Mar

28

On starting to get worried about freedom of scientific expression.

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I have known Jan Velterop  for 30 years. At Elsevier, at Springer, at Nature ( before the two were conjoined) and the Academic Press. Always the admirable enthusiast for change and development. Always the man  of principle. When he warns, I listen. I was appalled by his latest warning:https://blog.scielo.org/en/2025/03/26/global-science-in-danger/. I think that everybody should read this and take it seriously.

I try not to write here about political issues. Each to his own. “Great leaders” are full of bombast, empty press releases and ambitious but often impractical executive commands. often the more important things that governments do are never taken seriously at the time. I think for example that since the time in the 1990s when the US government of the day made its defence network Darpanet  available to the world as the Internet, seeking the science communication, the trade and information advantages which would arise from such a gift. A subtle blend of generosity and self interest.The world has altered as a result in a way  which public and political society has never fully recognised. We can talk about globalisation and supply chains, but we are, whether we acknowledge it or not, now a global communication society. Different. countries may try to handle this in different ways, but, by and large, this genie cannot be put back into the bottle. In science, and in the science ecosystem of communication and knowledge transfer with which I have been greatly concerned for at least 40 years, this is particularly true. Science is collaborative and global. Whatever demands are made by politicians, scientists have two speak to each other: they blog, they share thoughts and hypotheses, often sharing data as well as insights. When politicians try to constrain the thinking of one group in one country there are impacts on all groups everywhere .

Jan in his article raises the issues of the NSF list of terms which, if found in the funding proposals or research papers of US scientist dependent upon federal funding will raise questions and provoke examination by officials. This is what  particularly worries me. The list has been widely quoted, but here are a selection of the terms:

  Readers will readily see the agenda. Some, I have no doubt, will sympathise with it and some will not. As an historian and writer and the worker for many years in information and communication, I have to say that the worrying thing for me is not the words to be“examined“. It is the idea of the examination itself. Just as I know that the big noises at the top of the political tree will one day exhaust themselves, so I fear deeply the release of an enduring examining bureaucracy with narrowly framed ideas and aims seeking to censor, restrict and discriminate. The Western world rightly decried the totalitarian regimes of Hitler, of Stalin and of Mao. Looking back on those dreadful periods of history, it is the thought control, and the bureaucratic apparatus created by willing men and women serving  these leaders.  They proved adept at finding  new ways to effectively stifle unrestricted expression in their society. All of this starts in every instance with a list of words, things that you must not say, things that mark you out as “different“. The Orwellian overtones are what I find so chilling. Surely we are not about to replay 1984 from an election result in 2024?

In the last 15 years of blogging “From the bottom of my Garden“ there has been one consistent theme. Trust and identity. We need to know who we are communicating with and we have to trust that their communications have not been pressured framed, adjusted or tampered with in any way. if this is what is threatened by the various moves of the US administration in recent months, then the situation is very serious indeed.

Please find out from your for yourself:

https://www.defendresearch.org

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