How scientists are fighting back scrap that people write on science topics

Scientists all over the world are really frustrated about the misinformation that is being spread by some people that write on science. This rubbish is the reason for people not trusting science or ignoring the confusing reports that appear all the time in the media. Science is being ridiculed by some because of this menace. Undoubtedly scientists want to encourage higher standards of excellence in science reporting.

Now, I am glad to see that scientists are fighting back to preserve the integrity of their field. The results are obvious.

A few days back I wrote about an interesting site that somewhat puts an end to our anguish at least with regard to health care research.  This health news/story release reviews site which conducts independent expert reviews of ‘health care journalism, advertising, marketing, public relations and other messages that may influence consumers and provides criteria that consumers can use to evaluate these messages themselves.’ It also rates press releases from universities, government agencies, medical journals, drug makers, device manufacturers and others. In other words, it actually polices the research press releases! Click on the link below to know how.

http://www.healthnewsreview.org/

And how climate scientists are tackling this issue? Scientists in the field  get tool to mark online climate science media coverage!
Using the Climate Feedback tool, scientists have started to diligently add detailed annotations to online content and have those notes appear alongside the story as it originally appeared.

If you’re the writer, then it’s a bit like getting your homework handed back to you with the margins littered with corrections and red pen. Or smiley faces and gold stars if you’ve been good.

The scientists also give each story a grade for its “scientific credibility”.
So far about 40 scientists have joined the Climate Feedback group from places like MIT, the University of New South Wales Climate Change Research Centre, Germany’s Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Harvard, the US National Snow and Ice Data Center, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and universities in the UK, Australia and the US.

The project is the brainchild of climate scientist Dr Emmanuel Vincent, a tropical cyclone expert at the University of California.

Several scientists are volunteering their time to review articles and think they take part because of a “moral and professional duty” to speak up when “some media are distorting important topics”.

http://climatefeedback.org/

There is another one...
To enable a conversation over the world’s knowledge that come from note-taking on top of news, blogs, scientific articles, books etc. It leverages annotation to enable sentence-level critique. They have a tool scientists are using to annotate the online text.

https://hypothes.is/

PS:

The use of the word 'scrap' in the heading is deliberate - which means discorded material that is not in use. To say that journalists are using 'thrown away things' by scientists.