The National Science Foundation’s new policy means better wine research access (and maybe just better research)

Last week, the National Science Foundation (NSF) announced that any journal article published as a result of funding issued from its coffers must be made freely available to everyone. The policy goes into effect for papers published in and after January 2016. Let’s get the two caveats out of the way first:

1. Articles must be made available within 12 months of publication, so SAGE and Elsevier and the rest of the journal hogs (I’d prefer to use stronger language) have a year’s space for embargo policies. (Though there’s already work to make this 6 rather than 12 months.)
2. The NSF won’t (for now, at least) compile it’s own article archive. They’ll have a database of titles and authors and abstracts and such with links to full-text articles available on publishers’ websites. That’s cheaper in the short term but less than ideal: different journals’ formats will make collecting “big data” sort of information harder, and we’re still tied to those journal hogs.

This is still a good thing. Between this and similar policies at the other major U.S. funding agencies (the National Institutes of Health did this, plus creating their own archive in PubMedCentral, in 2008), the published results of essentially any research project funded at least partially by the American government belong to everyone, worldwide. A good example of NSF-funded wine-related research is California-based work on the glassy winged-sharpshooter. Hardly mitigates the harm our government has done to the world, but it’s nice, and it makes the slope toward information being shared freely for everyone’s benefit a little slipperier.

Many wine industry folk look to Google for technical information and browse what surfaces pretty omnivorously, reading reports in trade journals, scientific articles or their abstracts, agricultural news, other farmers’ blogs…so long as it doesn’t end in .porn or seem to be published by a puppy mill in a third-world country, it’s probably at least worth a look. That said, some sources are more reputable than others and some of the most reputable are the most inaccessible: unless you’re a student or staff member at a tertiary educational institute, or unless your sugar-daddy parent company buys a subscription to AJEV, you’ll only see one-paragraph summaries (abstracts) of scientific articles.

The new NSF policy helps change that. Not all American wine research receives government funding, and countries such as Australia and New Zealand still think that research resources should be walled off just to their domestic levy-payers. The EU has exhorted it’s member countries to implement “European-level open access,” but maybe they’ll eventually care that this isn’t doing global social justice any good. Still, this means that winemakers’ (and everyone’s) Google searches will now lead to more full-blown studies with methods and detailed results and all of those other useful middle bits not encapsulated in the one-paragraph summary.

I think that open access will do more than just make it easier for everyday non-academics to see journal articles. I think that this will change the way scientists interact with the “end users” of research and, maybe, eventually, how those journal articles are written. Let’s say that you’re a winemaker trying to learn more about bacteria and soil health (already open-access thanks to the Department of Energy’s policy). You search for key words, find and read an interesting-sounding article, and have a question. You can, if you’ve got gumption, email one of the scientist-authors to ask it. And since most scientists are nice-but-busy people who want their work to matter to someone, you have a decent chance of seeing a reply.

In other words, the audience for scientific publications — especially for applied, industry-relevant research — is getting bigger. As it does, scientists may begin thinking about writing conclusions that acknowledge the interests of those non-scientists, and writing more clearly, and helping everyone — scientists included — see and make better connections between bitty research findings and the bigger world. That’s the real purpose of scientific research — to doodle in the blank spaces on the shared knowledge map of humanity. Open access helps.

(More) Race, class, and gender in wine writing

Eminent wine blogger Tom Wark is being provocative again (if you know Tom, I’ll wait for your shock and awe to subside, and if you don’t know Tom, that was sarcasm) and poking at several attendees’ comments that speakers at the recent 2014 North American Wine Bloggers Conference* were overwhelmingly male. Tom’s original post is less interesting than the comment thread — sincere congratulations on that, Tom. I chime in with a reminder that critical awareness of power structures is a non-stop job.

I don’t have an answer to the problem of discrimination, Tom; if I did, I should darn well be sharing it a little more aggressively. But I can say that the answer to “why aren’t there more women speakers at WBC?” or “what should we do about it?” begins with awareness that power structures exist. And that, fundamentally, the answers boil down to what I tell my composition students when they ask me nearly anything: 1. What is your purpose? 2. Be aware of what you’re doing.

*I wasn’t there for obvious reasons, i.e. being in grad school on the other side of the world.