm twisted by that nice Mr Willetts, but the grunts who do the research can conveniently ignore it safe in the knowledge that it will hardly dent their academic careers. I think this is a totally unfair comment. The majority of researchers don't 'conveniently ignore' outreach. Like people in any other job, we are trying to do the best we can when faced with a huge range of conflicting demands on our time. Different people will react by assigning different amounts of effort to different areas. People who are good at outreach will tend to do more outreach. People who are good at research will tend to do more research. Is that really unhealthy? I don't think so. Best wishes, Andrew -- Dr Andrew Pontzen [log in to unmask] www.ast.cam.ac.uk/~app26/ ********************************************************************** Further information about the psci-com discussion list, including list archive, can be found at the list web site: http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/psci-com.html You may also change your settings and subscribe/unsubscribe to psci-com from the web site. Psci-com is part of the National Academic Mailing List Service, known as 'JISCMail'. It adheres to the JISCMail Acceptible Use Policy: http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/policyandsecurity/acceptableuse.html and to the JISCMail guidelines for etiquette: http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/policyandsecurity/etiquette.html Email commands: 1. To suspend yourself from the list, whilst on leave, for example, send an email to mailto:[log in to unmask] with the following message: set psci-com nomail -- [include hyphens] 2. To resume email from the list, send an email to [log in to unmask] with the message: set psci-com mail -- [include hyphens] 3. To leave psci-com, send an email to [log in to unmask] with the message: leave psci-com -- [include hyphens] Please allow up to 24 hours for these commands to activate. Remember that you will need to send commands using the same email address that you used to register on psci-com. To contact the Psci-com list owner, please send an email to: [log in to unmask] **********************************************************************