How do they expect the PR people to write the press release then, if they are incapable of understanding the paper because they’re not working as researchers in top groups in the particular fields?  Or maybe some university PR people are still bullied into letting the researchers write the press releases themselves.  And I thought times had changed……

Mary Rice

A bit of context before we get to the punch line.

Nature has just published what is probably an interesting paper on graphene. (I have yet to lay my hands on a copy.) The university issued a press release that has been picked up in lots of places. But PR folks did not provide access to the paper.

This is one of my peeves. If a paper warrants a release, then the people putting out the release owe it to the rest of us to provide easy access to that paper. Not just access for journalists, but for the people who will read the results of those releases, the articles that appear in newspapers and on websites.

When I said as much, as a comment to one of those website articles, here is one of the replies I received:

“The public isn't smart enough to do anything with it even if it had free access. Seriously. Unless you ACTIVELY work in the field as a researcher in a top group such publications are wasted on you.”

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2012-10-roadmap-graphene.html#jCp

So, after all those years of people banging on about Public Engagement in Science and Technology, there are still old school researchers out there who think that we should not worry all those dim members of the public with this complicated science stuff.

As well as those polls about the public perceptions of science, can we have one on the scientists’ perception of the public?

MK

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