In January 2012, for the first time I suggested that my students contributed to my epidemiology lectures using Twitter. This was a master’s course held in our large lecture hall, with 192 students from the managerial side of health, care and welfare establishments. I scattered my PowerPoint with slides where I asked them specific questions (eg: What will be the three main causes of mortality in Europe in 2030?), I gave them time to answer and commented for a few moments on their tweets which were displayed in real time next to my PowerPoint on the large screen in the hall. As nothing was filtered, a few jokes were made behind my back while I continued with the lecture, or else people outside the hall commented sometimes using a pseudonym. This is normal with Twitter. I don’t think that any were ever unsettling or spiteful. There was never any reason to consider moderating the flow of tweets by filtering them upstream. During the 6 lectures (12 hours), I received 732 tweets, in response to my 51 questions, i.e. 14 replies per question and 61 replies per hour. How could I ever have enabled nearly 200 people gathered together in a lecture hall to take part to this extent? The students who tweeted made a positive contribution to this lecture (now available on Internet without access restriction). For example, if you ask what are the three main types of health alert, it is certain that, as students are not in their professor’s head, they will suggest answers that you would not have thought of yourself, and which are not wrong! You then have to re-write your lecture with them in real time.
Social networks are having a radical effect on our social relationships as well as our teaching and research practices. The New York Times published an article (in English) on this subject on 17 January. There is a strong anti-establishment movement among young scientists in all disciplines at international level. This Open Science movement sees itself as breaking new ground in the face of conventional scientific practices.
What are these “conventional” scientific practices? Thomas Lin, the author of the New York Times article, invites you to visit the splendid page of the New England Journal of Medicine, which is celebrating its 200th anniversary this year and which presents a highly original timeline celebrating the scientific advances first described in its pages: the stethoscope in 1816, the beginnings of anaesthesia in 1846, antisepsis in surgery in 1867 etc. For centuries, this is how science has operated – through research done in private, then submitted to science and medical journals to be reviewed by peers and published for the benefit of other researchers and the public at large. This is the same model that still applies but, “to many scientists, the longevity of that process is nothing to celebrate. The system is hidebound, expensive and elitist, they say. Peer review can take months, journal subscriptions can be prohibitively costly and a handful of gatekeepers limit the flow of information,” according to Thomas Lin.
Over the past few years an alternative system for evaluating and distributing scientific results has been developing. Open access to archives and journals such as arXiv and journals such as the Public Library of Science (PLoS) and, even better (as it is entirely free both for the author and the reader and financed entirely by public funds) Public Health Reviews, the journal of the EHESP and ASPHE, and the Eurosurveillance journal of the ECDC in Stockholm. During the ‘flu pandemic, I remember that the PLoS opened the ball by creating the blog which has become an open online scientific review, free for reading and contributing (PLoS currents: influenza). It was unacceptable to wait 6 months for journals to agree to publish scientific results intended to influence public policies as quickly as possible. The other major medical journals (NEJM, Lancet, Jama) had to adapt in haste, and did so on this occasion, before reverting to their old ways (and financial model). Much earlier in fighting for open science, freedom of expression and speed of discussion, mathematicians set up an online forum, MathOverflow. In Europe, in Berlin, the ResearchGate social networking site has established contacts between scientists from all branches or rather for any branch they choose. ResearchGate had 12 employees one year ago and now has 70 and in 2011 had over one and a half million connections. It aims to be a combination of Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn with pages of profiles, comments, forums, job offers, subscribe buttons, etc
All these initiatives show that the world is progressing and the world of scientists is also changing. Scientists tend to be conservative and are probably moving more slowly than others. Their benchmarks, the way in which careers develop and their individualism are brakes to the mass use of social networks and open free discussion. Recent censorship of research results that are considered to be politically sensitive (I refer to discoveries relating to H5N1 that we mentioned at Christmas and which have had recent repercussions) will not encourage researchers to defend for long the models of our great grandparents that have been jealously preserved by subsequent generations. Further education and research are experiencing a real cultural revolution at the moment in all fields including, of course, that of public health.
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