Hints of Revolution

Every time that I sign into Flickr, the digital revolution in science becomes apparent to me. One would expect this to be most realized through my daily accessing of science journals via the internet, however that is access to scientific papers, but not necessarily scientific information. Journals and publishers largely remain the gatekeepers of scientific knowledge, but here I see a a new trend in the digital revolution in how we find and access scientific information, which is larger than journals alone, and which could eventually lead to greater democratization of science and more widespread access to science.

For me, the realization started with Flickr, a website that I use primarily to share photos with friends and family. But I also use it to share a small set of scientifically oriented graphs, schematics, diagrams, and other images; 6 in all. Most of these are from my masters thesis, which I made available under a Creative Commons licence to enable reuse and redistribution. However, knowing the pains and frustrations of either obtaining copyright permissions versus the time consumed in making one’s own figures, I wanted others to be able to use the figures within it with even greater freedom. My UBC thesis is not particularly visible online,  and within it, finding any one of the 185 pages makes for further encumbrance. So I decided to make a number of the general figures available via my Flickr account, which is much more accessible; each photo and associated text is individually indexed by the major image search engines (i.e. Google).

Science Images on Flickr

The six, publicly accessible images in my Science set are:

  1. Filter Cube Set and CY3 Emission/Absorption Characteristics [724]
  2. General Purpose Electrochemical Cell [662]
  3. Vacuum Transfer Flask [565]
  4. Spectroelectrochemical Cell [346]
  5. 2nd Generation Spectroelectrochemical Cell [241]
  6. Spectroelectrochemical Cell Design [92]

Below is a typical stats page from my Flickr account. Referrers such as images.google.com and compflight.com can be noted. Four of my science images are among the most frequented images, although this changes significantly from day to day.

Flickr Stats Page

Now, when I check my account’s stats, each day I see one or two of the science images has been viewed by someone. In some cases, Flickr enables me to see how that someone found their way through cyberspace to that particular image by giving information about “Referrers”. Referrers are typically search engines such as google.com, images.google.com, bing.com, flickr.com, images.yahoo.com, etc…  and the information will usually include what the terms of the search were.

How People are Finding These Images

So, excluding the majority of referrers which are “unknown” to Flickr, these are domains and corresponding searches that have brought people to these six science images over the past 37 days.

images.google.com

google.com

flickr.com

compflight.com

yahoo.com

While one can vaguely observe from this list what the seekers were searching for, it’s less certain why they’re searching for it. Are these graduate students, seeking a figure for their presentation or thesis, or perhaps a step-by-step procedure to making something work? Could they be undergraduates, looking for a leg-up in preparing for a lab or for a visual definition for an uncertain phrase heard in lecture? Could they be researchers in industry exploring the viability of some untried methodology? Those are questions I cannot answer, but they are worth considering.

Increased Access to Science

No matter what the seekers' goals, although it is clear that they’re seeking something science-related, the fact that they clicked the link to see these images indicates to me that I’ve assisted them in some small way. This is what I see as a democratization in communicating science: scientists can publish and provide information to other scientists and the public directly (or at least through a new intermediary, i.e. Google) . And the accessibility is increased compared even to digital journals, which, in addition to cost barriers, have limited visibility in search engines, and even when search engines are specifically focused on journals and related primary sources (Microsoft Academic Search or Google Scholar), the results are rarely as direct or obvious in answering the question as can be found intuitively via general search engines. And anyone — teachers, students, doctors, parents, kids, seniors, employees, et cetera — can access the information freely and easily.

Of course there’s at least one additional advantage to having this information presented accessibly via the internet: it can flourish in new forms and varieties. Videos, multimedia, images (in a multitude of formats, both raster and vector), infographics, audio files (streaming and downloadable), blogs, websites, data sets, interactive graphs, and even articles.

Really, it does inspire me—and I hope others as well—that a set of six science images can generate 2630 views over a period of 686 days. While these are not citations (although perhaps one day projects like ORCID may enable that), my M.Sc. thesis itself has never been cited to my knowledge (and it’s impossible for me to know how many times it’s been accessed), and the paper resulting from my thesis, while it has been cited (to date, 15 times in journals, plus one book and one thesis), this gives one less a sense of peoples' use of the information. But 2630 views is a tangible number for me, and one that motivates me to make more of my science accessible to others.