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New potentials in the communication of open science with non-scientific publics: The case of the anti-vaccination movement
Abstract
There is persistent pressure on science to be more open. But for all the fervour, scant attention has been paid to the full gamut of the potentials of openness, both positive and negative. These potentials are, in many cases, linked to open access to the formal communications of science made possible by digitisation, the internet and developments in information and communication technologies. A consequence of direct access to the formal communications of science is that traditional channels of communication are no longer the gatekeepers to the public’s understanding of science. Instead, new and different types of channels for the communication of science are proliferating in a society that is increasingly online and networked, and it is therefore reasonable to expect attentive non-scientific publics to access the communications of science. If this is the case, then open science introduces new trajectories in its communication that are best understood with reference to flows of information in the communication networks that define the network society.
It is the direct access to the communications of open science by non-scientists that this thesis examines in order to answer the question ‘What are the potentials of open science in the communication of science?’. It does so by investigating the presence of two products of science – open research data and open access journal articles – in the online communications of a specific non-scientific community: the anti-vaccination movement. Specifically, it determines (1) whether the product is being accessed by the anti-vaccination movement as indicated by references in three online spheres (Twitter, Facebook and the web); (2) whether the product is being used by the anti-vaccination movement as indicated by the movement’s level of engagement in each online sphere; and (3) whether there are intermediaries in the online communication networks of the anti-vaccination movement as indicated by mapping the movement’s online communication networks centred around the products of open science.
Findings show that the anti-vaccination movement is not accessing open research data. In the case of open access journal articles, findings show that online social networks allow the anti-vaccination movement to amplify its minority position by being selective in terms of the vaccine science it feeds into its online communication networks, and by being highly active without engaging closely with the scientific knowledge at its disposal. In part, the amplification was found to be attributable to the presence of different types and a disproportionate number of intermediaries.
The consequences of the anti-vaccination movement’s use of open access journal articles in its online communications is the production and amplification of uncertainty around the safety of vaccinations. Science communicators will need to develop new strategies to counter the potentially detrimental health outcomes of increases in uncertainty and vaccine refusal in the broader population. This first foray into the potentials of open science shows that the development of such communication strategies will require further research to understand better how attention, influence and power function in a society increasingly defined by its global communication networks.
... The achievement of complete basic immunization must pass various challenges, one of which is the public's trust in the immunization program. Schalkwyk (2019)explained that most of the antivaccine group movement use social media to spread misleading information about vaccines to strengthen the hesitancy of others in giving vaccines to their children (Schalkwyk, 2019). Social media is chosen because it is the only media currently used by everyone to interact, search for information, and to become part of a community (Joubert, 2019). ...
... The achievement of complete basic immunization must pass various challenges, one of which is the public's trust in the immunization program. Schalkwyk (2019)explained that most of the antivaccine group movement use social media to spread misleading information about vaccines to strengthen the hesitancy of others in giving vaccines to their children (Schalkwyk, 2019). Social media is chosen because it is the only media currently used by everyone to interact, search for information, and to become part of a community (Joubert, 2019). ...
Introduction: The current controversial issue regarding the anti-vaccine movement is the biggest challenge in implementing immunization in Indonesia because it influences the stagnation in the coverage of complete basic immunization. The World Health Organization (WHO) also states that the anti-vaccine group is one of the ten major threats to global health in 2019 since this phenomenon can cause rare diseases to become epidemic. This study aims at factors related to vaccine hesitancy in the anti-vaccine group on Facebook.Methods: This study used a descriptive correlational method with a quantitative approach. The sample in this study was 150 mothers who were members of the anti-vaccine group on Facebook social media, selected using a purposive sampling technique.Results: Demographic characteristics include religion, ethnicity, education, and income. Perceived susceptibility and perceived severity were assessed using Hwang’s Health Belief Model questionnaire, while vaccine hesitancy was assessed using Saphiro’s Vaccine Hesitancy Scale questionnaire, then analyzed using Spearman Rho (α<0.05). The results of this study showed that there was a correlation between perceived susceptibility and perceived severity of vaccine hesitancy (p=0.000), while demographic characteristics were not related to vaccine hesitancy.Conclusion: Certain religions and ethnicities which have caused concern have proven unrelated to parent’s hesitance in immunization, as well as the level of education and income. The vulnerability and severity of a disease emerged as most parents’ overriding concern when making decisions about vaccine
... The achievement of complete basic immunization must pass various challenges, one of which is the public's trust in the immunization program. Schalkwyk (2019)explained that most of the antivaccine group movement use social media to spread misleading information about vaccines to strengthen the hesitancy of others in giving vaccines to their children (Schalkwyk, 2019). Social media is chosen because it is the only media currently used by everyone to interact, search for information, and to become part of a community (Joubert, 2019). ...
... The achievement of complete basic immunization must pass various challenges, one of which is the public's trust in the immunization program. Schalkwyk (2019)explained that most of the antivaccine group movement use social media to spread misleading information about vaccines to strengthen the hesitancy of others in giving vaccines to their children (Schalkwyk, 2019). Social media is chosen because it is the only media currently used by everyone to interact, search for information, and to become part of a community (Joubert, 2019). ...
Introduction: The current controversial issue regarding the anti-vaccine movement is the biggest challenge in implementing immunization in Indonesia because it influences the stagnation in the coverage of complete basic immunization. The World Health Organization (WHO) also states that the anti-vaccine group is one of the ten major threats to global health in 2019 since this phenomenon can cause rare diseases to become epidemic. This study aims at factors related to vaccine hesitancy in the anti-vaccine group on Facebook.
Introduction: The phenomenon of basic vaccine hesitancy in parents is the biggest challenge faced byhealth workers in the global era currently. This study aimed to analyze the relationship between perceivedbenefits, perceived barriers, and knowledge about vaccines towards vaccine hesitancy among anti and provaccinecommunities on social media Facebook.Methods: This study used a cross-sectional design. The sample was 150 members of the anti-vaccinecommunity and 234 members of the pro-vaccine community on social media Facebook using a purposivesampling technique. Data were collected using questionnaire namely; HBM (health belief model)questionnaire which was translated and modified, and Vaccine Hesitancy Scale (VHS) questionnaire. Theindependent variables in this study were perceived benefits of vaccines, perceived barriers to vaccines,knowledge about vaccines. The dependent variable was vaccine hesitancy. Spearman rho analysis was usedto measure the relationship between the dependent and independent variables.Results: The results of the Spearman rho analysis showed that the perceived benefits of vaccines (p=0.363of anti-vaccine, p=0.702 of pro-vaccine), the perceived barriers to vaccines (p=0.410 of anti-vaccine,p=0.341 of pro-vaccine), and knowledge about vaccines (p=0.413 of anti-vaccine, p=0.192 of pro-vaccine)was related to vaccine hesitancy in parents.Discussion: This study results indicated that the perceived benefits of vaccines, perceived barriers tovaccines, and knowledge about vaccines are related to vaccine hesitancy in parents. The implications of thestudy are essential information for health workers to determine the right and wise strategy in responding tothe increasing vaccine hesitancy in public so that basic vaccine coverage will increase.
We investigated pro- and anti-vaccine rhetoric on two South African Facebook pages to identify the nature, sources and justifications of the vaccine-related claims published on these pages. Our dataset consisted of 440 Facebook posts made by page administrators during 2019. Statements related to the safety and necessity of vaccines dominated the pro-vaccine page, while the anti-vaccine page focussed primarily on claims about the dangers of vaccines. Posts on both pages frequently contained content shared from within Facebook, with much of the content originating from the United States. Both pages made equal use of scientific justifications (i.e. published journal articles) to support claims, and most of these articles were published in accredited journals. The authors hope that a better understanding of the nature, sources and justifications of pro- and anti-vaccine rhetoric may lead to more constructive dialogue about vaccines, including the ongoing debate about COVID-19 vaccines.
Social media metrics have a genuine networked nature, reflecting the networking characteristics of the social media platform from where they are derived. This networked nature has been relatively less explored in the literature on altmetrics, although new network‐level approaches are starting to appear. A general conceptualization of the role of social media networks in science communication, and particularly of social media as a specific type of interface between science and society, is still missing. The aim of this paper is to provide a conceptual framework for appraising interactions between science and society in multiple directions, in what we call heterogeneous couplings. Heterogeneous couplings are conceptualized as the co‐occurrence of science and non‐science objects, actors, and interactions in online media environments. This conceptualization provides a common framework to study the interactions between science and non‐science actors as captured via online and social media platforms. The conceptualization of heterogeneous couplings opens wider opportunities for the development of network applications and analyses of the interactions between societal and scholarly entities in social media environments, paving the way toward more advanced forms of altmetrics, social (media) studies of science, and the conceptualization and operationalization of more advanced science‐society studies.
The quackery virus: A preliminary analysis of pseudoscientific
health messages on Twitter
This paper presents an analysis of the anti-vaccination movement’s referencing of research articles on the topic of vaccination in the social media network Twitter. Drawing on the concept of bibliographic coupling, the paper demonstrates how Twitter users can be coupled based on articles mentioned on Twitter. The sample applied consists of 113 open access journal articles. The combination of tweeter coupling with the respective stance of Twitter accounts vis-à-vis vaccination makes possible the creation of a network graph of tweeters mentioning this corpus of articles. In addition to a common interest in the scientific literature, the findings show distinct communities of shared interests within the anti-vaccination movement, and demonstrate that tweeter coupling can be used to map these distinctive interests. The emergence of Twitter accounts serving as cognitive bridges within and between communities is noted and discussed with regard to their relative positions in the network. This paper’s results extend the knowledge on the application of altmetric data to study the interests of non-scientific publics in science; more specifically, it adds to the understanding of the potentials of open science and science–society interactions arising from increased access by non-scientists to scientific publications.
Chapter discusses the social and behavioural change communication (SBCC) as a
domain in health communication. It presents empirical examples of successful culturally-oriented health communication in the Global South with a specific focus on HIV/Aids.
Despite growing interest in Open Access (OA) to scholarly literature, there is an unmet need for large-scale, up-to-date, and reproducible studies assessing the prevalence and characteristics of OA. We address this need using oaDOI, an open online service that determines OA status for 67 million articles. We use three samples, each of 100,000 articles, to investigate OA in three populations: (1) all journal articles assigned a Crossref DOI, (2) recent journal articles indexed in Web of Science, and (3) articles viewed by users of Unpaywall, an open-source browser extension that lets users find OA articles using oaDOI. We estimate that at least 28% of the scholarly literature is OA (19M in total) and that this proportion is growing, driven particularly by growth in Gold and Hybrid. The most recent year analyzed (2015) also has the highest percentage of OA (45%). Because of this growth, and the fact that readers disproportionately access newer articles, we find that Unpaywall users encounter OA quite frequently: 47% of articles they view are OA. Notably, the most common mechanism for OA is not Gold, Green, or Hybrid OA, but rather an under-discussed category we dub Bronze: articles made free-to-read on the publisher website, without an explicit Open license. We also examine the citation impact of OA articles, corroborating the so-called open-access citation advantage: accounting for age and discipline, OA articles receive 18% more citations than average, an effect driven primarily by Green and Hybrid OA. We encourage further research using the free oaDOI service, as a way to inform OA policy and practice.
In this article, we develop a method that uses altmetric data to analyse researchers' interactions, as a way of mapping the contexts of potential societal impact. In the face of an increasing policy demand for quantitative methodologies to assess societal impact, social media data (altmetrics) have been presented as a potential method to capture broader forms of impact. However, current altmetric indicators were extrapolated from traditional citation approaches and are seen as problematic for assessing societal impact. In contrast, established qualitative methodologies for societal impact assessment are based on interaction approaches. These argue that assessment should focus on mapping the contexts in which engagement among researchers and stakeholders takes place, as a means to understand the pathways to societal impact. Following these approaches, we propose to shift the use of altmetric data towards network analysis of researchers and stakeholders. We carry out two case studies, analysing researchers' networks with Twitter data. The comparison illustrates the potential of Twitter networks to capture disparate degrees of policy engagement. We propose that this mapping method can be used as an input within broader methodologies in case studies of societal impact assessment.
This book describes the development of the scientific article from its modest beginnings to the global phenomenon that it has become today. Their analysis of a large sample of texts in French, English, and German focuses on the changes in the style, oganization, and argumentative structure of scientific communication over time. They also speculate on the future currency of the scientific article, as it enters the era of the World Wide Web. This book is an outstanding resource text in the rhetoric of science, and will stand as the definitive study on the topic.
As more academic work (teaching, research, and publishing) moves online, we acafans face ever more challenges regarding how academia and online communities can and should interact. Since academia enjoys a position of power, while fan communities are often highly marginalized, I argue that, as acafans, we have a special responsibility to the fan communities we engage with and study. Fulfilling this responsibility means using what I call a goodwill ethics heuristic approach to online research methods, which requires us to balance the concerns of fans with those of scholarly development. In order to trace what this goodwill heuristic approach to online research methods might look like, I start by examining ethical values of research methods as they are defined by the Belmont Report. I then revisit the methods of previous fan studies. I add to these methods an extended set of ethical values as they have been described by prominent scholars in a range of fields using human subjects research. Finally, I discuss my own online fannish profile, focusing on my self-positioning and how it has been crucial in developing a goodwill ethics approach in my own research. Ultimately, I argue that all online research should use a goodwill ethics heuristic approach, and that such an approach is chiefly characterized by researchers' willingness to abdicate their expert status where necessary; ongoing negotiations between researchers and participants; and researchers' taking sufficient time to establish both an emic perspective of the community or site being researched and relationships with participants.
The emergence of social media such as Twitter has brought the discussion about vaccination to a new dimension. In this study, the researchers aim to explore the discussion on issues related to vaccination on social media platform, specifically Twitter and identify the 'influencers' in the conversation. The paper also highlighted some of the subgroups that exist within the network where the influential individuals or organisations are the centre of their attention. The findings show that there are six types of influencers that dictate the discourse on vaccination on Twitter which are: celebrity doctor, media organisations, homeopathy promoter, government and government agencies, blogger and renowned medical journal. It also found that some of the influencers have their own circle of audience while some of the influencers are sharing the same crowd.
Many citizens and decision- makers obtain information about science mainly, or even exclusively, from news and online media. Accordingly, social science has devoted considerable attention to the analysis of science news coverage. A review of this literature reveals a number of ongoing, substantial transformations: In line with the crisis of legacy media, the rise of online communication, and the extension of PR by many societal stakeholders, science communication is changing. Science journalism has come under pressure in publishing houses, and science journalists’ working conditions have worsened. The amount of science news coverage is stagnating, albeit after a rise that lasted several decades, and seems to navigate toward either a more controversial reporting about politicized issues such as gene editing or a less critical “churnalism” that is more strongly influenced by PR efforts than before. The implications of these changes for science communication and societal decisions regarding science communication are considered.
The cross-disciplinary Oxford Handbook on the Science of Science Communication contains 47 essays by 57 leading scholars organized into six sections: The first section establishes the need for a science of science communication, provides an overview of the area, examines sources of science knowledge and the ways in which changing media structures affect it, reveals what the public thinks about science, and situates current scientific controversies in their historical contexts. The book’s second part examines challenges to science including difficulties in peer review, rising numbers of retractions, publication and statistical biases, and hype. Successes and failures in communicating about four controversies are the subject of Part III: “mad cow,” nanotechnology, biotechnology, and the HPV and HBV vaccines. The fourth section focuses on the ways in which elite intermediaries communicate science. These include the national academies, scholarly presses, government organizations, museums, foundations, and social networks. It examines as well scientific deliberation among citizens and science-based policymaking. In Part V, the handbook treats science media interactions, knowledge-based journalism, polarized media environments, popular images of science, and the portrayal of science in entertainment, narratives, and comedy. The final section identifies the ways in which human biases that can affect communicated science can be overcome. Biases include resistant misinformation, inadequate frames, biases in moral reasoning, confirmation and selective exposure biases, innumeracy, recency effects, fear of the unnatural, normalization, false causal attribution, and public difficulty in processing uncertainty. Each section of the book includes a thematic synthesis.
The introductory chapter defines a science of science communication, examines efforts to advance scholarship in this area, provides an overview of the contents within the six parts of the handbook, and indicates ways in which communication about the Zika virus relates to each of those parts and to chapters within them.
Communicating within and about science in a fashion that honors its norms and ways of knowing plays a role in warranting the ability of science to serve as a privileged source of premises, evidence, and conclusions in public and policy debates and decisions. Unlike political communication, in which selective uses of evidence, categorical assertion, and calculated ambiguity are stocks in trade, science’s distinctive norms and structures of enforcement entail forms of communication that take into account the available relevant evidence, specify the level of certainty attached to a claim, and precisely specifying the phenomena being analyzed or reported. This chapter discusses these issues and suggests future ways forward for science communicators.