The Internet Forces the Scientific Community to Face its Ethical Problems
Bruce M. Pollock · HortScience · 1997
Historically, ethical issues in science have disappeared behind the veil which alleges that science is self-correcting because of its reliance on secret peer review. Unfortunately, that same peer review process has closed scientific journals to scientists holding to different ethical standards, while access to the law and courts has been a prohibitively expensive mechanism to protest unethical actions. Although eager to sensationalize ethical lapses, news media have been ineffective in correcting the problems. As a result, dissension has been left exclusively to lay activists. Against this background, in the 1995 AIBS symposium, “Ethics, Science, and Public Policy,” Bella described scientific publications as “propaganda” and Mattson discussed the fact that unbiased science cannot exist within government agencies. However, with the sudden rise of the World Wide Web, scientific societies have lost control of publication, and legal confidentiality has disappeared, because the Web now provides outlets for dissenting views and the opportunity to bring corruption in science to public attention. Thus placed under public scrutiny, the scientific community must confront an urgent need to examine its ethical standards.