Clueless in the EU
I apologize for interrupting the regular scheduled program for a brief rant.
Since being a researcher mostly means burning taxpayer dollars, it is widely understood and accepted in the scientific community that we need to explain to the public what on earth we’re actually doing and why any of it matters once in a while. Personally, I enjoy this very much - so much, in fact, that I tell people without having been asked. Blogging is obviously one of the best ways of talking to virtually any interested individual on the planet about your work, and I think that is partly because it attracts people who otherwise wouldn’t go through the arduous process of finding a paper publication, buying it, and then contending with an unwieldy format and inaccessible jargon that only the anointed are able to understand.
In other words, talking about your research on the web is a great idea, because all sorts of people who are not members of a tightly knit in-group might listen and contribute with their perspectives. Or, if you’re some kind of grant agency that supports scholars, having a blog to talk to your clients might be a really good idea.
Which is why the website of KoWi, the office for the coordination of scientific institutions in the EU (my rough and dirty translation) frustrates me so much. They state their mission as follows:
Via email, phone, in the KoWi offices in Bonn and Brussels or at your institution KoWi gives advice regarding proposal-writing and project management. Particularly, this is valid for the European Research Council (ERC) as well as the funding of young scientists and European and international consortia in collaborative research (quote)
Being both a young scientist and a citizen of the EU, I strongly support this goal. The trouble is: the advice and information KoWi provides appears on the front page in the form of anonymously posted news bits. Not only do I have absolutely no idea who writes this stuff (and therefor little reason to find any of it relevant), but it also seems to exist independently of their AiD newsletter (which they’ve been publishing for an impressive 13 years). The disconnect between the news on the web site and the newsletter is just a minor issue though - the newsletter itself is where it really gets weird.
Instead of simply containing news items in the message body, each email issue instead consists of a table of contents. For each item in this table a PDF attachment is included, even if the news piece is a mere three or four sentences long. But that’s not all. In a recent issue, only two of four newsletter items were actually attached to the email as PDF docs. Why? Because, as the disclaimer tells me, “you only receive those items which match your profile” - that is, a list of interest areas that you have to specify when signing up for AiD. Of course I was interested in one of the items that wasn’t attached and wondered how I’d be able to get it. They don’t provide a link or anything else that would be, you know, useful. In the end I had to google their web site to find what I was looking for. To summarize: they’re using email for something that could be realized much more effectively through a blog, they apparently don’t know what RSS is and they’re making it unnecessarily difficult for me to find what I’m looking for. Oh yeah – and I have no clue who they actually are and what precisely they do, which is something a blog could tell me.
The closing irony of it all is that the news item I wanted to read was about communicating the results of your research to the general public (for example via the Internet!). They apparently had a conference on the subject. Now, a bit more than a year later they’ve published the proceedings.
As a book.