{ "version": "https://jsonfeed.org/version/1.1", "title": "chem-bla-ics", "description": "Chemblaics (pronounced chem-bla-ics) is the science that uses open science and computers to solve problems in chemistry, biochemistry and related fields.", "home_page_url": "https://chem-bla-ics.linkedchemistry.info/", "feed_url": "https://chem-bla-ics.linkedchemistry.info/2010/12/06/trust-has-no-place-in-science.json", "icon": "https://chem-bla-ics.linkedchemistry.info/assets/images/chem-bla-ics_logo.png", "language": "en", "authors": [ { "name": "Egon Willighagen", "url": "https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7542-0286", "_orcid": "0000-0001-7542-0286" } ], "items": [ { "id": "https://doi.org/10.59350/7rktt-6w969", "url": "https://chem-bla-ics.linkedchemistry.info/2010/12/06/trust-has-no-place-in-science.html", "title": "Trust has no place in science", "content_html": "

One discussion I had often had in the past year, is about trust in science.\nI, for one, believe (hahahaha; you see the irony? ;) that trust has nothing\nto do with science. Likewise, any scholar should be, IMHO, hes \nis suspicious when someone talks about trust. A scholarly scientist will never\ntrust any result: hes will accept it as true or false, but will take responsibility\nfor that decision; hes will not hide behind ‘but I trusted him’ or ‘but it was\npublished in Nature’.

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Antony asked\nlast week the community to answer a questionnaire, which turned out the be about\nour trust in online chemical database. He presented the results at the EBI.\nThis is the slide that summarizes the results from that questionnaire:

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We see that trust clearly has a very significant place in science. How disappointing.\nYou can spot me in these results easily: I am the one that consequently answered\n‘Never Trust’ for all databases. It’s not that I do not value those databases,\nbut there is no need for them to trust them. I verify. This is actually a point\nvisible in Tony’s presentation: we can compare databases.

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This is the point that I and others have been making for more than a decade\nnow: if we do things properly, we can do this verification. Anyone can. With\nOpen Data, Open Source, and Open Standards we can. I can only stress once more\nhow important this is. We trust people, we trust government, but repeatedly\nthis trust is taken advantage of. Without transparency, people can hide. By\nbeing able to hide, human loose there ability to decide what is right. With\ntransparency, we see things return to normal, as we saw this week with UK politicians.

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Further reading in my blog:

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Update: if you liked this post, you will also like blogs posts like this\none from Björn.

", "summary": "One discussion I had often had in the past year, is about trust in science. I, for one, believe (hahahaha; you see the irony? ;) that trust has nothing to do with science. Likewise, any scholar should be, IMHO, hes is suspicious when someone talks about trust. A scholarly scientist will never trust any result: hes will accept it as true or false, but will take responsibility for that decision; hes will not hide behind ‘but I trusted him’ or ‘but it was published in Nature’.", "image": "https://chem-bla-ics.linkedchemistry.info/assets/images/trust.png", "date_published": "2010-12-06T00:10:00+00:00", "date_modified": "2026-10-17T00:00:00+00:00", "tags": ["chemistry","science"], "authors": [ { "name": "Egon Willighagen", "url": "https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7542-0286" } ] } ] }