Thank you very much and hello everyone. I'm delighted to welcome you all to London and in particular to the University of London Senate House for what promises to be a wonderful few days of discussion, sharing of knowledge and meeting of old and new colleagues and

friends. Some of you may know that the Senate House was home during the Second World War to the Ministry of Information. George Orwell's wife worked here and the Ministry was responsible for issuing national propaganda at home and abroad but more relevant

for our purposes I think for controlling news and information that might be of military value. In today's terminology it used metrics to generate knowledge. So it's very fitting indeed that the Altmetrics Conference should be held in this building. The men and women who worked here would immediately have seen the value of what you're doing and the

ways in which altmetrics enrich our understanding of the impact of research. Today Senate House is home to Senate House Library which occupies most of the large tower above us and the School of Advanced Study where I'm based which incorporates nine postgraduate humanities

research institutes. This building brings together in one place a library, research and in the school's open access books programme, publishing. All of these are concerned with and affected by altmetrics and their applications. As humanities researchers I think we're particularly interested in how altmetrics can most usefully be applied in

disciplines which remain centrally concerned with books where truly groundbreaking research can still be found in chapters in edited collections. These are largely beyond the scope of altmetrics at the moment. How can this kind of research and these kinds of researchers be acknowledged and showcased using altmetrics? How can historians, classicists,

linguists, English literature scholars be helped to communicate their research more effectively online? How can altmetrics shape the ways in which open access books of all kinds are published and shared? I hope that all of these issues and more will

be discussed over the next few days, sparking debate that resonates beyond the life of the university conference. The right people are all here. Finally, you may have seen posters around the building for the University of London's current leading women campaign. 150 years ago in 1868, nine women were admitted to the university. This was the

first time in Britain that women had gained access to university education and it was a hugely significant moment for this institution, for women and for the development of society as a whole. We've been celebrating the achievements of these amazing women and their successes throughout 2018. In keeping with the spirit of this 150th anniversary year, a wonderfully

diverse programme of speakers has been put together by the conference organisers, reflecting the full range of people and organisations for whom altmetrics matter. I hope that beyond this event, altmetrics can play a role in promoting equality and

diversity in research, in supporting efforts to decolonise the curriculum, in allowing new and varied voices to be heard, in breaking down old hierarchies that are sometimes reinforced by citation practices. Again, the right people are all here. Enjoy the conversations

that you will have over the next two days and I look forward to seeing how they shape the understanding and application of altmetrics in the coming months and years. Thank you very much. Okay, good morning. It's my honour and pleasure to introduce our keynote speaker,

Joep de Vriesen. Now, I know Joep already many, many years. He's a good friend of mine and we've done the same study. We're part of a group of friends and we all went our own way.

I went to publishing, some of us went to pharmaceutical companies, some of them sticked around in research and Joep has always been sort of our consciousness and pointing at issues like shouldn't you be more that or you or that and the other,

which is a pleasure sometimes, knowing if it's about publishing, obviously. Other than that, he's become a great, in my opinion, yet biased, a great journalist. He's won, together with his wife, the AAAS Gavli Prize, I hope I pronounced that correctly,

in journalism for a very touching story in NSA Next. He writes in New Scientist, in Science, some of the Dutch local newspapers and his title of his talk is Research Reporting in Mainstream Media. The floor is for Joep.

Thank you very much for your introduction and for the invitation. Wait, I will click on my clock so that I know and I have to shut my mouth.

Thanks again. I'm a freelance science journalist nowadays for ten years actually now, which is long for me, but most of the people here will be more experienced.

I was invited to give a talk not so much on old metrics, although I will touch upon the topic every now and then during my presentation and of course I expect you to

research reporting in the mainstream media is my topic. Let me start with a confession. I'll first have my title, of course. It's kind of trying to make it a little bit edgy.

Eureka Alert has spoiled science news and science journalism and here's how we can fix it. Let me first start with a confession. I have a love-hate relationship with science news. Yes, of course I like to read about science, as most people here will probably do.

I also like to see all these new papers and being one of the first people to be able to see them, to read them and to discuss them with scientists and other experts and to share them with other people, with the audience. At the same time, I hope to show in my talk that I think science news as we have it today

is one of the least creative parts of journalism and also of science journalism. As I say, it's sort of taken over by the press officers and by services like Eureka Alert

and thereby it has become of a different type than I would like to see it. I'd like to trigger you to think about it from your perspective as to how we can improve it by making it more relevant for journalism and also for society.

Let me first go back to history, to the history of science journalism. This is William Lawrence. This picture was taken in 1945,

just before the two bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He was a science journalist of the New York Times and he was very close there. He was actually on one of the planes when the second bomb was dropped

and he wrote an eyewitness piece on it. There was also something strange going on. He got a lot of praise for this, but at the same time, it was something strange because he was sort of invited by the government, by the US government to be part of it. Actually, he was sort of part of the team of the Manhattan Project

and at the same time as being a reporter at the New York Times, he was also writing press releases for the government, which is kind of weird. At that time, it wasn't that weird. Why was that?

Because at that time in his age, science writers were not really science journalists. There were no journalists. They were not supposed to ask critical questions or to doubt the motives and the effects of science and government and industry.

It was a very young field at that time. Many people say that one of the first science journalists, sort of science writers, I should say, was H.G. Wells. He was born in 1866 and he published this book, Anticipations.

It's about the mechanical industry in 1901. He's well known from his science fiction books,

but at the same time, he saw it as his goal to inform the broader audience about science and technology, but not so much from a critical perspective. Science journalists in that time, and they were increasingly working at newspapers, they saw it as their goal and as their mission to convince the audience of,

as some people phrase it, the science as a salvation for society. The relationship between science journalists and scientists was one of respect and trust.

That sort of uncritical approach of science journalism, of science writing, sort of maintained after the war for a while, but it changed dramatically in the 60s. It was the era of the Cold War, of the Vietnam War.

When first, like, Lawrence was in 46, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, which is sort of a Nobel Prize for journalism in this case. But after the war, so that first maintained, and then in the 60s it changed.

There was the Vietnam War, there was also widespread pollution, and governments were kind of reluctant to do a lot about it. An important event was the publication of a book of this woman, Rachel Carson. Everybody knows this, I guess, Silent Spring.

She was actually not a science journalist or a science artist, she was a biologist and an activist. With her book, she really touched upon something because she was really critical of pesticides in general, but in particular of the industry who was selling them and using all these marketing tools

to sort of how she saw it as spreading disinformation about the effects and all the unwanted effects. At the time, she really got in a conflict with the science writers at the time, because they were basing their writing on scientific literature,

and they said she had effects, she didn't really stick to the facts. Partly they were proven right afterwards, but at the same time, she had a point in saying that scientific literature was distorted by the industry.

And with her, not only her, but the whole movement that started, managed to get a ban on DDT for agricultural use, and also sort of triggered the foundation of the EPA, which did not exist before that. And it also started a whole new movement of journalism,

of journalism that was more critical of the societal and environmental impacts of technology and science, and very critical of the power triangle of industry, government, and science. And these are, you could say, the first real journalists with a scientific background.

They were taking their role as watchdogs more seriously than before. And during the 70s, this movement grew and got more influence. It was also the time of a different critique on science, which is the postmodern critique,

although I recently talked to Bruno Latour and he still says he has never been a postmodernist, but I could give a different talk on that. The postmodernists are sort of, what they did was look at science and the way it was practiced. It used to be seen as some kind of idealist thing, and they said, well, it's a human endeavor.

And the other book here on the screen is the famous book by Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. And it's also a book you can read in different ways, but one of the ways is seeing that it's really a human thing,

and there's a lot of resistance towards new ideas, as we all know now is the case. And they argue that the truth is not as absolute as many people used to think, and it depends on your perspective, and it's often temporary.

This critique fit well into this broader critique with the environmentalists, although discussed, but also a feminist critique and a sort of anti-colonial critique. And that broad movement really gathered steam, but then there came the conservative realist counterattack, and it was quite effective.

There were the famous hoax by Alain Sokal, who published a fake, as we would call it now, a fake article in one of those postmodernist scientific journals. There was the other book, I read it, it's kind of, it's really polemic,

and it really used a lot of straw man to counter the postmodern critique, and part of it indeed was kind of hilarious, kind of weird critique, but they had good points. So it sort of left the screen for a while, but it never really disappeared.

So now we have the post-truth. I won't go into that, because that's also another topic for keynote speak. And I heard there's a talk on this, or a conference, an actual conference on this tomorrow, or Thursday, yeah, tomorrow. But there's also just the general scientific critique on science,

and we're actually experiencing a new wave of science critique, mainly psychologists and other scientists that are zooming in on the flaws and limitations

of the current system, of the scientific methodology, focusing a lot on reproducibility, and also on incentives, and also, again, on the rights of minorities, women in science, and opportunities for a career for anyone who wants to be in science.

But at the same time, we still have this image of science in general media. So how come? Because we were talking about all this critique, and we thought we would be improving, but at the same time we have this image. I think this is partly because we have, in the meantime, entered the era of neoliberalism,

and of all these rankings, and we are measuring everything as we are here now, and all the universities are trying to build their reputation and have impact.

Impact is important, but at the same time, although of course it's good to have impact, because you are an institution in society, but it also has created this competition over attention of science journalists, of the audience,

and the growing influence of the PR offices in scientific institutions. I experience a lot as a journalist that I am no longer allowed to directly approach a scientist without first letting the PR officer know.

Sometimes they are not allowed to talk. But it's also not just being there in between the scientists and journalists, but also curating and controlling the streams. At the same time, journalism itself has changed as well, of course,

because we went from newspapers and magazines mainly to online. Anyone who wants to know can see which articles are the most important ones. The advertisement income has gone to Google, more or less,

so newspapers and media have to find new models and just pay less to the journalists. A lot of journalists just have to do more work in less time, or just produce more articles.

A lot of freelance journalists have, by this dynamic, been forced into a position of wearing two hats, working at the same time as an independent journalist and working for scientific institutions,

or for governments or for NGOs that are part of this scientific debate, which creates a conflict of interest and also a sort of diffusion, which is not really a good thing. There are only very few science journalists that are freelance or independent that are really independent.

But even the staff writers and independent science journalists, they are under the huge influence of the PR of the scientific institutions. And this is not only bad, because what we've seen in the time just after the war,

we as science journalists had to do everything ourselves. We had to go into the library. I never did that. We had to go into the library, look for the journals, find the interesting articles, sort of translate them, and then make an article.

Most of this is now done by the press officers. They are selecting the interesting stuff. They are partly translating, putting emphasis on the interesting parts, which is a good thing. They also contact the scientists so that they can be interviewed, and they train them so that they speak normal language, so to say.

This is good, but at the same time, it's not journalism. It is communication, and in many cases it is public relations. So the exponent of this dynamic is Eureka Alert. You probably all know this portal for journalists.

It was set up in 1998 already. In the same year in Europe, Alpha Galileo was founded, but the impact of Alpha Galileo is way less, smaller than of Eureka Alert. At first sight, it looks like a wall holla for journalists.

It's sort of a portal where all the press releases you'd like to see are there. Over 5,000 PR officers are connected. They can put content in there, and there are all these embargoed releases from all the respected journals, except Nature, because it's founded by AAAS.

But don't expect any scoops, because 14,000 colleagues are looking at the same content every day. They're not looking every day, but they're all allowed to go and look for news.

Essentially, Eureka Alert is kind of a marketplace where all the scientific news items are screaming for attention. Pick me. You could see it as healthy competition between different findings,

but it also has impacts on the content of the press or news releases. There have been some studies looking at this. This one is from the UK. Actually, what you see is, even nowadays, it used to be that a journalist exaggerated the news to impress his audience.

Nowadays, the press officer is doing that job for him or for her. Actually, the exaggerated news is usually caused by the press officer, because they know what the journalists and what the audience want.

It was replicated in the Netherlands as well, this finding. It's not just annoying that it's all exaggerated, because you can get a very unwanted, undesired dynamic. I don't know if everyone in the back can see all the details of this. You start here with your own research,

very sincerely trying to do your work. It goes into PR, and it's sort of changed, more simplified. It ends, in the end, with your grandma being totally panicking about the findings of your work, and you think, wow, what happened here?

In particular, I hope this video works. In particular, it can go wrong when Science News is covered by mainstream media. I'm not against all mainstream media, but in science, mainstream media, TV media in particular,

they don't use science journalists, but just reporters. And this is what you can get.

You shouldn't play sloppy jokes on TV.

And if you win one of them, oh no. As a scientist, you're going to have to get yourself in the news. And that's not easily done, because science has been boring. So when does science become news? When it's about global warming.

63% of science nations in the media are either to do with climate change, or renewable energy, or pollution. Whereas if you're studying bioterrorism, just live up there. The story about climate change is being used no matter how unlikely.

The warming will not interfere with cancer, or to the cannibals, leading farmers to take extreme measures to keep their sheep from on site.

All good stories, all within the Nobel Prize for getting in the news. The next thing you'll need to get your research into the news is one of these squirty things. Squishy ones are involved in every bit of discovery. One.

But the best way to get in the news is to discover the cure for cancer. We love cancer breakthroughs, and the great thing is, there is no unit of doubt dubious your claim can be.

Each cauliflower, each olive oil, each sugar butter, with olive oil, electric milk, cacao and asthmatic, milk is good, frog skins are good, sunscreen is good, almost as great as that, aspirin, that's good,

not a bad thing to add, drink wine, drink wine, drink coffee, no one drink coffee over the hill, don't go over the hill, start breastfeeding, don't be bald, have longer eats, not good,

don't take a trip to the toilet at my time, take ecstasy, don't be tall,

Facebook, I've never felt healthier. So this is more or less what we see, right, in the media.

And it's funny, it's sort of, I would say, laughing loud not to cry, because this is what often happens, I'm not watching it again.

So, to get serious again, this is sort of the negative impact of when you get too much of a PR focus in science, so you get oversimplification, overstating evidence, selective reporting of the impressive and sexy findings,

and this could result in an unrealistic image of science and the world around us among the audience, and could also lead to a loss of trust in science. So, in general, when we are looking at all these polls that are, like the Pew Institute,

then in general, the trust in science is high still, in particular compared to journalism, but in certain fields where this dynamic has been going on in a more severe way, it is already happening. This paper was published recently by

a Dutch sociologist of science, Bartenders, and he actually argued that the dismissal of nutrition science makes sense, because of all the conflicting findings that people are having to absorb every day. There's another recent paper by John Dejolmitis,

the famous MITA scientist, he actually argued that the nutritional epidemiology has to reform almost completely to gain back the trust of the audience and also become relevant again, actually. Not just by doing different PR, but also by doing different studies.

So some of the, some, I wish it would be some, but a lot of websites are just copying and pasting the news releases from the Rick Alert, like Science Daily, but many other less known sites do the same, which is actually journalism.

That's what the term invented by Nick Davies in his 2009 book. Journalism is nothing more than just PR or propaganda, so to say. Some other media, they use their own sauce, so to say, change some, or sometimes even oversimplify

the press release itself. More critical media, they have their own standards, they usually do a better job by consulting external experts and doing a better critical science journalism job.

But it's difficult. I can speak from my own experience. I've been working for the main Dutch news website, Nieuw Punt en Elle, for a couple of years, and this is what I did. So this is the Eureka Alert site. You go to the Breaking News,

to the Embarker News and Journals. Here they are, the main, the high impact journals, so you know that when your audience sees, oh, it's sell, then it's great, or plus, or a month. So that's what you do. You go to the, in this case, the Science Magazine portal, which is the biggest one, of course,

because science is owned by AAAS, and you look for something that's kind of sexy, you know a lot about already, or controversial. And if not, you can go to the other part of the website where all these institutions and foundations are putting their embargoed releases.

Which leads to sort of uniformity of science, because we tend to think we all are independent thinkers, but everybody sort of is triggered by the same articles, and the major journals will have to be covered. And this really became clear

when Eureka Alert in 2016 went offline for a while, and all the journalists were thinking, wow, what now? And this also triggered a debate on embargoes. It's kind of superficial as well, because, artificial as well, because these findings are not new anymore,

but because the journal wants their attention, they're setting up an embargo, and everybody said, okay, we'll wait. And a colleague of mine recently blogged about it, and he called it embargo discipline, and he compared this with a pizza party where you're celebrating the sort of baking off

the deep-fried, the deep frozen pizzas. And everybody, nobody wants to miss out on the party, so we get this. This is one paper, and everybody is covering the same news. So what about altmetrics in this case?

I already said I'm not going to go deep into the altmetrics, because you are the experts, but maybe it's a good thing to think about. What are we sort of giving points for? We have this top ten of articles based on tweets, mainly.

It's social media, but mainly it's tweets. I should say there are some, like, there is an artificial womb, Ebola, vaccine, but stress among PhD students, probably shared a lot by scientists themselves. And so, yes, it is relevant science,

but at the same time you see some of them are already debunked, but that's normal in science, right? And it's a lot about obesity and about sugar and carbs. So I wouldn't say that this is, we shouldn't be reading these articles,

but are we, by using altmetrics on single papers, are we pushing science, new science journalism, in a direction that's good for society? What we need, I think, is good journalism,

but at the same time I realize that scientific institutions don't really like this idea of journalism, because, yeah, we are in this age of, you have to maintain your reputation, and you have to get your grants and your subsidies, and when you let the journalists just do their real job,

then they start writing stuff you don't want them to be printed. But I do think that it's still possible to do this, because a science journalist normally, I think, has two roles. One is look at society from a scientific perspective, which is sort of the classical science journalism.

And the other one is looking at science from a societal perspective, which can be more critical of science, but could also be about how science could solve things. The first would be what causes cancer, what we can do about it. Another would be how artificial intelligence is changing

or maybe disrupting our society, and whether we want that. And then there's also a third category that I'm sort of part of myself, is critical science journalism of the science itself. I recently published an article on meta-analyses and how battles between meta-analyses can sort of lead to meta-wars

and not solving a controversy, but even searing it up. So in general, there are three narratives in science journalism or in science reporting. This is from this paper in PNAS.

So there's the quest discovery, which is the classical one. There's a counterfeit quest that's focusing on some people, some scientists doing things wrong, and there's a systemic problem that you'll hear a lot recently about, well, the system is broken. And all of them are incomplete, so we have to find new constructive narratives

to make science for the people again, more or less. So there are good societies benefiting from it and not being sort of just pushed all these news because scientific institutions want their ratings to go up

or want their impact, want their attention. And constructive journalism is a rather new stream within journalism, which is not just putting emphasis on things that are wrong but also trying to find answers. I think science is in particular a good topic to do constructive journalism.

If you only focus on the bad, you have this. If you only focus on the good, this is sort of short-term effect. This is what science news is often doing. And I guess this would be the best option.

So it reduces, I could name them all, but to summarize, it does give people a positive image of science but more realistic than if you would just only boil up all the good results.

So to wrap this up, how can we do this? How can we fix science news in order to make it more relevant and more realistic? Let's focus on short-term attention for single papers,

for single studies, or for a topic that's now hot. And thereby by just creating a more realistic image of science and a scientific process as well. We call this scientific literacy 2.0, not just learning people what DNA is,

but learning how the scientific process works and why it's not so straightforward. By facilitating the debate, both among scientists and with the public, focus on broader developments. I always ask scientists or press officers

to not just call me when they have a new paper out, but when they see some broader development. That is really a different way of thinking, and that's why it's not easy, but I think it would be good. Another way to become relevant and to be relevant is to anticipate current events and offer interpretation,

because that's what often is lacking. The news reporters don't have a scientific background, and you see this already happening, smaller enterprises or institutions that are set up in particular for this, to be able to bring in the scientists that can give more depth to news.

And I think there's a role for our metrics there as well in order to reward the right things, and I think that's up to you, maybe also part of, during these two days or three days, to think of ways to do that.

And what about William Lawrence? In 2004, he was almost stripped from his... He already died, but he was almost stripped from his Pulitzer Prize because he sort of neglected a lot of those negative effects, in particular radiation sickness caused by the atomic bombs.

Their request was not granted, so he still is on the list of the Pulitzer Prize, and I think it's okay. He was a child of his time, but I think it would be good if we would not make the same mistakes as he did in his time. Thank you very much.