A Farewell Note: Insights from Federico Boem’s time in NanoBubbles

My experience in NanoBubbles came to an end this June.

I thought it would be nice to make a critical assessment of my experience, without the ambition to be exhaustive, complete or ‘objective’.

Before coming to the more personal part, I would like to stress a few points that are important to me and that I have matured  with greater clarity, at least I think, during my time in the project.

1. Research requires time and resources that often do not go hand in hand with the economic-political and cultural models that finance it. This distortion also produces excessive competition and a struggle for survival that is also asymmetrical. This means that certain groups and centres start at an advantage and that members of the same group with different positions have different possibilities and different ‘protections’ against dangers and uncertainties arising from research errors (whether unintentional or not).
2. The issue of science correction has strong political connotations (both academic and non-academic) but this should not lead to easy generalisations (e.g.  ‘researchers are all frauds’, ‘research as a whole is a fraud’ etc.). Responsibilities are personal. And a lot of research is done scrupulously and robustly. So making undue generalisations is not the right take home message of my thoughts.
3. However, I believe that the witch-hunt/crusader’s attitude must also be avoided.Obviously, the professional and ethical conduct of individual researchers is their responsibility (and therefore they will be held accountable). But certain behaviour does not take place ‘in a vacuum’. If the integrity of research is problematic, as researchers we should also try to understand why this happens rather than just pointing fingers at circumscribed problems or single individuals (which is definitely also part of the problem and is crucial). But I think that paying attention to context and systemic issues remains fundamental (also with a view to trying to put some remedies in place).
4. Errors in science are everywhere and, I would say, intrinsically connected to the practice of doing research. In fact, I would say that errors are more common than successes. Errors are not always caused by fraud, but sometimes due to the difficulties of trying to understand something of the chaos that is our sensible experience. We must be careful to distinguish these errors, because genuine errors indicate good research as much as frauds are a sign of bad research. So words like ‘error’, ‘failure’, ‘difficulty’ should be part of the positive vocabulary of research and not used as a weapon to silence and belittle opponents or colleagues. In this, both the academy’s self-narration and the media/journalistic representations of science, unfortunately, have co-responsibilities.
5. The correction of science, e.g the scrupulous analysis not only of results when they are produced but also when they become common knowledge, is a constitutive part of the scientific process. Evaluating the robustness of the literature and critically examining ‘established truths’ is as important as producing new ones (in line with Merton’s so-called ‘organized skepticism’).
6. Some famous cases are such given the importance of the journal or the topic and the visibility of the people who have shed light on the issue. However, not everyone has the resources (financial and time related) to devote themselves totally to this activity. Yet there are thousands of researchers who every day dedicate part of their time analysing and commenting on special platforms (such as PubPeer.com ), participating in the so-called post-publication peer review. This is work that often remains largely unknown. This commitment is for the time being entirely voluntary, largely unrecognised and indeed often the subject of criticism (as when I was told last year at the world chemistry conference promoted by IUPAC that those who work on these issues are because they are not good enough to do their own research).
7. Sometimes people ‘outside’ the academia (such as journalists, sleuths, activists etc.) are essential to bring certain things to light. Since it is not only a question of competence, but also of the institutional dimension. Why is it that science, which is often portrayed as a community that governs itself in total autonomy and deliberates on the quality of its products (e.g. peer review) struggles so much to correct itself? Perhaps this narrative of research as isolated and pure in a world of purely cognitive ideas and values should be revised (beyond academic consensus). And again, more attention to economic aspects (e.g. how is research financed?) and political aspects (e.g. why is it financed and who does it?) should become a common heritage of researchers and others.
8. Scientific journals and their power constitute a central issue. A few months ago, a German colleague showed me how the top five scientific publishers in the world have a response rate to requests for correction of research that ranges from 50 per cent at best (i.e. actually about half of the requests are at least considered) to 95 per cent at worst. The scientific community and other institutional bodies could renegotiate this power. Of course, this would also require a global and profound rethinking of how research is currently produced and disseminated.
9. The philosophical aspect of all this is certainly ethical but also epistemic. Classic questions such as what constitutes evidence and good evidence, what constitutes a good explanation/justification for a finding, the nature of models and techniques, reflections on method, etc. seem fundamental (at least to me, but I am not alone).

Moreover, these are issues that many philosophers (unfortunately) often discuss in the abstract and on ancient examples (sometimes ‘fossilised’ ). On the contrary, these issues find their full dimension here. This leads me to hope for future organisations of university curricula that are more integrated and in dialogue with each other (because ‘no man is an island’ but also no discipline).

And now for some brief personal considerations.

NanoBubbles was and is an exciting but also a very difficult project. Integrating and harmonising different visions, embodied by people with different backgrounds and different sensitivities and opinions is not easy.

It was, somehow, a gamble, and probably more time would have been needed, but I think the end result is, all things considered, positive.

I am extremely grateful first of all to Yj Erden and Raphaël Lévy for the opportunity they gave me. And so to the other PIs and all other project members (especially among them Nathanne Rost, and then Maha Said and Mustafa Gharib). They all taught me something.

For me, NanoBubbles was an exceptional personal and educational experience.
I learnt a lot within NanoBubbles and developed many new ideas.
What we did will definitely shape my future steps.

So this is my farewell to the project, but as we say in Italy, it is not a farewell but an ‘arrivederci’.

Federico Boem