E S & H news

ENVIRONMENTAL, SAFETY & HEALTH COMMUNICATION SPCIAL INTEREST GROUP

Volume 4 - number 1 Summer 1998

The Environmental, Safety & Health Special Interest Group promotes high standards of professional communication and provides a forum for information on environmental science and protection, occupational safety, and public health.

Editor's Request

Please send us the URLs for web sites of interest to environmental, health, and safety communicators. Send to the editor, Hillary Hart, at this address:

Department of Civil Engineering
University of Texas
Austin, Texas 78712
or hart@mail.utexas.edu

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By Carla Salvador
Associate Manager for Safety Communication

Here's what I heard.

• computer-based training as a panacea
  
  
• warning signs that are all in capital letters and don't say much
  
  
• rules posted on walls
  
  
• "do not's"
  
  
• trivializing or caricaturing safety in the media
  
  
• putting safety in the expert's domain--making it complicated
  
  
• "blame the worker" posters
  
  
• failing to build safety into the "ecology" or "culture" of our workplace.

Some of my correspondents also had suggestions for communicating safety effectively:

• personalize safety--connect it to what is important in our lives
  
  
• Use case studies so we can learn from mistakes
  
  
• Take it seriously and "walk the talk."

Please let us know how these thoughts match up with yours. Probably one person's peeve is another's panacea. Maybe we can explore some of these issues together to identify what is truly effective and what just gets in the way.

Carla Salvador, Associate SIG Manager for Safety

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New Listserv on Environmental Conferences

by Fred Stoss

ES&H Communicators are often requested information about up coming conferences, seminars, workshops, and other events related to the environment. Gathering this information can be a time consuming and frustrating job. Tom Parris at the Harvard College Library has initiated a new listserv to help ease the burden of looking for conference-related information. EnvConfs-L can be a vital tool for assisting the persons served by ES&H Communicators, and it can be an important reference tool to assist ES&H PIC members in identifying relevant conferences for presenting papers of their own, soliciting potential contracts for services, or identifying events where instruction in areas related to ESH communication might be taught.

Fred Stoss
Science and Engineering Library
SUNY Buffalo
fstoss@acsu.buffalo.edu

Here is a description of this listserv from its owner:

EnvConfs-L is a mechanism with which the environmental sciences and public policy community may use electronic mail to learn and share information about environmental conferences, events, and publication opportunities This document describes EnvConfs-L and provides instructions for its use. Participation in EnvConfs-L is open to all interested parties.

Many of us receive numerous electronic mail announcements of environmental conferences, events, and publication opportunities. EnvConfs-L provides a mechanism to share these announcements with the broader Environmental Sciences and Public Policy community.

EnvConfs-L should be used in conjunction with more traditional tools for learning about environmental conference, events, and publication opportunities (e.g., professional society journals). Many environmental conferences, events, and publication opportunities are not announced via electronic mail, and are therefore unlikely to appear on this list.

To send a conference, event, or call for papers announcement to EnvConfs-L, simply compose an electronic mail message containing your announcement and send it to:

EnvConfs-L@environment harvard.edu

(case is not important)

Please choose a subject line that can serve as a one sentence abstract of the conference, event, or publication opportunity you are announcing. Your announcement will be sent to EnvConfs-L subscribers within 24 hours.

Remember that the purpose of this list is to share information about environmental conferences, events, and publication opportunities. Messages that are not announcements about environmental conferences, events, and publication opportunities will be rejected by the moderator.

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Books of Interest

Kovacic, B
Emerging theories of human communication
0791434524
State Univ. of New York Press
$18.95
SUNY series in human communication processes

Morgan, K
Global healthcare grid; the transformation of medicine through communication
9051992998
I O S Press, Inc.
Studies in health technology & information

Street, R
Health promotion and interactive technology: theoretical applications and future directions
0805822054
Erlbaum

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published by the ES&H Special Interest Group of the Society for Technical Communication

ES&H news is published twice a year by the Environmental, Safety, and Health Communication Special Interest Group (ES&H SIG) of the Society for Technical Communication. The ES&H SIG assists members in the effective communication of the broad aspects of environmental quality, and safety and health aspects of occupational and outdoor environments. The ES&H SIG allows technical communicators to stay current on developments in this growing area of the profession. The Society for Technical Communication assumes no responsibility for the statements and opinions advanced by the contributors to the Society's publications. Editorial views do not necessarily represent the official position of STC. © 1997 by the Society of Technical Communication.

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Annual Conference 1999 -- Let's Be A Big Presence!

by Hillary Hart-- Editor

The ES&H SIG met on May 17 with the Science SIG at the STC International Conference in Anaheim CA. The two SIGs generated a number of great ideas for presentations to be proposed for the 1999 STC Conference in Cincinnati. We invite your participation!! Please look at this list of topics and then send an abstract to STC (see the Call for Papers in the June issue of Intercom) or e-mail me for more ideas or information. I'll be happy to help you put together an abstract for a paper, proposal or progression. The deadline for call for papers is August 1, 1998!

Let's wake up STC to the vital presence of science and environmental, health, and safety communicators!

Topics for 1999 STC Presentations

• What science communicators have to offer technical communicators (possible progression topic)
• What is a science communicator?
• Uses of voice: what is the effect of passive and active voice?
• Editing: who is the audience for scientific communication? Who is the scientific community? How do we broaden our audience?
• What is biotech?
• What is the difference between a researcher who writers and a science writer?
• What are the differences in science communication in business, government, the academic world, and journalism?
• How do you build credibility as a science writer if you're not a scientist? (a case study?)?
• When is a science degree necessary? (possible panel)
• The challenge of teaching a scientist to write
• Demystifying science, scientific snobbery (related to an article by Jerry Diamond in Discover magazine)
• Pure and applied knowledge, writing teams in science, writers and scientists working together
• Styles in science communication
• Document management, version control
• Editing online--version control (Linda Girardin)
• Regulatory writing, concerns under NAFTA (possible panel)
• Writing about science for politicians
• Risk management in science communication (Hillary Hart -- possible panel)
• Advocacy and persuasive writing in science
• Dumbing down science–what does it mean? What are the ethics? (Hillary Hart)
• Liability issues in science communication (think of BSE, hepatitis C)
• Translating science into English from other languages: cultural difference; discourse communities
• Bridging the gap between mindsets
• Grant writing
• Proposal writing for science and engineering
• Specific documents: EISs and Fact Sheets for government agencies
• Certification: further education (Robyn Remington)
• YOUR TOPIC HERE

Hillary Hart, editor

hart@mail.utexas.edu

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Experts Registry Entrants Sought

by: Fred Stoss

Sciences International, Inc. is a consulting firm dedicated to the environmental and health sciences. SII is developing a registry of experts, called the Sciences International Experts Registry (SIER).This registry is used to communicate to SII existing and potential private sector and government clients their ability to call upon the service of experts. The services provided by SIER are highly acclaimed by their clients, because of the high level of expertise in specific subject areas of SIER members.

This provides ES&H PIC members an excellent opportunity to have your or your organization's expertise inventoried for potential use by SII. If you are interested in becoming a member of their registry simply email your address to Carol Eisenmann at SII and she will send you more information about our company and the registry, as well as a listing agreement letter.

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Contributor vs. Author: A New Model for Academic Publication?

by Sherri Bowen
Associate Manager for Science Communication

Authorship issues have been the subject of much recent discussion among scientific and medical journal editors. Lately, I have attended two meetings that devoted considerable time to the subject: the 3rd International Congress on Biomedical Peer Review, September 1997, and the Council of Biology Editors Retreat on Authorship in Biomedical Publication, February 1998. Below I have summarized some of what I learned.

Publication is considered the "coin of the realm" in academia (i.e., it is the currency by which worth is measured). The coin has two sides: credit and responsibility/accountability. Prestige, historical legacy, promotion and tenure, grant acceptance/funding, etc., are the goods and services it can purchase. There has been a recent shift from one author to many, reflecting the trend toward more multidisciplinary collaborations ("big science"). The prevalence of multiple authors has complicated the authorship question in many ways, but perhaps most importantly, collaboration has diluted the accountability but not the credit.

The current definition of authorship as promoted by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors, also known as the "Vancouver Group" (See "Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals" JAMA 1997;277:927-34), reads as follows:

All persons designated as authors should qualify for authorship. Each author should have participated sufficiently in thc work to take public responsibility for the content. Authorship credit should be based only on substantial contributions to (1) conception and design or analysis and interpretation of data; and to (2) drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content: and on (3)final approval of the version to be published. Conditions l, 2 and 3 must ad be met. Participation solely in the acquisition of funding or the collection of data does not justify authorship. General supervision of the research group is not sufficient for authorship. Any part of an article critical to its main conclusions must be the responsibility of at least one author. Editors may ask authors to describe what each contributed; this information may be published. [italicized phrase is NEWsince 1997]

Several studies have shown that these or other standard authorship criteria are not well known, not well liked, and not widely used. Abuses in practice of the current definition include misassigned coauthorship (deserving authors not listed, undeserving listed), gift authorship (I'll put your name on my paper if you put mine on yours; the department chair's name ALWAYS goes on the papers–that's the way it's been done for years), and ghost authorship (freelance writers or research associates who do the writing but may not even be acknowledged, much less listed as an author). Accordingly, many attendees at these two recent biomedical publication meetings concur that the system is indeed "broken."

A new system of authorship, or contributorship (as it has been designated), has been proposed by a team of editors from the Journal of the American Medical Association (See Rennie D, et al. JAMA 1997;278: 579-85):

The idea that accountability can be divided and overlapping reflects the reality that the many-person, 1-product research article of today is an aggregation of the work of many people, each of whom takes full responsibility for certain parts of the project. But for the system to be able to identify accountability, there must 6e disclosure to the reader of every participant's contributions to the work and to the manuscript. It is equally necessary that the reader receive assurances as to the quality and integrity of the work as a whole. In the end, the only people who can accept accountability for the entire article are one or more of the coinvestigators.... We propose the substitution of the word and concept contributor for the word and concept author. Contribution is the activity of science that is most relevant to publication because its disclosure can identify who is accountable for what part of the research and allows the reader to assign credit fairly.... The critical feature of our model is the idea that contributors describe their actual research activities to the reader.

Under this system, those whose names would appear on the paper would describe their contribution. Several journals (including JAMA, The Lancet, British Medical Journal) are already using such a system. Some journals let authors write their own descriptions; others use "check box" type descriptions from which contributors can choose. How to describe contributions in the former instance is supposed to be decided among the contributors. A checkbox system could lead to misrepresentation, though, if contributors think they came close to a description but perhaps did not actually fit the spirit of it (and of course, this would also be a matter of interpretation).

Also, under the contributorship system, one or more of the contributors would function as "guarantors." The role of the guarantor would be to vouch for the integrity of the data, a role not necessarily required of all contributors. This concept replaces the current notion that "each author should have participated sufficiently in the work to take public responsibility for the content."

Still under discussion by those close to the topic are issues such as by-lines and order of contributors. In a contributorship system, should there still be a by-line? If so, whose names should appear there? Would indexing services (such as the National Library of Medicine) agree to print all contributors or would there be a limit to the number that could appear in a citation? Would there still be an importance (perceived or otherwise) to the order of contributors? Should they be ranked somehow?

There are, of course, advantages and disadvantages of this new system, which Rennie and colleagues address in their paper. According to them, the advantages are that the system is precise ("readers will feel able to allocate credit and responsibility accurately"), it is fair (contributors will be recognized appropriately), and it may discourage fraud (by "specifying responsibilities so that individuals are more effectively and publicly linked to those tasks for which they are accountable").

As discussed at the CBE retreat, perhaps the biggest disadvantage is that this system ultimately constitutes an extremely significant change in the research environment as a whole. For example, promotions and tenure could no longer be decided on a quota of papers for which the applicant must be first author (not that this is a palatable practice anyway, but it does exist). Published descriptions of what persons actually contribute to papers may make automatic gift authorship to laboratory directors or department heads laughable. Junior faculty, who have had to rise through the ranks with all the publication trials and tribulations, may not feel they should be the ones to embrace such a change, since they had to pay their dues the old-fashioned way.

We can anticipate much resistance to a contributorship system, or to any real change in the status quo.

At the end of the CBE retreat, we were not ready to issue a formal statement distilled from our discussions. We decided, instead, that we need to gather more research on authorship practices and on the possible impact a contributorship system will have. I am interested in hearing from STC members their thoughts on these issues, especially regarding the possible impact on ghost writers.

If you have questions or would like to discuss the new proposed system with me,
please call me at (512) 445-3461 or
e-mail me at sbowen@bga.com.

The author wishes to acknowledge Mary Royer, ELS for reviewing this article

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Our multi-cultural workplaces: The many tongues of safety

by Carla Salvador
Associate Manager for Safety Communication

We all know that providing safety training for our employees in English is not 100% effective. So how should we communicate with our workers who do not speak or read English comfortably?

The 1991 Census found that only two-thirds of Canadians aged 15 to 65 listed English as the language they speak at home (12 million of 18 million). Another 14 percent (2.5 million) spoke French, leaving about one-fifth (3.5 million) who spoke neither official language at home.

In the United States, the 1990 Census found that 86 percent of those aged 18 to 65 speak English at home (132 million of 154 million). Nearly eight percent in this age group speak Spanish (12 million), while more than two percent speak an Asian or Pacific Island language (3 million), and four percent use other languages at home (6 million). After English and Spanish, French, German, Italian, Chinese, Tagalog, Polish, Korean, Vietnamese and Portuguese are the languages most commonly spoken at home by American residents.

Of course, many adults who speak another language at home also communicate in English. However, we must be aware that perhaps 10 percent or even more of our fellow workers probably do not communicate comfortably in English.

How do we handle this? The July 21, 1997, issue of Safety and the Supervisor suggests an escalating set of techniques if you have workers who primarily communicate in another language:

• establish a buddy system for new employees--pair a non-English-speaking employee with a veteran who speaks the same language
  
  
• consider providing safety training seminars in another language given by an employee who speaks that language, if you have a number of employees who could benefit
  
  
• provide the safety training materials in the alternative language
  
  
• use universal training techniques in your training and post symbols in the workplace
  
  
• use skits or real-life examples in your training.

Many suggestions in the article are excellent. For example, I like the notion of sitting in and observing how training sessions are being received. However, I have mixed feelings about the suggestions for training workers who do not speak English.

• Pairing up a new employee with a "buddy" chosen solely on the basis of a common language is no more likely to be effective when the language is Italian or Tagalog than when it is English. Two issues that strike me as significant are cultural, political and social circumstances that may affect the relationship of these two individuals, and whether the "buddy" also speaks " safety."
  
  
• Providing training in the employees' preferred language certainly seems like a good idea. However, once again, I would like to make sure the instructor is as sophisticated in adult education and safety as the facilitators who train my English-speaking workers.
  
  
• Of course, I like the idea of providing the training materials in the appropriate language; in fact, I think it is essential to do this when as soon as we decide to provide training in other languages.
  
  
• The article suggests that "almost all important safety information can be reduced to symbols of some sort." Therefore, it recommends training the employees to recognize these symbols and then posting them to indicate the need for caution. I am not convinced that symbols can bear that much responsibility.
  
  
• Skits and real-life examples can be very meaningful, in any language or culture. But they must emphasize positive messages, focus on how problems can be avoided in the future and steer dear of "blaming and shaming" individuals or groups, however subtly or indirectly.

I could go on and on, but I'd rather hear from you. What is your experience with these issues? Please let me know your effective techniques for handling safety among workers from other cultures who speak other languages.

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