Elife Episode 1: Multicellular life, potato blight and Hepatitis B

克里斯说scientist and eLife Deputy Editor, Fiona Watt, about the free journal and its funding.

Fiona - eLife is all about a publishing revolution. It is a journal which is fully funded by three organisations, the Wellcome Trust, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and the Max Planck Society. And by 'fully funded', I mean that at present, none of the authors pay and none of the readers pay for the content. ELife was launched with three main objectives. The first was a feeling that it was important to push the concept of open access further, that the open access movement in a sense had started well but had stalled. Second was that if we published a journal which is purely digital with no paper copy, we could completely revolutionise the way content is explored by the authors and by the referees. And then thirdly, very importantly, we felt there was a need to take science publishing back into the hands of scientists. As I like to say it, we wanted to end the tyranny of that bastard referee 3. So in other words, we wanted to avoid months and months of papers being revised and resubmitted. Young scientists career's are really on the line because of a single referee wanting more and more data.

克里斯-好吧,让我们来看看这些东西n term but since you've brought the review process first, I was sitting in a meeting at my institution the other day, and one of the professors of one of the research departments at Cambridge University said it's not uncommon when you send your papers off somewhere that a referee will come back with some suggested additional experiments that basically, they're a year's work.

Fiona - I don't know really at what stage this really began to spin out of control, but certainly, my experience in my lab is that when we submit the paper, we are probably looking at at least 6 months work even if we have favourable reviews.

克里斯- So, how will eLife address that?

Fiona - The process of handling papers in eLife is distinctive in a number of ways. All of the people involved in the review process are practicing scientists. So, we're all accountable. Secondly, when a paper is submitted, we line up members of our - if you like - college of referees who are actually paid to be part of the review process, and we have an online discussion about the paper. So, we ask our office to submit a simple pdf and we aim to make a quick decision about whether or not the paper is likely to fly at eLife. And if a decision is made that the paper should go out for review, we've already lined up people who are familiar with the content of the paper and are committed to steering it through the full review process.

克里斯- But how does this solve the problem of that nasty referee number 3 who then says, "I want 18 months more experiments to be done before I will consider this adequate for publication"?

霏欧纳——好吧,如果你的论文已经完整review, it will typically be three reviewers. When the reviews come in, we consider do we in principle - want to publish this paper and if so, can the authors fix the bits that need to be fixed in a short timeframe. We would say, ideally 3 months. Instead of regurgitating the reviews in verbatim, we draft a high end summary where we highlight the things that we think are important and doable.

克里斯- The second point you made was about not being tied to print. So, how does that benefit eLife and the people who want to send their papers to you?

Fiona - "Not being tied to print" has been a very interesting experience. We could say, "Well, do we really need a two column with format?" If most people are going to be reading the paper on an iPad, how would we want to look at the figures? We're experimenting now with something called lens which means that as you pass the cursor over the text, figures will appear exactly where you want them. Movies for example are fully embedded in the paper so you can play the movies as you're reading the text. It's a process which is still evolving, but we want people to be able to essentially play with the data, interact with it in ways that have not been possible up until now.

克里斯- And I suppose the benefit of beginning with something which is built for that purpose rather than taking a traditional print process and trying to turn it into something that has that functionality, it must be easier, more streamlined.

Fiona - Yes, I think that's right. One rather amusing, effective of being purely digital is that when we've had stands at scientific conferences to publish eLife, people are so used to picking up hard copies of the journal that we felt we didn't really have enough beyond a few t-shirts and an iPad. So, we really had to think about better ways to display what we're up to.

克里斯- I think if you gave away iPads, that would probably attract quite a curious crowd.

Fiona - I'm sure if you'd like to suggest giving away iPads, that would be fine, but we're going to have them anchored to the stand. But it will be a great chance for people to see what we mean about handling the data in different ways.

克里斯- Also, you mentioned that you felt that Open Access, which is obviously a major driver for eLife, you felt that process had stalled. Why do you think that?

Fiona - I was really referring to data from the Wellcome Trust. So, they have been pioneers in the UK of the Open Access movement and they monitor compliance. People who are funded by the Wellcome Trust must publish their work, make it openly available to others. And compliance was rising steadily until a couple of years ago when it seem to sort of level out at about 55%. So, they actually now have introduced the stick as well the carrot to make sure that their grant holders make their work freely available. So, I think eLife gives scientists a platform to publish their very best work, Open Access and completely, at no cost to them. So, I do think that is going to be a boost for Open Access.

What happens when you drive in fog? Paolo Pretto from the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tubingen, Germany, clarified a few issues related to driver's perceptions of their speed in foggy conditions. He explains to Martha Henriques...

保罗,所以,有很多的事故在雾中,right? We blame low visibility condition and there were a couple of papers in the past that just said we can't explain why this happens and they provided an explanation which was quite comfortable when you drive in fog, because fog is simply a natural way to reduce visual contrast. And we know that a low visual contrast leads to lower perceived speed then what happens to the driver is they perceive their own speed being lower and therefore, you accelerate to match what the actual speed will look like in clear visibility conditions. So, what this paper did was they brought this to a situation of self-motion. So, when there is no object moving, but the observer itself is moving in the environment. So, they considered this for the first time. And, probably, the way they reduce their contrast was the same way that used in the laboratory conditions. So, they reduced the contrast of the visual seeing of the driver in a driving simulation uniformly, independently of depth, independently of the distance from the observer. And so, that's what was missing in the previous study and that's what we did in our new study.

玛莎-在那些先前的研究,他们的形式lations were more like driving with a misted up or dirty windscreen whereas you adjusted contrast so that it seemed more like actually looking at fog outside through a clear windscreen. Why is that an important difference and how does that affect human perception of speed when driving?

Paolo - The difference is quite simple. So, no one ever tried before to simulate a gradient of contrast reduction. So, a contrast which is not reduced uniformly all over the visual field. But different regions have different contrast reductions and that's basically the new part.

Martha - So, you created a more realistic simulation of driving in foggy conditions and the initial models used were essentially just too simple and you've added a few more factors to make it...

Paolo - So, we're not appropriate. We're simulating a realistic fog.

Martha - Once you have this better idea of the way fogs should be modelled, what happened when you got some drivers into these simulators, the testing?

Paolo - Well, we used different methods. We did some study on the perceptual side. So, studies which are basically passive for our subjects so they don't have to do a driving path. But with this kind of methodologies, we can somehow quantify their perception. We can relate their internal representation of their speed to the actual current physical speed that they're driving at. So, we measured what is technically called the point of subjective equality. So, when two different speeds are met to different scenes, moving scenes. With that, we derive the perceived velocity, the perceived speed of the driver. And now, the method that we use was more like a behavioural neuroscience method. So, we asked our participants, our subjects to drive, to do some driving tasks and by trying to match a given target speed. They were trained to reproduce before the real experiment. With that long, we could measure the other side. So, we could measure the production of speed. By that, we could relay the effect of perceived speed that we measured in the psychophysical experiments with the observable changes in the behaviour of the drivers that we measured in the second experiment.

Martha - So, you found that the perceived speed was significantly higher than the speed produced by the drivers in the simulator. Meaning, they would actually tend to drive more slowly in foggier conditions. So in fact, our instincts seem to be telling us to do the sensible thing and slow down. So in fact, speed perception doesn't seem to be a factor that would make us more prone to traffic accidents in fog after all.

保罗,我们在我们的研究介绍e on the perceptual effects, on the visual motion that was processed by the drivers. But we know that when we drive that it's not only perception going on. We have also our own motivations. For example, if we are in a hurry, if we have an appointment, we will speed up. We will drive faster. So, we simply will ignore what our perception, what our brain will suggest that. there are a lot of higher order cognitive factors that overcome the perceptual effects. If we try to simplify and we try to analyse separately the perception, that's what we found. So, the brain would kind of suggest that to drive safely. We don't do it obviously.

Martha - And so, how do you think these findings might influence say, road safety campaigns or policy? What do you think might be the practical applications that your work could contribute to?

Paolo - At the time we conceived the study, we were not really concerned about practical applications. But after seeing the results, we actually realised that this could be kind of useful for many different fields. For example, we know that in the driving simulation community, there is always a problem, and the problem is that in the simulation, all the drivers over estimate their own speed. With our findings, we could think of some application in the future where playing around with the contrast of the visual scene, we could somehow adjust more or less efficiently towards higher or lower levels of perceived speed in the simulation.