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PS26: Truth has a platform problem: technology's role in the misinformation era
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PS26: Truth has a platform problem: technology's role in the misinformation era
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Language: EN.
Segment:0 .
RYAN ROSS: Good afternoon, everyone. I hope y'all enjoyed lunch. [BACKGROUND CHATTER] Oh, all right. Thank you all for joining us so soon after lunch and not heading off for nap time yet. We have a great panel today. We are titled, Truth Has a Platform Problem, and we've got some great speakers with us today.
RYAN ROSS: So I'm going to ask them each to introduce themselves and ask them, as an opening question with their introduction, from your perspective, why is scientific misinformation an even more urgent and consequential topic today? And how are you engaging with this challenge? And first, I guess I should introduce myself I'm Ryan Ross. I'm a solutions engineer working on a ScholarOne Manuscripts.
RYAN ROSS: So Suze, would you like to start with your introduction and answer to that question?
SUZE KUNDU: Thank you so much. Thank you for having us, first of all. We had a really hyped-up intro from Will at the very beginning. So hopefully, we're going to deliver on the spice content of this session. So I'm Suze. I'm a science communicator, I'm a recovering academic, and I'm a research community engagement consultant. So as a science communicator, as a member of the public, as a consultant, obviously I care about misinformation and deliberate disinformation, partly because I think in the age that we're living in at the moment, technology is brilliant.
SUZE KUNDU: It can be such an equalizer. It can create access to so much information, and knowledge, and connection. But unfortunately, we have so much information being produced from a research perspective, and we have even more content being produced by things like AI that has the capacity to be incredibly compelling, to look very convincing. And I think when people are bombarded with that much information, one of the challenges that we are facing in this digital age is how to give people the tools to be able to determine what is truth and what is less truthful in order for them to make better decisions.
SUZE KUNDU: So as part of that, I am a consultant, but I'm also here representing defendresearch.org because I do feel that when we talk about misinformation, there's also aspects of missing information as well and acts of censorship. I'm very conscious. We're two blocks away from a very white house with some people in it talking about AI. And none of us are involved for some reason.
SUZE KUNDU: But anyway, defendresearch.org is giving people an opportunity to stand up for research in the face of censorship in all of its many forms. So we'll be unpacking that a bit today.
RYAN ROSS: Thank you. Megan, would you like to go?
MEGAN FALLON: Yeah, but-- oh, all right.
RYAN ROSS: All right.
MEGAN FALLON: There we go. Yeah. OK. Hi, everybody. My name is Megan Fallon. I'm the communications director for the Science family of journals at AAAS, the American Association for the Advancement of Science. I am a science writer and communicator by training, and I oversee the team at the Science family of journals that helps authors who are publishing from all over the world in all disciplines communicate their research to media and in turn, to the public.
MEGAN FALLON: And increasingly, over the years, as the landscape in which science information travels has changed, we've been helping authors think about how to communicate in other ways, in other places, with content creators, with journalists who have less background in science, maybe sometimes in places where science is being discussed and they want to be a part of it, like Reddit or even LinkedIn.
MEGAN FALLON: And I think the misinformation question is really important now because unfortunately, misinformation is very good at storytelling, using elements like people, and emotion, and surprise to make what it's sharing memorable. And I think that there's more that we as publishers can do in that space to make the content that we're publishing meaningful, memorable, and even just content that people can find their way into.
MEGAN FALLON: And we're trying some experiments at the Science family, and I thought I could share a little bit about those today.
RYAN ROSS: Thank you. David.
DAVID SAMPSON: Thank you. So I'm David Sampson, and I am the chief publishing officer at NEJM Group. We publish The New England Journal of Medicine. First of all, I'm not listening to something else. I haven't made my appointment at Costco to get some hearing aids, and my daughter said, oh, you should try your Airbuds and see if that helps. And it's helping a lot.
AUDIENCE: [LAUGHTER]
DAVID SAMPSON: So I started my career when Al Gore invented the internet. And--
AUDIENCE: [LAUGHTER]
DAVID SAMPSON: All right. Most of you laughed at that. So I know how old you are.
AUDIENCE: [LAUGHTER]
DAVID SAMPSON: But science and medical misinformation has really taken up a lot of headspace for me. And as the publisher of The New England Journal of Medicine, obviously our bread and butter is our trust and reputation. And we're seeing in the news every day, we've been seeing it for a while, where people are being harmed, they're dying, because of medical misinformation.
DAVID SAMPSON: And misinformation is changing the relationship between physicians and patients. And as a publisher, we think it's part of our mission to try to remediate, alleviate, address that problem that all of society is really facing right now. Misinformation obviously is impacting the research enterprise, it's politicizing research. And so in the theme of this talk is technology and its role in either perpetuating misinformation, that's something that I think we as publishers have a responsibility to address.
DAVID SAMPSON: And we need to act on it as soon as possible.
RYAN ROSS: Thank you. One thing that I think it was important to note as well is we had talked in the session before lunch about these various stakeholders within scholarly publishing. And we sort of broke them down into authors, reviewers, researchers, editors. There was a vote for staff as well in my group. And these people here are really speaking not just about those groups within us, but this is a chance to sort of get out of our bubble and think about the broader public at large about that.
RYAN ROSS: And so one of the things obviously that comes up is as information is being ingested into LLMs, and people are using that more and more, we heard another statistic that most people, even researchers, don't understand that those AI summaries are not vetted by real people. That really becomes a challenge for that scientific communication. We also know already that authors and reviewers are already using AI in their work.
RYAN ROSS: And David, would you like to speak a little bit about how authors and reviewers are already using AI, and how that might be impacting scholarly communications?
DAVID SAMPSON: Yeah, so there--
AUDIENCE: Can you use the mic, please?
DAVID SAMPSON: Thank you. So there was also, I think, a second part of that question about standards and--
RYAN ROSS: Yes.
DAVID SAMPSON: Should we set and agree on standards for AI use? And yes, I think that there are some basic principles around AI use that all journals, all publishers should adopt, certainly around disclosure, how the AI was used, certainly around accuracy and originality. Those are things that I think we can all agree on. But I would say that for The New England Journal of Medicine, we've adopted the ICMJE, International Council of Medical Journal Editors, guidance on the use of AI.
DAVID SAMPSON: But even within our own family of journals, we publish one called NEJM AI, we are experimenting and adopting a different way of peer review because some of the research that gets submitted to that journal is, there aren't very many researchers doing research on that topic. So it's incredibly hard to find reviewers. And so the editors of that journal have piloted it's a combination of a human reviewer with AI reviews.
DAVID SAMPSON: And this is for papers that most likely will get accepted and the author has to opt in to have an AI review for their research. At the end of the day, the human makes the decision. Our editors make the decision on whether or not to accept a paper. And that takes place in a room with other editors and members of the editorial board debating the merits of a paper. But the review process itself is aided by AI.
DAVID SAMPSON: And where authors have said, yes, I'll opt into this, the paper is fed into Claude and some version of ChatGPT. And then the editors take a look at those reviews, take a look at their own reviews. And they have to complete their review first, or the human reviewer has to complete their review first, before they receive the AI reviews. And then we also use AI for a stats review for that journal.
DAVID SAMPSON: Again, the author has to opt in. But the point I'm trying to make is that I think it's a little more nuanced. Each journal, each field is going to have to have their own policies on AI use. And you're just going to have to continually update those policies as the field changes.
RYAN ROSS: Thank you. It's interesting to me that in our discussions before this panel, we were talking on the one hand about this era of rapid technological change and sort of responding to that. But also, we kept coming back to this theme of storytelling and relationships. And what role does storytelling play in building trust in science? And what other fundamental communication techniques should we keep in mind as we're trying to spread information and stop the spread of misinformation?
RYAN ROSS: Suze, do you have something to add about that?
SUZE KUNDU: Yeah, so I think first of all, I would love at some point in the break to hear more about the models that you're talking about because I think the things that worry me a tiny bit about aspects of any kind of AI being used is obviously they're working on historic data, and there's a huge underrepresentation of many people that have been published before. And so I am very curious to learn how you kind of mitigate not doubling down on maybe some of the biases.
SUZE KUNDU: So maybe we can unpack that later. But I think maybe that leads to some of the storytelling aspects of things. I think there are many aspects of research and of publishing that people don't know about, that don't understand. And one way that we can start to create transparency and relevance is through storytelling. Storytelling is a word that can evoke many emotions, I think, because when you say storytelling, and forgive me for those of you that were at Alps and have heard me rant about this already a couple of weeks ago, but people kind of think of storytelling and think of fairy tales.
SUZE KUNDU: And they imagine that it is not something that is based in fact. In fact, storytelling, I think, gives us the opportunity to communicate values in ways that are more relevant to all people. We do research, and we publish research in order to benefit all of humanity. At least most people do, you would hope. And if we're not communicating not just why we do things, but how we do things, and the transparency of that in ways that people can care about, in ways that make people better understand how that eventually impacts them in their everyday lives.
SUZE KUNDU: I think we're kind of missing a trick there. So I think storytelling is incredibly important from that aspect. I also think as we start to maybe, from a different research perspective, one of the things we care about is the censorship of research that's being carried out, research that is being published. And I think one way that we need to think about things quite carefully is if we don't have traditional, established, peer-reviewed methods of getting communication out there about research that's being conducted because it is not as favorable, or is going to be a negative if that's included in something, and people are telling us that's not an area that we should be looking into, there are other places and spaces where those stories can be told, and will be told.
SUZE KUNDU: And I think we need to engage in better understanding how people communicate information, how people achieve impact through the work that they're doing. So I do think storytelling is incredibly important. And I say this with Megan on the panel here, who knows better than most. [LAUGHS]
MEGAN FALLON: Yeah, thanks, Suze. I agree with all of that. And I think that, so we're in a venue where we're talking a lot in part about making things readable for machines. But even if they were maximally readable for a machine and included everything you might ever want, provenance of all sorts, it doesn't mean that they are psychologically transparent. So we've been thinking at the Science family about how to do what misinformation is good at.
MEGAN FALLON: And it's to present research with people at the front, with their values at the front, with some of the emotion that was inherent to the work that scientists do at the front. And we don't want to sacrifice any of the rigor of that research as we do this work. But we are seeing that adding these elements can make the research more compelling. It can provide conceptual hooks to help people become interested in something that might otherwise be pretty complex and hard to digest.
MEGAN FALLON: So as an example, two weeks ago, we published a research paper looking at using psilocybin to treat chemotherapy-induced neuropathy, terrible nerve pain that you might have after chemotherapy treatment. It's really debilitating and it's life altering. We talked to researchers in a briefing setting with reporters on the line about how they did the work and what they found. But we also took about 10 minutes to ask them, what are the values that informed this work in the first place?
MEGAN FALLON: Why are you even doing this? And they told incredible stories about family members who died of opioid addiction, motivating them to look at other ways to mitigate pain. They told incredible stories about humility, and working with, and learning from patients about patients, and what they really want as they navigate life after chemotherapy. And I think that it changed the conversation.
MEGAN FALLON: It made it very, very memorable, again, without sacrificing the rigor. And I think that's some of what the mechanics behind misinformation, unfortunately. But science has all of these elements inherently. Story, people, surprise, emotion. We're just looking for ways now to pull them out and to spread the word so that they might travel farther into different corners, even in the algorithm as it is.
RYAN ROSS: OK, do any of you have any guesses or hopes as to how we can keep promoting that human side, and those values, and those stories around science when we're sort of increasingly being served it up in our Google searches as kind of this very emotionless fact? Like, do we run the risk of misinformation sort of going the other way and not having those emotional connections?
RYAN ROSS: So how can we make sure that we keep that human side as things are being increasingly mediated through LLMs?
SUZE KUNDU: I don't know if we value it as part of the research endeavor. I think science communication, public engagement, all of these things have been nice-to-haves. But very much even in business settings, things like community engagement are deemed as the fluffy things. And they're absolutely not because that's how you're effectively kind of securing your audience base, your client base, your customer base. And so I think through research, we need to actually put value on being good at communicating science.
SUZE KUNDU: It's not dumbing down. That's not what we do when we communicate complex topics. You find the right analogy. You find the right context. You work out what people need to know from that research. Nothing needs to be dumbed down. But I don't think, in terms of workload models, in terms of promotion incentives, in terms of even training available, that we actually put any value onto it.
SUZE KUNDU: And I think that's something that we really need to change. And I do think that's something that the publisher segment could massively lead on, because I think it's so directly related as an extension of what you're already doing, the core mission to disseminate information for others to build on, for others to care about, for others to fight for. I think that's absolutely something that can go hand in hand with the publishing segment.
DAVID SAMPSON: Yeah, I think you hit the nail on the head. And the question I would ask, though, is, is it really our role to be the communicators of the science? Or is it someone else's role and we can help them? Because I think as an industry, we've done a pretty poor job of communicating what it is that we do to the public. And if I speak to somebody at a cocktail party and they ask me, oh, what do you do? Well, I'm in medical publishing.
DAVID SAMPSON: And they're like, oh, what's that? And so think about then communicating the science that we publish. And I think most publishers aren't really great communicators, aren't great storytellers. And we've ceded that role to the media, to influencers. And many of those influencers take the research that we publish and they communicate it incorrectly or out of context.
DAVID SAMPSON: And so can we in this room, do we all have the resources from our respective publishers to invest in that level of science communication? Some of us may. Some of us may not. So I would say that we have to look at other opportunities, other options. Not all researchers are great storytellers, and we shouldn't put them in the position of trying to tell the story about their researcher.
DAVID SAMPSON: But maybe there are proxy storytellers that we can engage to tell the great stories about what we publish.
RYAN ROSS: That's a great point. Yeah, it is a lot to ask someone who's doing that groundbreaking research to also then be the person who is solely responsible for communicating that research. I think also, we see a lot, Megan, as you mentioned, of people really using social media as a place where kind of the general public is doing research. And what have you seen in terms of trying to have researchers or science communicators or generally having the scholarly community be more present, and on social media, and in those places where we don't usually find that scholarly research.
MEGAN FALLON: Yeah, I was talking to a researcher the other day, published in Science Advances, and just asking him about-- so we like to ask researchers, what did you think about the accuracy and framing of the news coverage that you saw in your paper? And where did you see it discussed? Did anything surprise you? And he said, I've spent a lot of time on Reddit answering questions about this research on butterflies.
MEGAN FALLON: And actually, the discussion has been very good. There have been a lot of researchers engaging, and this is an R science Reddit. And I found a new grad student, someone to work in my lab. And I was as surprised as the next person about this. I don't think that happens very often, but we have developed guidance for authors who want to engage on Reddit because there are some specific parameters there.
MEGAN FALLON: You've got to have karma on Reddit, which I don't. I don't really understand how it works, but I know it's a thing. We've developed guidance for authors who want to communicate on LinkedIn, and we're seeing that that's a pretty positive experience. We really try to help researchers stay open to communicating with the wide range of journalists who are signed up for the embargoed science press package each week.
MEGAN FALLON: We serve some 8,000 journalists around the world. Some of them have been communicating science for years, some who are just thinking about peer-reviewed research and how to talk about it. Reporters tell us things like, we don't really understand the difference between a retraction and a correction, and an editorial expression of concern. I'm trying to convince my boss to do a briefing on retractions, where we explain the process, and how we work with institutions, and such.
MEGAN FALLON: And we've done a little bit of work there, but there's more to do. I think it's just an environment where you kind of have to keep your ear to the ground and be willing to do small experiments with authors who opt in. And they have to know what the stakes are. And I think that the payoffs can be big when they're willing to try things with us. But to David's point, it takes time and resources.
MEGAN FALLON: So yeah, that's a fact.
SUZE KUNDU: It's just such an amazing opportunity, though. I think Reddit being a genuine space of engagement by definition, being that two-way dialogue, which I'm not sure you've seen much on many other social media platforms anymore, you just get shouted at, or just share cat pictures like I do, which is a much nicer space to be in. But it's very rare to have that. And you would hope that by engaging with people, not only do you recruit a future grad student, but you also actually start to craft better research questions if you're able to engage with and learn from the communities you're trying to serve.
SUZE KUNDU: As you said, there are risks, but there's so many opportunities as well.
RYAN ROSS: Yeah, that's a great point. It's also interesting to think about, as you're sort of creating these guidelines for people interacting with social media, how does that then change what quality research means as you're sort of factoring the communication of that research?
MEGAN FALLON: How does it change what quality of research means? Well, I think it changes what scientists think about communicating first. So instead of saying, we conducted a randomized, placebo-controlled, double-blind trial with 247 participants and found x, they might say, we were really perplexed that for 12 years, no one could figure out why b. So I think it changes the framing. There's a great piece in science a few weeks ago by James Evans from the University of Chicago called, "Designing for Surprise".
MEGAN FALLON: And he talks about how research papers are written often to communicate to your community, to people who have the same priors. But when you think about communicating to people who don't know the field, you might change how you frame the work to represent very clearly how it moves the field forward. And that can be very powerful, because often, that is also an audience who might be influenced by understanding this change.
MEGAN FALLON: New evidence can change minds. So now, Ryan, I forget your question. But that piece by James Evans is great, "Designing for Surprise". Yeah.
DAVID SAMPSON: Yeah. Right, right. I really struggle with social media as a channel for us to address misinformation. And the reason I struggle with it is because I think we're all slaves to the technology companies and the algorithms. And even if we were to create very compelling, engaging content to, whether it's addressing misinformation or explaining research, the audience that we're maybe trying to convince may never, ever see that because it just won't come up in their feeds.
DAVID SAMPSON: And I think all of us experience it every day when you go on whatever is your favorite social media channel, and you tend to see only things that you're interested in. I rarely get anything that's information supporting the Trump administration. It knows what I like. It knows what's going to trigger me. And so I think it's a real challenge to use social media. And I'm not giving up on it, but I think it's a real challenge to use social media to change thinking in the conversation.
DAVID SAMPSON: And where we're looking is at the AI chat bots. We're never going to change where especially a lay audience goes to research health information or questions. They are going to ChatGPT, and Claude, and Google. So how do we then make sure that in those platforms that they're increasingly using, that the answers that are being produced are grounded in the best evidence, and making sure somehow, enabling the consumer to discern, oh, that's a credible source, that's maybe not such a credible source.
DAVID SAMPSON: And one final comment I'll make is when we spoke with one of the frontier LLM companies about health information, they said, in their research, yes, users are looking for credible information, but they also want the w information showing up as citations.
SUZE KUNDU: Can I just pick up on one thing as well that you said? I think it's interesting that you mentioned convincing people. It reminded me, we have the word, "truth", in this topic. But truth and trust, I think, go hand in hand as well. And I think one thing we need to remember as we communicate research to various publics is that trust is a very fragile commodity, but it's still persisting.
SUZE KUNDU: There are, I believe, in the last couple of months, seven different public understandings and public attitudes to science surveys that have been released. A little bit like buses, we've been waiting for years and seven have come along all at once. But what they're all indicating is that the publics do trust scientists, they do trust researchers, and they have faith in that research.
SUZE KUNDU: And so I think the way that we communicate is very important. So rather than convincing, sometimes you just want to present. Because if we're trying to be convincing, we can start to breed aspects of Spidey sense tingles going, why are they being so persuasive in their argument of this being a great thing? Sometimes, we just need to present things in that very human, contextualized way.
SUZE KUNDU: And so I just wanted to slightly pick up on that and just remind us all that actually, they're kind of on our side. And that's a really privileged position to be in. So let's make sure that we maintain that position and communicate effectively, and not make people worry or panic.
RYAN ROSS: Yeah.
MEGAN FALLON: Yeah, just a thumbs up, two thumbs up on that, Suze. I think it's less about convincing for us and more about showing what the process is. What does it mean to share your data, to have it available to everyone, to have it organized in such a way to be willing to correct your paper, what does all that look like? And how can I look for that in other places for other research types?
MEGAN FALLON: That's something we're interested in doing more.
RYAN ROSS: Yeah. Yeah, it almost sounds like giving that sort of transparency into that process is its own form of prebunking that can really help to serve people who are ingesting that information.
MEGAN FALLON: Yeah, build a mental model of what good research looks like. And we're still having to understand how to communicate that ourselves. I think that's the position we're finding ourselves in as we talk to policymakers about paper mills and peer review. We're having to find better ways to communicate all that.
RYAN ROSS: Yeah, I think the issue of trust markers is a big one. And what we're hearing here is that it's not even just about having sort of a green check by things, but it's really having that information and that sort of knowledge of the process, like, already in people's schema. And I think we're struggling a little bit because things are changing so fast. So we don't have those guidelines sort of cut, and dried, and set in stone yet.
SUZE KUNDU: I mean, yes, things are changing at a kind of rate and volume at which we're perhaps not used to. But I think fundamentally, the challenges are kind of still the same. We were chatting, David, and you and I, I think it was just before you joined us, Megan. We were chatting about we have this incredible process where people publish things and other experts look at it and go, yeah. Sounds pretty robust. Yep, get that out there.
SUZE KUNDU: Somebody else can build on it or somebody can refute it. Or if something is found to be wrong, a retraction process exists. But then you think about all of the kind of green flags that you could have of publishing in a reputable journal, of it being peer reviewed, and of it being retracted. But that doesn't mean that that kind of persistent poison doesn't exist in the system.
SUZE KUNDU: I'm thinking of Andrew Wakefield's horrible paper that was deeply unethical, but had all the green flags of being a solid bit of research. And we still have people today. That was retracted, I think, in 2010. All the processes were followed, but we still have people that go, actually, no. My kids aren't going to have the MMR because autism. It's like, it's scientifically inaccurate to believe that.
SUZE KUNDU: But again, it's knowing people's motivation, and it's finding a way of telling those stories in a way that relates to the reasons why people would care about this. So I think, yes, it is new, but also, there's so much we've already kind of tackled before that we need to reflect on and still learn from, I think.
RYAN ROSS: Yeah, I think that issue of retractions and sort of misinformation being part of the scholarly record is not insignificant. And maybe it's not even really a new problem. But it's certainly compounded, I think, by the rise in LLMs. For any of the panelists, how do we cope with things like retractions and things like out-of-date or old information that sort of become part of what these models have been trained on, and it maybe has the potential to be very persistent, like overly persistent, and sort of overshadowing the new research or those retraction announcements and things?
DAVID SAMPSON: So my comments will be in the context of licensing content to frontier LLM companies, and then AI companies in the health medical vertical. And I remember when we first did our licensing deals, and we've done quite a number of them, that we discussed, how do we communicate corrections and retractions in an automated way to these companies?
DAVID SAMPSON: And I'm not going to name the colleague, but this person said, oh, well, shouldn't there be somebody at that company reading our e-talks and figuring out where there's been a retraction? Fortunately, we very rarely have retractions. But it was almost putting the responsibility on some poor person at these companies. And we have heard, we've received some complaints, about our content deliveries not keeping up with corrections where we issue a correction, but we haven't actually, for example, maybe sent the corrected figure for them to update their corpus, their data set.
DAVID SAMPSON: So a retraction for a machine that really never learns about it in a timely way isn't really a retraction. And I think as publishers, if you're going to do licensing deals with AI, and we're working on this, you have to figure out how to do this in an automated way and make sure that the licensee is updating their data set and their AI inference set.
SUZE KUNDU: I think there's also a culture piece associated with retractions. I'm going to tee you up slightly. I hope you don't mind. But I think for an early career researcher that is struggling with funding, if they have to go through a retraction process, it can be seen as a black mark on their record. And I'm very kind of encouraged to see quite high-profile people actually owning their attractions.
SUZE KUNDU: So Frances Arnold is a Nobel-Prize-winning chemist. And after they won the Nobel Prize, they also had to retract one of their papers. And they went through that process. And they were so open about it, and normalizing it. And of course, they have that platform and that privilege. But using that platform and privilege, I think to, I don't want to say celebrate, but I kind of do, because research is one of those few areas where if somebody proves you wrong or something that you've done might have been overlooked, you go, great.
SUZE KUNDU: Four new doors of research have opened. I can apply for more funding for these things. That's fantastic, though. And so I think embracing that as part of a very healthy culture of publishing research is very important. I'm now teeing you up for Ctrl-Z.
MEGAN FALLON: Yeah, thanks, Suze. I was telling Suze, I spent the morning on the drive here from Pennsylvania listening to a great podcast called Normal Curves, I think. They were interviewing the two winners of the first ever Ctrl-Z Award. Ctrl-Z means, undo. And this award is for researchers who retracted their work at great professional risk. This year, it honored Kate Laskowski at UC Davis and Alyssa Shull from Northeastern.
MEGAN FALLON: They talked about how much they learned going through the retraction process, how scared they were to lose faculty positions, or a first job out of grad school, but how they persisted in it, and then what they're going to do differently going forward, and how they're teaching classes. A lot of it comes down, honestly, to organizing your Excel files, data management.
MEGAN FALLON: But it's great that it has this visibility. They both talked about how many people have reached out to them for help and mentorship now that they've been elevated for having done this. And I think that's really exciting. At the Science family, last year, we published an editorial called Breaking the Silence". We were working with other publishers, we were working with Retraction Watch reporters, PIOs at universities, research integrity officers.
MEGAN FALLON: We were thinking about the following moment. There's a question about research on PubPeer or in some other format. Media get wind of it, they knock on the door of the author, they'd like a little insight into what's going on. There are many cases where understandably, researchers aren't responding to these questions. And that is not helping with the trustworthiness landscape that we'd like to improve.
MEGAN FALLON: And so we organized working with all those stakeholders, a couple of kind of points of guidance and tips for authors who might find themselves in that position. There are certain things they may not be able to share, especially during a confidential investigation. But there are other things they can communicate about the complexity of their research landscape, what their intentions are, that can help a reporter write a story and can help to kind of inspire some trust in the process.
MEGAN FALLON: So we're thinking about that culturally too. Appreciate David's points about the AI piece of this as well. Yeah.
DAVID SAMPSON: Can I just make one more comment about AI and our responsibility as a licensor of content to these AI companies? That responsibility doesn't end once you sign the agreement and start delivering content. And one of the things that we're thinking much more about is the sort of auditing process of looking at the performance and the answers in the tools that we've licensed content to and making sure that they're meeting our standards as well as the high standards that are required in the health space.
DAVID SAMPSON: We haven't done that well, but it's something that we're thinking about, how do we formalize it? How do we make it consistent so that we're pressure testing the right things within these tools, and within these models? I think retractions are just kind of like the tip of the iceberg. And there's a huge responsibility for us as a company that licenses content to make sure that these tools really are delivering what they said they would.
RYAN ROSS: Thank you. As we get close to the end of our session, we'll have some time for Q&A. So tee up your questions. But I wanted to pose a question just in closing for each of our panelists that came up in Wendy Queen's presentation earlier today. From your point of view, for this group, what deserves action now? What's the next thing we should do?
SUZE KUNDU: If we're talking about technology, I think straddling sort of the different sides of publishing, from the research perspective and from the sort of segment perspective, I think I've seen, and I'm very kind of encouraged to hear some of David's insights because it's the embracing of new technology, I think we often feel like the horse is bolted, and it's way too late to kind of pull it back.
SUZE KUNDU: I think new technology such as AI and LLMs are a part of everyone's future. And I think I've seen some publishers, I haven't seen any here, but I've seen some that have been very condemning of the use of novel technology, overlooking the fact that things like AI can actually, if used in certain ways, can help equalize the playing field, and can actually unlock publication of work or increase visibility of work for people that haven't had that privilege.
SUZE KUNDU: This is a global endeavor. And so I think what I would like to see as an action point is more community engagement, more understanding of how researchers that intend to publish are using novel technology like AI and like LLMs. And I think working with them, understanding that change is inevitable, and actually being a partner in making sure that changes that do occur are done while still grounding integrity of research and understanding that the purpose of publication is to have a true version of record, and to share knowledge in a way that others can critique and build on.
SUZE KUNDU: I think that's what I'd like to see.
RYAN ROSS: Thank you. Megan?
MEGAN FALLON: So I think there's a lot of focus on making sure that research is of high quality and machine readable. And all of that is extremely important. I also think it's interesting to think about how to maybe change the way we make some of our research maximally human readable going forward by thinking about what we're doing in some short form, bullets on the article, author videos, to clarify things like, what kind of gap are we trying to fill here?
MEGAN FALLON: Why is this important? How could it be used? And who did it? So we have to work on the machine-readable piece, but we also have to work on the human-readable piece. And I think that latter part also signals to the future generation of researchers what they should be focusing on, and what they should be bringing to research as they pursue it as a lifetime career.
RYAN ROSS: Thank you.
DAVID SAMPSON: So my advice would be, sort of thinking about Teddy Roosevelt's man-in-the-arena speech. Like, be the person in the arena. Don't sit on the sidelines, because this isn't going away. And you can learn a lot from either licensing your content or doing pilots. And again, I'm speaking in the context of AI. You're not going to learn by sitting on the sidelines, and waiting it out, and hoping that this goes away.
DAVID SAMPSON: And that's the approach that we've taken is, one, we have a mission because of the content that we publish to make sure that our content is in as many of these AI systems, whether it's a frontier LLM for training or for AI inference in a tool like OpenEvidence. It's our responsibility, our responsibility. I mean, any GM group, to make sure that what we publish is grounding the answers that physicians and patients are getting.
DAVID SAMPSON: And if you look at-- I asked a clinical question in OpenEvidence. I asked that same clinical question in ChatGPT and in Claude. And it's night and day the difference in the answers that you get. Now granted, OpenEvidence is for a physician audience. But it was very clear that the AI inference was calling on peer-reviewed journals.
DAVID SAMPSON: If you look at Claude, and you look at ChatGPT, the references are news sources, and PubMed Central, sources that you just wouldn't trust or recognize. So we have a responsibility, I think, as publishers to be in the game and engaging these companies. And then what we're looking at is, right now, what we supply to AI companies is basically knowledge.
DAVID SAMPSON: But we're not providing them with any intelligence. We're not providing them with any context. And in health care and medicine, it's a high-stakes field where you need to get it right. But there's also a lot of nuances in medicine. I said during a conference last week for SSP that medicine is as much of an art as a science. And the AI machines aren't going to pick up on that. The humans will pick up on that.
DAVID SAMPSON: But then how do you translate that, that human insight into better performance in the machines?
RYAN ROSS: Thank you. We have a few minutes left, so we do have time for questions. And I see a hand up. I think I need to hand the mic off to somebody. Oh, Evan's got a mic.
AUDIENCE: Oh, hello. So Lou Peck here. Do you know, I was sitting here listening to this. And then I looked over at, I don't know if you've seen these little cards on our table that says about what's your biggest professional pet peeve? And I think I've just found it.
AUDIENCE: [LAUGHTER]
AUDIENCE: And OK, so as I was listening to you all and thinking about the work that I do, and the people that we work with, I think as an industry, we need to recognize the impact that we had when, as a goodwill thing, people thought that they were doing the right thing, but coming off X, societies, member bodies, nonprofits, commercials are still there, right, coming off there. And I have literally seen biologists nearly in fisticuffs about this because it's so contentious for them.
AUDIENCE: You're still on it. And when you take away trusted information from a channel where people are, we can't force people to come to our platforms to go to where we expect them to be. We have to go where they are. So when you take trusted information away and you're just left with fake news, what do you think society is going to believe? Fake news.
AUDIENCE: So I mean, if I asked the room here who are organizations, who came off X? Come on. I know many of you came off X. Yeah. So as we think about this, what if we went back on X? I mean, forget who owns it. But if we're supporting the community and we want people to learn better, and find better information, and have trusted information that's more accessible to them, I think you kind of need to get back on X. I mean, the big boys are on there.
AUDIENCE: So the more, the better. So it's more of a comment. Well, no, you could answer that question. Are you going to go back on? Are you going to make a commitment?
MEGAN FALLON: We're still there. We have some of our highest engagement for certain papers on X. Yeah.
AUDIENCE: Absolutely. And submissions, people still get submissions through X. So yeah. Cluster of small community. Are you going back on?
DAVID SAMPSON: Well, NEJM is on X. I am not on X.
AUDIENCE: [LAUGHTER]
AUDIENCE: I like that, though. I think we all kind of fell off there personally. But yeah.
SUZE KUNDU: I do think you make a good point, though. One of the first rules of science communication is, you meet people where they are. And if they are there, and we've left a vacuum of quality, trusted information, and we do want to engage with them, part of it, it's tricky because people are resource poor. And often, trying to convince people that cannot be convinced kind of needs to be ruled out. But rather than only preaching to the choir, where we already are, I think there is a group of people that can be, I don't want to say convinced, because I did debunk that earlier, but can be engaged with and can-- David, I think, mentioned when we were chatting in one of the pre-meetings, what we want to do is make people curious again, and re-instill critical thinking, and give them the tools, and empower them to be able to discern what is fact and what is fiction.
SUZE KUNDU: And that can only be achieved through meaningful engagement, and meeting people where they are. But I think maybe finding space, and resource, and time to engage with the people that are neither one side or the other, I think you're probably right. It's uncomfy, but yes. It's a really good point.
RYAN ROSS: I think we have time for one more question.
AUDIENCE: All the way in the back. Peter Lynch, American Academy of Pediatrics. This has obviously been a big focus of our organization over the last couple years. And so I was just curious in your daily work around communications and things, do you approach it any differently, or have any different strategies when you're trying to combat disinformation? People who are not confused but are deliberate, bad actors trying to muddy the waters, bring down the integrity of where the research came from, and all that.
MEGAN FALLON: You want it? OK.
SUZE KUNDU: I can kick off with a really simple thing, which is, never make people feel stupid. Don't come at their point of view with negativity. I think finding out where they have found that information, why they have found that information, why they have found that compelling, and you can't really change a mind in one interaction. But what you can do is start to build a more trusted association and a positive association with somebody that comes at it from a different perspective.
SUZE KUNDU: And over time, and over kind of repeat engagement activities, you can start to better understand where they've got that and why they're wedded to that idea. You can help inform the way that you then communicate something that is not disinformation or not misinformation, but it is more truth based. And I think they're actually some of our most valuable encounters. I had the most fascinating chat with a flat Earther in St. Pancras Station on the way to Paris.
SUZE KUNDU: And by the end of our train journey, it was two hours and 22 minutes, and he said he would find a YouTube video that was not suggested to him in his algorithm. And that, for me, felt like impact. And so it's kind of, again, it's a little bit of the meeting people where they are, I think. But I think that's the really important thing, not making people feel bad, and trying to engage with them on a level where they already are.
MEGAN FALLON: That was a great train ride.
SUZE KUNDU: Not for him, I don't think. [LAUGHTER]
MEGAN FALLON: Well, in our day-to-day work when we're working with authors, so we're asking them, two to three weeks ahead of publication, are there ways that you're seeing people misunderstand or misrepresent your work? Anything we can help kind of mitigate against as you prepare to publish with us? And if we get a big signal from them, or if we just know there's a place where misinformation is rampant, we might work with the authors to set up a press briefing, invite a lot of reporters, reporters of different stripes, to come and hear the authors, three or four authors, talk about that work, and directly tackle kind of the elements of information that are being misunderstood in thoughtful ways.
MEGAN FALLON: They're not reading a script. They're talking and then they're taking questions. And then we see news coverage that reflects those sentiments. But we try to spend time asking our authors, like, how is your work being misrepresented? And then we try to think about how we can mitigate against that in different ways in our work with media and content creators.
DAVID SAMPSON: This is such a tough one because we, as a publisher, have always-- our primary audience has been physicians. It hasn't been the patient or the lay audience. We've tried to develop tools, I would say, different formats of content, to maybe reach a consumer audience. But when you look at the usage, or the views, it's still relatively low. We're trying to learn new tricks.
DAVID SAMPSON: About a year ago, we brought in someone who headed up video at Conde Nast, completely different space, consumer space. And we asked this person to conduct a workshop for us to really give us some best practices and tips on, how do you create engaging video and audio multimedia, and to take some pages from that consumer playbook? Now it's up to us to try to apply that to the content that we're creating to reach maybe a different audience.
DAVID SAMPSON: But it's hard. And that's why we're maybe looking past social media, and how can we impact positive change on the tools, the platforms, that more of our fellow citizens are using? And that's ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini.
RYAN ROSS: Thank you, everyone. This is really just the tip of the iceberg. I feel like there's so much more to talk about this. We are out of time. But thank you, Suze, Megan, and David for participating in this. And I believe I am handing the stage over to Will, who's on his way. Thank you. [APPLAUSE]
Segment:0 .
RYAN ROSS: Good afternoon, everyone. I hope y'all enjoyed lunch. [BACKGROUND CHATTER] Oh, all right. Thank you all for joining us so soon after lunch and not heading off for nap time yet. We have a great panel today. We are titled, Truth Has a Platform Problem, and we've got some great speakers with us today.
RYAN ROSS: So I'm going to ask them each to introduce themselves and ask them, as an opening question with their introduction, from your perspective, why is scientific misinformation an even more urgent and consequential topic today? And how are you engaging with this challenge? And first, I guess I should introduce myself I'm Ryan Ross. I'm a solutions engineer working on a ScholarOne Manuscripts.
RYAN ROSS: So Suze, would you like to start with your introduction and answer to that question?
SUZE KUNDU: Thank you so much. Thank you for having us, first of all. We had a really hyped-up intro from Will at the very beginning. So hopefully, we're going to deliver on the spice content of this session. So I'm Suze. I'm a science communicator, I'm a recovering academic, and I'm a research community engagement consultant. So as a science communicator, as a member of the public, as a consultant, obviously I care about misinformation and deliberate disinformation, partly because I think in the age that we're living in at the moment, technology is brilliant.
SUZE KUNDU: It can be such an equalizer. It can create access to so much information, and knowledge, and connection. But unfortunately, we have so much information being produced from a research perspective, and we have even more content being produced by things like AI that has the capacity to be incredibly compelling, to look very convincing. And I think when people are bombarded with that much information, one of the challenges that we are facing in this digital age is how to give people the tools to be able to determine what is truth and what is less truthful in order for them to make better decisions.
SUZE KUNDU: So as part of that, I am a consultant, but I'm also here representing defendresearch.org because I do feel that when we talk about misinformation, there's also aspects of missing information as well and acts of censorship. I'm very conscious. We're two blocks away from a very white house with some people in it talking about AI. And none of us are involved for some reason.
SUZE KUNDU: But anyway, defendresearch.org is giving people an opportunity to stand up for research in the face of censorship in all of its many forms. So we'll be unpacking that a bit today.
RYAN ROSS: Thank you. Megan, would you like to go?
MEGAN FALLON: Yeah, but-- oh, all right.
RYAN ROSS: All right.
MEGAN FALLON: There we go. Yeah. OK. Hi, everybody. My name is Megan Fallon. I'm the communications director for the Science family of journals at AAAS, the American Association for the Advancement of Science. I am a science writer and communicator by training, and I oversee the team at the Science family of journals that helps authors who are publishing from all over the world in all disciplines communicate their research to media and in turn, to the public.
MEGAN FALLON: And increasingly, over the years, as the landscape in which science information travels has changed, we've been helping authors think about how to communicate in other ways, in other places, with content creators, with journalists who have less background in science, maybe sometimes in places where science is being discussed and they want to be a part of it, like Reddit or even LinkedIn.
MEGAN FALLON: And I think the misinformation question is really important now because unfortunately, misinformation is very good at storytelling, using elements like people, and emotion, and surprise to make what it's sharing memorable. And I think that there's more that we as publishers can do in that space to make the content that we're publishing meaningful, memorable, and even just content that people can find their way into.
MEGAN FALLON: And we're trying some experiments at the Science family, and I thought I could share a little bit about those today.
RYAN ROSS: Thank you. David.
DAVID SAMPSON: Thank you. So I'm David Sampson, and I am the chief publishing officer at NEJM Group. We publish The New England Journal of Medicine. First of all, I'm not listening to something else. I haven't made my appointment at Costco to get some hearing aids, and my daughter said, oh, you should try your Airbuds and see if that helps. And it's helping a lot.
AUDIENCE: [LAUGHTER]
DAVID SAMPSON: So I started my career when Al Gore invented the internet. And--
AUDIENCE: [LAUGHTER]
DAVID SAMPSON: All right. Most of you laughed at that. So I know how old you are.
AUDIENCE: [LAUGHTER]
DAVID SAMPSON: But science and medical misinformation has really taken up a lot of headspace for me. And as the publisher of The New England Journal of Medicine, obviously our bread and butter is our trust and reputation. And we're seeing in the news every day, we've been seeing it for a while, where people are being harmed, they're dying, because of medical misinformation.
DAVID SAMPSON: And misinformation is changing the relationship between physicians and patients. And as a publisher, we think it's part of our mission to try to remediate, alleviate, address that problem that all of society is really facing right now. Misinformation obviously is impacting the research enterprise, it's politicizing research. And so in the theme of this talk is technology and its role in either perpetuating misinformation, that's something that I think we as publishers have a responsibility to address.
DAVID SAMPSON: And we need to act on it as soon as possible.
RYAN ROSS: Thank you. One thing that I think it was important to note as well is we had talked in the session before lunch about these various stakeholders within scholarly publishing. And we sort of broke them down into authors, reviewers, researchers, editors. There was a vote for staff as well in my group. And these people here are really speaking not just about those groups within us, but this is a chance to sort of get out of our bubble and think about the broader public at large about that.
RYAN ROSS: And so one of the things obviously that comes up is as information is being ingested into LLMs, and people are using that more and more, we heard another statistic that most people, even researchers, don't understand that those AI summaries are not vetted by real people. That really becomes a challenge for that scientific communication. We also know already that authors and reviewers are already using AI in their work.
RYAN ROSS: And David, would you like to speak a little bit about how authors and reviewers are already using AI, and how that might be impacting scholarly communications?
DAVID SAMPSON: Yeah, so there--
AUDIENCE: Can you use the mic, please?
DAVID SAMPSON: Thank you. So there was also, I think, a second part of that question about standards and--
RYAN ROSS: Yes.
DAVID SAMPSON: Should we set and agree on standards for AI use? And yes, I think that there are some basic principles around AI use that all journals, all publishers should adopt, certainly around disclosure, how the AI was used, certainly around accuracy and originality. Those are things that I think we can all agree on. But I would say that for The New England Journal of Medicine, we've adopted the ICMJE, International Council of Medical Journal Editors, guidance on the use of AI.
DAVID SAMPSON: But even within our own family of journals, we publish one called NEJM AI, we are experimenting and adopting a different way of peer review because some of the research that gets submitted to that journal is, there aren't very many researchers doing research on that topic. So it's incredibly hard to find reviewers. And so the editors of that journal have piloted it's a combination of a human reviewer with AI reviews.
DAVID SAMPSON: And this is for papers that most likely will get accepted and the author has to opt in to have an AI review for their research. At the end of the day, the human makes the decision. Our editors make the decision on whether or not to accept a paper. And that takes place in a room with other editors and members of the editorial board debating the merits of a paper. But the review process itself is aided by AI.
DAVID SAMPSON: And where authors have said, yes, I'll opt into this, the paper is fed into Claude and some version of ChatGPT. And then the editors take a look at those reviews, take a look at their own reviews. And they have to complete their review first, or the human reviewer has to complete their review first, before they receive the AI reviews. And then we also use AI for a stats review for that journal.
DAVID SAMPSON: Again, the author has to opt in. But the point I'm trying to make is that I think it's a little more nuanced. Each journal, each field is going to have to have their own policies on AI use. And you're just going to have to continually update those policies as the field changes.
RYAN ROSS: Thank you. It's interesting to me that in our discussions before this panel, we were talking on the one hand about this era of rapid technological change and sort of responding to that. But also, we kept coming back to this theme of storytelling and relationships. And what role does storytelling play in building trust in science? And what other fundamental communication techniques should we keep in mind as we're trying to spread information and stop the spread of misinformation?
RYAN ROSS: Suze, do you have something to add about that?
SUZE KUNDU: Yeah, so I think first of all, I would love at some point in the break to hear more about the models that you're talking about because I think the things that worry me a tiny bit about aspects of any kind of AI being used is obviously they're working on historic data, and there's a huge underrepresentation of many people that have been published before. And so I am very curious to learn how you kind of mitigate not doubling down on maybe some of the biases.
SUZE KUNDU: So maybe we can unpack that later. But I think maybe that leads to some of the storytelling aspects of things. I think there are many aspects of research and of publishing that people don't know about, that don't understand. And one way that we can start to create transparency and relevance is through storytelling. Storytelling is a word that can evoke many emotions, I think, because when you say storytelling, and forgive me for those of you that were at Alps and have heard me rant about this already a couple of weeks ago, but people kind of think of storytelling and think of fairy tales.
SUZE KUNDU: And they imagine that it is not something that is based in fact. In fact, storytelling, I think, gives us the opportunity to communicate values in ways that are more relevant to all people. We do research, and we publish research in order to benefit all of humanity. At least most people do, you would hope. And if we're not communicating not just why we do things, but how we do things, and the transparency of that in ways that people can care about, in ways that make people better understand how that eventually impacts them in their everyday lives.
SUZE KUNDU: I think we're kind of missing a trick there. So I think storytelling is incredibly important from that aspect. I also think as we start to maybe, from a different research perspective, one of the things we care about is the censorship of research that's being carried out, research that is being published. And I think one way that we need to think about things quite carefully is if we don't have traditional, established, peer-reviewed methods of getting communication out there about research that's being conducted because it is not as favorable, or is going to be a negative if that's included in something, and people are telling us that's not an area that we should be looking into, there are other places and spaces where those stories can be told, and will be told.
SUZE KUNDU: And I think we need to engage in better understanding how people communicate information, how people achieve impact through the work that they're doing. So I do think storytelling is incredibly important. And I say this with Megan on the panel here, who knows better than most. [LAUGHS]
MEGAN FALLON: Yeah, thanks, Suze. I agree with all of that. And I think that, so we're in a venue where we're talking a lot in part about making things readable for machines. But even if they were maximally readable for a machine and included everything you might ever want, provenance of all sorts, it doesn't mean that they are psychologically transparent. So we've been thinking at the Science family about how to do what misinformation is good at.
MEGAN FALLON: And it's to present research with people at the front, with their values at the front, with some of the emotion that was inherent to the work that scientists do at the front. And we don't want to sacrifice any of the rigor of that research as we do this work. But we are seeing that adding these elements can make the research more compelling. It can provide conceptual hooks to help people become interested in something that might otherwise be pretty complex and hard to digest.
MEGAN FALLON: So as an example, two weeks ago, we published a research paper looking at using psilocybin to treat chemotherapy-induced neuropathy, terrible nerve pain that you might have after chemotherapy treatment. It's really debilitating and it's life altering. We talked to researchers in a briefing setting with reporters on the line about how they did the work and what they found. But we also took about 10 minutes to ask them, what are the values that informed this work in the first place?
MEGAN FALLON: Why are you even doing this? And they told incredible stories about family members who died of opioid addiction, motivating them to look at other ways to mitigate pain. They told incredible stories about humility, and working with, and learning from patients about patients, and what they really want as they navigate life after chemotherapy. And I think that it changed the conversation.
MEGAN FALLON: It made it very, very memorable, again, without sacrificing the rigor. And I think that's some of what the mechanics behind misinformation, unfortunately. But science has all of these elements inherently. Story, people, surprise, emotion. We're just looking for ways now to pull them out and to spread the word so that they might travel farther into different corners, even in the algorithm as it is.
RYAN ROSS: OK, do any of you have any guesses or hopes as to how we can keep promoting that human side, and those values, and those stories around science when we're sort of increasingly being served it up in our Google searches as kind of this very emotionless fact? Like, do we run the risk of misinformation sort of going the other way and not having those emotional connections?
RYAN ROSS: So how can we make sure that we keep that human side as things are being increasingly mediated through LLMs?
SUZE KUNDU: I don't know if we value it as part of the research endeavor. I think science communication, public engagement, all of these things have been nice-to-haves. But very much even in business settings, things like community engagement are deemed as the fluffy things. And they're absolutely not because that's how you're effectively kind of securing your audience base, your client base, your customer base. And so I think through research, we need to actually put value on being good at communicating science.
SUZE KUNDU: It's not dumbing down. That's not what we do when we communicate complex topics. You find the right analogy. You find the right context. You work out what people need to know from that research. Nothing needs to be dumbed down. But I don't think, in terms of workload models, in terms of promotion incentives, in terms of even training available, that we actually put any value onto it.
SUZE KUNDU: And I think that's something that we really need to change. And I do think that's something that the publisher segment could massively lead on, because I think it's so directly related as an extension of what you're already doing, the core mission to disseminate information for others to build on, for others to care about, for others to fight for. I think that's absolutely something that can go hand in hand with the publishing segment.
DAVID SAMPSON: Yeah, I think you hit the nail on the head. And the question I would ask, though, is, is it really our role to be the communicators of the science? Or is it someone else's role and we can help them? Because I think as an industry, we've done a pretty poor job of communicating what it is that we do to the public. And if I speak to somebody at a cocktail party and they ask me, oh, what do you do? Well, I'm in medical publishing.
DAVID SAMPSON: And they're like, oh, what's that? And so think about then communicating the science that we publish. And I think most publishers aren't really great communicators, aren't great storytellers. And we've ceded that role to the media, to influencers. And many of those influencers take the research that we publish and they communicate it incorrectly or out of context.
DAVID SAMPSON: And so can we in this room, do we all have the resources from our respective publishers to invest in that level of science communication? Some of us may. Some of us may not. So I would say that we have to look at other opportunities, other options. Not all researchers are great storytellers, and we shouldn't put them in the position of trying to tell the story about their researcher.
DAVID SAMPSON: But maybe there are proxy storytellers that we can engage to tell the great stories about what we publish.
RYAN ROSS: That's a great point. Yeah, it is a lot to ask someone who's doing that groundbreaking research to also then be the person who is solely responsible for communicating that research. I think also, we see a lot, Megan, as you mentioned, of people really using social media as a place where kind of the general public is doing research. And what have you seen in terms of trying to have researchers or science communicators or generally having the scholarly community be more present, and on social media, and in those places where we don't usually find that scholarly research.
MEGAN FALLON: Yeah, I was talking to a researcher the other day, published in Science Advances, and just asking him about-- so we like to ask researchers, what did you think about the accuracy and framing of the news coverage that you saw in your paper? And where did you see it discussed? Did anything surprise you? And he said, I've spent a lot of time on Reddit answering questions about this research on butterflies.
MEGAN FALLON: And actually, the discussion has been very good. There have been a lot of researchers engaging, and this is an R science Reddit. And I found a new grad student, someone to work in my lab. And I was as surprised as the next person about this. I don't think that happens very often, but we have developed guidance for authors who want to engage on Reddit because there are some specific parameters there.
MEGAN FALLON: You've got to have karma on Reddit, which I don't. I don't really understand how it works, but I know it's a thing. We've developed guidance for authors who want to communicate on LinkedIn, and we're seeing that that's a pretty positive experience. We really try to help researchers stay open to communicating with the wide range of journalists who are signed up for the embargoed science press package each week.
MEGAN FALLON: We serve some 8,000 journalists around the world. Some of them have been communicating science for years, some who are just thinking about peer-reviewed research and how to talk about it. Reporters tell us things like, we don't really understand the difference between a retraction and a correction, and an editorial expression of concern. I'm trying to convince my boss to do a briefing on retractions, where we explain the process, and how we work with institutions, and such.
MEGAN FALLON: And we've done a little bit of work there, but there's more to do. I think it's just an environment where you kind of have to keep your ear to the ground and be willing to do small experiments with authors who opt in. And they have to know what the stakes are. And I think that the payoffs can be big when they're willing to try things with us. But to David's point, it takes time and resources.
MEGAN FALLON: So yeah, that's a fact.
SUZE KUNDU: It's just such an amazing opportunity, though. I think Reddit being a genuine space of engagement by definition, being that two-way dialogue, which I'm not sure you've seen much on many other social media platforms anymore, you just get shouted at, or just share cat pictures like I do, which is a much nicer space to be in. But it's very rare to have that. And you would hope that by engaging with people, not only do you recruit a future grad student, but you also actually start to craft better research questions if you're able to engage with and learn from the communities you're trying to serve.
SUZE KUNDU: As you said, there are risks, but there's so many opportunities as well.
RYAN ROSS: Yeah, that's a great point. It's also interesting to think about, as you're sort of creating these guidelines for people interacting with social media, how does that then change what quality research means as you're sort of factoring the communication of that research?
MEGAN FALLON: How does it change what quality of research means? Well, I think it changes what scientists think about communicating first. So instead of saying, we conducted a randomized, placebo-controlled, double-blind trial with 247 participants and found x, they might say, we were really perplexed that for 12 years, no one could figure out why b. So I think it changes the framing. There's a great piece in science a few weeks ago by James Evans from the University of Chicago called, "Designing for Surprise".
MEGAN FALLON: And he talks about how research papers are written often to communicate to your community, to people who have the same priors. But when you think about communicating to people who don't know the field, you might change how you frame the work to represent very clearly how it moves the field forward. And that can be very powerful, because often, that is also an audience who might be influenced by understanding this change.
MEGAN FALLON: New evidence can change minds. So now, Ryan, I forget your question. But that piece by James Evans is great, "Designing for Surprise". Yeah.
DAVID SAMPSON: Yeah. Right, right. I really struggle with social media as a channel for us to address misinformation. And the reason I struggle with it is because I think we're all slaves to the technology companies and the algorithms. And even if we were to create very compelling, engaging content to, whether it's addressing misinformation or explaining research, the audience that we're maybe trying to convince may never, ever see that because it just won't come up in their feeds.
DAVID SAMPSON: And I think all of us experience it every day when you go on whatever is your favorite social media channel, and you tend to see only things that you're interested in. I rarely get anything that's information supporting the Trump administration. It knows what I like. It knows what's going to trigger me. And so I think it's a real challenge to use social media. And I'm not giving up on it, but I think it's a real challenge to use social media to change thinking in the conversation.
DAVID SAMPSON: And where we're looking is at the AI chat bots. We're never going to change where especially a lay audience goes to research health information or questions. They are going to ChatGPT, and Claude, and Google. So how do we then make sure that in those platforms that they're increasingly using, that the answers that are being produced are grounded in the best evidence, and making sure somehow, enabling the consumer to discern, oh, that's a credible source, that's maybe not such a credible source.
DAVID SAMPSON: And one final comment I'll make is when we spoke with one of the frontier LLM companies about health information, they said, in their research, yes, users are looking for credible information, but they also want the w information showing up as citations.
SUZE KUNDU: Can I just pick up on one thing as well that you said? I think it's interesting that you mentioned convincing people. It reminded me, we have the word, "truth", in this topic. But truth and trust, I think, go hand in hand as well. And I think one thing we need to remember as we communicate research to various publics is that trust is a very fragile commodity, but it's still persisting.
SUZE KUNDU: There are, I believe, in the last couple of months, seven different public understandings and public attitudes to science surveys that have been released. A little bit like buses, we've been waiting for years and seven have come along all at once. But what they're all indicating is that the publics do trust scientists, they do trust researchers, and they have faith in that research.
SUZE KUNDU: And so I think the way that we communicate is very important. So rather than convincing, sometimes you just want to present. Because if we're trying to be convincing, we can start to breed aspects of Spidey sense tingles going, why are they being so persuasive in their argument of this being a great thing? Sometimes, we just need to present things in that very human, contextualized way.
SUZE KUNDU: And so I just wanted to slightly pick up on that and just remind us all that actually, they're kind of on our side. And that's a really privileged position to be in. So let's make sure that we maintain that position and communicate effectively, and not make people worry or panic.
RYAN ROSS: Yeah.
MEGAN FALLON: Yeah, just a thumbs up, two thumbs up on that, Suze. I think it's less about convincing for us and more about showing what the process is. What does it mean to share your data, to have it available to everyone, to have it organized in such a way to be willing to correct your paper, what does all that look like? And how can I look for that in other places for other research types?
MEGAN FALLON: That's something we're interested in doing more.
RYAN ROSS: Yeah. Yeah, it almost sounds like giving that sort of transparency into that process is its own form of prebunking that can really help to serve people who are ingesting that information.
MEGAN FALLON: Yeah, build a mental model of what good research looks like. And we're still having to understand how to communicate that ourselves. I think that's the position we're finding ourselves in as we talk to policymakers about paper mills and peer review. We're having to find better ways to communicate all that.
RYAN ROSS: Yeah, I think the issue of trust markers is a big one. And what we're hearing here is that it's not even just about having sort of a green check by things, but it's really having that information and that sort of knowledge of the process, like, already in people's schema. And I think we're struggling a little bit because things are changing so fast. So we don't have those guidelines sort of cut, and dried, and set in stone yet.
SUZE KUNDU: I mean, yes, things are changing at a kind of rate and volume at which we're perhaps not used to. But I think fundamentally, the challenges are kind of still the same. We were chatting, David, and you and I, I think it was just before you joined us, Megan. We were chatting about we have this incredible process where people publish things and other experts look at it and go, yeah. Sounds pretty robust. Yep, get that out there.
SUZE KUNDU: Somebody else can build on it or somebody can refute it. Or if something is found to be wrong, a retraction process exists. But then you think about all of the kind of green flags that you could have of publishing in a reputable journal, of it being peer reviewed, and of it being retracted. But that doesn't mean that that kind of persistent poison doesn't exist in the system.
SUZE KUNDU: I'm thinking of Andrew Wakefield's horrible paper that was deeply unethical, but had all the green flags of being a solid bit of research. And we still have people today. That was retracted, I think, in 2010. All the processes were followed, but we still have people that go, actually, no. My kids aren't going to have the MMR because autism. It's like, it's scientifically inaccurate to believe that.
SUZE KUNDU: But again, it's knowing people's motivation, and it's finding a way of telling those stories in a way that relates to the reasons why people would care about this. So I think, yes, it is new, but also, there's so much we've already kind of tackled before that we need to reflect on and still learn from, I think.
RYAN ROSS: Yeah, I think that issue of retractions and sort of misinformation being part of the scholarly record is not insignificant. And maybe it's not even really a new problem. But it's certainly compounded, I think, by the rise in LLMs. For any of the panelists, how do we cope with things like retractions and things like out-of-date or old information that sort of become part of what these models have been trained on, and it maybe has the potential to be very persistent, like overly persistent, and sort of overshadowing the new research or those retraction announcements and things?
DAVID SAMPSON: So my comments will be in the context of licensing content to frontier LLM companies, and then AI companies in the health medical vertical. And I remember when we first did our licensing deals, and we've done quite a number of them, that we discussed, how do we communicate corrections and retractions in an automated way to these companies?
DAVID SAMPSON: And I'm not going to name the colleague, but this person said, oh, well, shouldn't there be somebody at that company reading our e-talks and figuring out where there's been a retraction? Fortunately, we very rarely have retractions. But it was almost putting the responsibility on some poor person at these companies. And we have heard, we've received some complaints, about our content deliveries not keeping up with corrections where we issue a correction, but we haven't actually, for example, maybe sent the corrected figure for them to update their corpus, their data set.
DAVID SAMPSON: So a retraction for a machine that really never learns about it in a timely way isn't really a retraction. And I think as publishers, if you're going to do licensing deals with AI, and we're working on this, you have to figure out how to do this in an automated way and make sure that the licensee is updating their data set and their AI inference set.
SUZE KUNDU: I think there's also a culture piece associated with retractions. I'm going to tee you up slightly. I hope you don't mind. But I think for an early career researcher that is struggling with funding, if they have to go through a retraction process, it can be seen as a black mark on their record. And I'm very kind of encouraged to see quite high-profile people actually owning their attractions.
SUZE KUNDU: So Frances Arnold is a Nobel-Prize-winning chemist. And after they won the Nobel Prize, they also had to retract one of their papers. And they went through that process. And they were so open about it, and normalizing it. And of course, they have that platform and that privilege. But using that platform and privilege, I think to, I don't want to say celebrate, but I kind of do, because research is one of those few areas where if somebody proves you wrong or something that you've done might have been overlooked, you go, great.
SUZE KUNDU: Four new doors of research have opened. I can apply for more funding for these things. That's fantastic, though. And so I think embracing that as part of a very healthy culture of publishing research is very important. I'm now teeing you up for Ctrl-Z.
MEGAN FALLON: Yeah, thanks, Suze. I was telling Suze, I spent the morning on the drive here from Pennsylvania listening to a great podcast called Normal Curves, I think. They were interviewing the two winners of the first ever Ctrl-Z Award. Ctrl-Z means, undo. And this award is for researchers who retracted their work at great professional risk. This year, it honored Kate Laskowski at UC Davis and Alyssa Shull from Northeastern.
MEGAN FALLON: They talked about how much they learned going through the retraction process, how scared they were to lose faculty positions, or a first job out of grad school, but how they persisted in it, and then what they're going to do differently going forward, and how they're teaching classes. A lot of it comes down, honestly, to organizing your Excel files, data management.
MEGAN FALLON: But it's great that it has this visibility. They both talked about how many people have reached out to them for help and mentorship now that they've been elevated for having done this. And I think that's really exciting. At the Science family, last year, we published an editorial called Breaking the Silence". We were working with other publishers, we were working with Retraction Watch reporters, PIOs at universities, research integrity officers.
MEGAN FALLON: We were thinking about the following moment. There's a question about research on PubPeer or in some other format. Media get wind of it, they knock on the door of the author, they'd like a little insight into what's going on. There are many cases where understandably, researchers aren't responding to these questions. And that is not helping with the trustworthiness landscape that we'd like to improve.
MEGAN FALLON: And so we organized working with all those stakeholders, a couple of kind of points of guidance and tips for authors who might find themselves in that position. There are certain things they may not be able to share, especially during a confidential investigation. But there are other things they can communicate about the complexity of their research landscape, what their intentions are, that can help a reporter write a story and can help to kind of inspire some trust in the process.
MEGAN FALLON: So we're thinking about that culturally too. Appreciate David's points about the AI piece of this as well. Yeah.
DAVID SAMPSON: Can I just make one more comment about AI and our responsibility as a licensor of content to these AI companies? That responsibility doesn't end once you sign the agreement and start delivering content. And one of the things that we're thinking much more about is the sort of auditing process of looking at the performance and the answers in the tools that we've licensed content to and making sure that they're meeting our standards as well as the high standards that are required in the health space.
DAVID SAMPSON: We haven't done that well, but it's something that we're thinking about, how do we formalize it? How do we make it consistent so that we're pressure testing the right things within these tools, and within these models? I think retractions are just kind of like the tip of the iceberg. And there's a huge responsibility for us as a company that licenses content to make sure that these tools really are delivering what they said they would.
RYAN ROSS: Thank you. As we get close to the end of our session, we'll have some time for Q&A. So tee up your questions. But I wanted to pose a question just in closing for each of our panelists that came up in Wendy Queen's presentation earlier today. From your point of view, for this group, what deserves action now? What's the next thing we should do?
SUZE KUNDU: If we're talking about technology, I think straddling sort of the different sides of publishing, from the research perspective and from the sort of segment perspective, I think I've seen, and I'm very kind of encouraged to hear some of David's insights because it's the embracing of new technology, I think we often feel like the horse is bolted, and it's way too late to kind of pull it back.
SUZE KUNDU: I think new technology such as AI and LLMs are a part of everyone's future. And I think I've seen some publishers, I haven't seen any here, but I've seen some that have been very condemning of the use of novel technology, overlooking the fact that things like AI can actually, if used in certain ways, can help equalize the playing field, and can actually unlock publication of work or increase visibility of work for people that haven't had that privilege.
SUZE KUNDU: This is a global endeavor. And so I think what I would like to see as an action point is more community engagement, more understanding of how researchers that intend to publish are using novel technology like AI and like LLMs. And I think working with them, understanding that change is inevitable, and actually being a partner in making sure that changes that do occur are done while still grounding integrity of research and understanding that the purpose of publication is to have a true version of record, and to share knowledge in a way that others can critique and build on.
SUZE KUNDU: I think that's what I'd like to see.
RYAN ROSS: Thank you. Megan?
MEGAN FALLON: So I think there's a lot of focus on making sure that research is of high quality and machine readable. And all of that is extremely important. I also think it's interesting to think about how to maybe change the way we make some of our research maximally human readable going forward by thinking about what we're doing in some short form, bullets on the article, author videos, to clarify things like, what kind of gap are we trying to fill here?
MEGAN FALLON: Why is this important? How could it be used? And who did it? So we have to work on the machine-readable piece, but we also have to work on the human-readable piece. And I think that latter part also signals to the future generation of researchers what they should be focusing on, and what they should be bringing to research as they pursue it as a lifetime career.
RYAN ROSS: Thank you.
DAVID SAMPSON: So my advice would be, sort of thinking about Teddy Roosevelt's man-in-the-arena speech. Like, be the person in the arena. Don't sit on the sidelines, because this isn't going away. And you can learn a lot from either licensing your content or doing pilots. And again, I'm speaking in the context of AI. You're not going to learn by sitting on the sidelines, and waiting it out, and hoping that this goes away.
DAVID SAMPSON: And that's the approach that we've taken is, one, we have a mission because of the content that we publish to make sure that our content is in as many of these AI systems, whether it's a frontier LLM for training or for AI inference in a tool like OpenEvidence. It's our responsibility, our responsibility. I mean, any GM group, to make sure that what we publish is grounding the answers that physicians and patients are getting.
DAVID SAMPSON: And if you look at-- I asked a clinical question in OpenEvidence. I asked that same clinical question in ChatGPT and in Claude. And it's night and day the difference in the answers that you get. Now granted, OpenEvidence is for a physician audience. But it was very clear that the AI inference was calling on peer-reviewed journals.
DAVID SAMPSON: If you look at Claude, and you look at ChatGPT, the references are news sources, and PubMed Central, sources that you just wouldn't trust or recognize. So we have a responsibility, I think, as publishers to be in the game and engaging these companies. And then what we're looking at is, right now, what we supply to AI companies is basically knowledge.
DAVID SAMPSON: But we're not providing them with any intelligence. We're not providing them with any context. And in health care and medicine, it's a high-stakes field where you need to get it right. But there's also a lot of nuances in medicine. I said during a conference last week for SSP that medicine is as much of an art as a science. And the AI machines aren't going to pick up on that. The humans will pick up on that.
DAVID SAMPSON: But then how do you translate that, that human insight into better performance in the machines?
RYAN ROSS: Thank you. We have a few minutes left, so we do have time for questions. And I see a hand up. I think I need to hand the mic off to somebody. Oh, Evan's got a mic.
AUDIENCE: Oh, hello. So Lou Peck here. Do you know, I was sitting here listening to this. And then I looked over at, I don't know if you've seen these little cards on our table that says about what's your biggest professional pet peeve? And I think I've just found it.
AUDIENCE: [LAUGHTER]
AUDIENCE: And OK, so as I was listening to you all and thinking about the work that I do, and the people that we work with, I think as an industry, we need to recognize the impact that we had when, as a goodwill thing, people thought that they were doing the right thing, but coming off X, societies, member bodies, nonprofits, commercials are still there, right, coming off there. And I have literally seen biologists nearly in fisticuffs about this because it's so contentious for them.
AUDIENCE: You're still on it. And when you take away trusted information from a channel where people are, we can't force people to come to our platforms to go to where we expect them to be. We have to go where they are. So when you take trusted information away and you're just left with fake news, what do you think society is going to believe? Fake news.
AUDIENCE: So I mean, if I asked the room here who are organizations, who came off X? Come on. I know many of you came off X. Yeah. So as we think about this, what if we went back on X? I mean, forget who owns it. But if we're supporting the community and we want people to learn better, and find better information, and have trusted information that's more accessible to them, I think you kind of need to get back on X. I mean, the big boys are on there.
AUDIENCE: So the more, the better. So it's more of a comment. Well, no, you could answer that question. Are you going to go back on? Are you going to make a commitment?
MEGAN FALLON: We're still there. We have some of our highest engagement for certain papers on X. Yeah.
AUDIENCE: Absolutely. And submissions, people still get submissions through X. So yeah. Cluster of small community. Are you going back on?
DAVID SAMPSON: Well, NEJM is on X. I am not on X.
AUDIENCE: [LAUGHTER]
AUDIENCE: I like that, though. I think we all kind of fell off there personally. But yeah.
SUZE KUNDU: I do think you make a good point, though. One of the first rules of science communication is, you meet people where they are. And if they are there, and we've left a vacuum of quality, trusted information, and we do want to engage with them, part of it, it's tricky because people are resource poor. And often, trying to convince people that cannot be convinced kind of needs to be ruled out. But rather than only preaching to the choir, where we already are, I think there is a group of people that can be, I don't want to say convinced, because I did debunk that earlier, but can be engaged with and can-- David, I think, mentioned when we were chatting in one of the pre-meetings, what we want to do is make people curious again, and re-instill critical thinking, and give them the tools, and empower them to be able to discern what is fact and what is fiction.
SUZE KUNDU: And that can only be achieved through meaningful engagement, and meeting people where they are. But I think maybe finding space, and resource, and time to engage with the people that are neither one side or the other, I think you're probably right. It's uncomfy, but yes. It's a really good point.
RYAN ROSS: I think we have time for one more question.
AUDIENCE: All the way in the back. Peter Lynch, American Academy of Pediatrics. This has obviously been a big focus of our organization over the last couple years. And so I was just curious in your daily work around communications and things, do you approach it any differently, or have any different strategies when you're trying to combat disinformation? People who are not confused but are deliberate, bad actors trying to muddy the waters, bring down the integrity of where the research came from, and all that.
MEGAN FALLON: You want it? OK.
SUZE KUNDU: I can kick off with a really simple thing, which is, never make people feel stupid. Don't come at their point of view with negativity. I think finding out where they have found that information, why they have found that information, why they have found that compelling, and you can't really change a mind in one interaction. But what you can do is start to build a more trusted association and a positive association with somebody that comes at it from a different perspective.
SUZE KUNDU: And over time, and over kind of repeat engagement activities, you can start to better understand where they've got that and why they're wedded to that idea. You can help inform the way that you then communicate something that is not disinformation or not misinformation, but it is more truth based. And I think they're actually some of our most valuable encounters. I had the most fascinating chat with a flat Earther in St. Pancras Station on the way to Paris.
SUZE KUNDU: And by the end of our train journey, it was two hours and 22 minutes, and he said he would find a YouTube video that was not suggested to him in his algorithm. And that, for me, felt like impact. And so it's kind of, again, it's a little bit of the meeting people where they are, I think. But I think that's the really important thing, not making people feel bad, and trying to engage with them on a level where they already are.
MEGAN FALLON: That was a great train ride.
SUZE KUNDU: Not for him, I don't think. [LAUGHTER]
MEGAN FALLON: Well, in our day-to-day work when we're working with authors, so we're asking them, two to three weeks ahead of publication, are there ways that you're seeing people misunderstand or misrepresent your work? Anything we can help kind of mitigate against as you prepare to publish with us? And if we get a big signal from them, or if we just know there's a place where misinformation is rampant, we might work with the authors to set up a press briefing, invite a lot of reporters, reporters of different stripes, to come and hear the authors, three or four authors, talk about that work, and directly tackle kind of the elements of information that are being misunderstood in thoughtful ways.
MEGAN FALLON: They're not reading a script. They're talking and then they're taking questions. And then we see news coverage that reflects those sentiments. But we try to spend time asking our authors, like, how is your work being misrepresented? And then we try to think about how we can mitigate against that in different ways in our work with media and content creators.
DAVID SAMPSON: This is such a tough one because we, as a publisher, have always-- our primary audience has been physicians. It hasn't been the patient or the lay audience. We've tried to develop tools, I would say, different formats of content, to maybe reach a consumer audience. But when you look at the usage, or the views, it's still relatively low. We're trying to learn new tricks.
DAVID SAMPSON: About a year ago, we brought in someone who headed up video at Conde Nast, completely different space, consumer space. And we asked this person to conduct a workshop for us to really give us some best practices and tips on, how do you create engaging video and audio multimedia, and to take some pages from that consumer playbook? Now it's up to us to try to apply that to the content that we're creating to reach maybe a different audience.
DAVID SAMPSON: But it's hard. And that's why we're maybe looking past social media, and how can we impact positive change on the tools, the platforms, that more of our fellow citizens are using? And that's ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini.
RYAN ROSS: Thank you, everyone. This is really just the tip of the iceberg. I feel like there's so much more to talk about this. We are out of time. But thank you, Suze, Megan, and David for participating in this. And I believe I am handing the stage over to Will, who's on his way. Thank you. [APPLAUSE]
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