Chapter 07: Reports, Changes to the Field of Scientific Publications, and the Challenges of In-House Publications
Files
Description
In this Chapter Mr. Pagel first talks about how MD Anderson was selected by the Texas Department of Health to prepare reports on “The Impact of Cancer on Texas.” This came about through the efforts of Dr. Joseph Painter and the Texas Commissioner of Health. The Department of Scientific Publications prepared three editions of this report between 1977 and the mid-eighties, compiling information on the impact of cancer by disease site. The statistics, he explains, came from ordinary databases. When data management changed (becoming primarily electronic) the publication was stopped.
Next, Mr. Pagel describes how publishing in the sciences has been radically altered in the electronic age, when information is so accessible and the pace of research is so brisk. Books are becoming much less prominent in the biomedical field, he explains, as there is no point in compiling information in a book when the contents will be quickly outdated. This accessibility offers mixed benefits, however, as Mr. Pagel notes. Fewer and fewer individuals browse for information, and he sees this as an indication that researchers tend not to look beyond the limits of information they know they need, a habit that may ultimately narrow their perspective. He gives examples of researchers who take a different perspective and always think about what is going on outside their own field of research: Molecular biologist Arnold J. Levine, who discovered p53, the tumor suppressor gene, and Gigi (Guillermina) Lozano, Ph.D., Professor and Chair of the Department of Cancer Genetics at MD Anderson, who also studies the gene. Dr. Lozano has established herself with great publication and the reach of her grants, he explains, and she has served on panel discussions organized by Scientific Publications. The advice she gave at one session: Don’t expect your funding to be renewed if your work has not evolved by year five.
Mr. Pagel next goes into detail about the Department’s (ultimately unsuccessful) experience with a journal publishing initiative. Molecular Carcinogenesis was first published in 1988, and Mr. Pagel notes the individuals involved in starting up the journal, with the rationale that creating such a publication would facilitate connections with faculty. However, this publication would have to support itself financially, and the Department of Scientific Publications realized that it could not manage a successful journal under those conditions. After publishing one issue, the journal was turned over to Wiley-Liss publishers. Mr. Pagel then talks about Cancer Bulletin, the journal once most closely associated with MD Anderson, broadening his focus to comment on the politics of publication and the questionable value of institutional journals, given the current availability of information. He then talks about the challenges of working on MD Anderson’s “General Report” (which served as a kind of annual report until about 1990.) From an editorial perspective, it was a challenging publication because there were no guidelines for contributors to follow. From another perspective, it was a challenge because no one had defined a clear purpose or audience for the Report. Mr. Pagel notes that it was important to MD Anderson in earlier years to document the caliber of the institution. After 1990, the Department of Public Affairs took over publication of an “Annual Report,” with the function of reporting taxpayer money is spent.
Identifier
PagelW_02_20120810_C07
Publication Date
8-10-2012
Publisher
The Making Cancer History® Voices Oral History Collection, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center
City
Houston, Texas
Interview Session
Walter Pagel, ELS (D), Oral History Interview, August 10, 2012
Topics Covered
The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center - An Institutional UnitInstitutional Processes Definitions, Explanations, Translations Building/Transforming the Institution Professional Practice The Professional at Work Discovery and Success
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Disciplines
History of Science, Technology, and Medicine | Oncology | Oral History
Transcript
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Okay. I’m Tacey Ann Rosolowski and today is August 10th, and I am in the office of Walter Pagel in Scientific Publications, and we are having our second interview session today. The time is ten minutes after two o’clock. Thank you very much for giving me this time again.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
We just came from the hall where there is a timeline set up of Mr. Pagel’s work with Scientific Publications since he was hired here in 1974 if I’m remembering—
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
Seventy-one.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Seventy-one. And we did that to prompt our respective memories and ideas about what to talk about in this second session, and one of the first things that I noted was work—beginning the work in 1971 on a study called “The Impact of Cancer on Texas” or excuse me, that—
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
That was it.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Yes, it was “Impact of Cancer on Texas” but I was making the connection that it was very close to the institution of the National Cancer Act which was in 1971, and I think this study came out in ’76, ’77?
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
Right.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Okay. I wonder if you could talk to me a little bit about that report and its significance and whether it continued after that.
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
It was a joint project—MD Anderson and the Texas Department of Health. The notion was to show what the impact of cancer was on Texans by disease site. It was actually a series of graphs—mortality and survival and incidence of the various cancers. They were—actually I shouldn’t—I have a book in here. I don’t think I do. But there were line graphs and bar graphs of the statistics, and the notion was that’s how you showed what the impact was in a very objective fashion. There was a little bit of text but not much. There were three editions of it, the first one in ’77, and then probably the last one in the mid ‘80s, and the statistics I think came from fairly easily gotten databases through the period—statewide databases. T.A.Rosolowski I was interested in the way you worded that—that you were—it was assumed that the bar graphs were the way that you represented that. Was there sort of an idea that you were trying to figure out how to represent this kind of information for a general audience at the time? That and I was just curious about the word choice you used there.
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
I don’t know if my word choice meant anything. I think it was really determined by others how that would be represented. It was a pretty standard way to show those things.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
What were the findings and what was the impact of the publication of this report?
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
Such hard questions. I actually don’t remember. It was too long ago for me. I know that the Commissioner of Health for the state of Texas and Joseph Painter, who was an important Vice President when he was here—Vice President for Extramural Affairs—were proud of it and pleased to be able to assemble a report like this. The people in epidemiology/patient studies at the time did most of the data management and statistical work, and our job was simply to oversee production of the volume.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Why was MD Anderson chosen to spearhead that particular study?
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
Well, I don’t think there was any other place that called itself a cancer hospital at the time. There are a few around now. We were—though I consider us still the experts. At the time there was no competition whatsoever. We were experts by default. There was nobody else to do it really except the department—Texas Department of Health. They needed people who knew cancer to be part of it. I’m not sure where the impetus for it came from—whether it came from Dr. Painter’s office or the Texas Department of Health.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
You said the last one was in the mid ‘80s, but has there been some other publication started that’s taken over the role of gathering that information about cancer in Texas?
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
I don’t think so. Data management probably has changed in tremendous ways, ways that I’m not so capable of discussing. But in the ‘70s and ‘80s, not anybody could get access to the data. It was just sitting in repositories here and there that weren’t so freely accessible, whereas now you can turn it up—the data up somewhere. There are people doing research on the impact of various cancers on—or maybe it’s the opposite. The impact of various factors on cancer survival or cancer incidence or whatever—based on data that they can access from their offices that’s in repositories all over the world. It’s just so, so different. You don’t have to publish stuff in order to make it accessible to people anymore. I’m thinking that’s why it probably just died. It’s not needed anymore.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
I was going to ask you how you felt scientific publishing had changed over the course of your time here at MD Anderson, and so now seems like kind of a natural time to slip that question in. Part of the databases—what are other kinds of factors that have influenced the changes? And what changes have you seen?
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
There are a lot of changes. The main change truthfully is the accessibility of information these days. You don’t have to have a printed copy in order to get the information you need. That you can do very focused searches of the data to get just the information you want and not have to bother with information that isn’t relevant to the exact thing you’re doing at the time. Books have become—for various reasons books have become much less prominent in the biomedical field. That’s not true of other academic fields, but in the biomedical field they’re viewed as just practically un-useful unless they’re in—if they’re intended for academic audiences because they have access to the latest journal publications just like that. They don’t have to subscribe to every journal that they want information from or go to the library and pull a journal off the shelf and look at it. They can do it all from their offices. It’s just too easy now. There’s not much point in collecting intellectual ideas in a book that are outdated within a year anyway. That’s one of the ways. I see the accessibility of data as a mixed benefit. I think I have hinted at that to you earlier. I don’t know if the recording was on then but the day of the browser—the person who looks beyond what they know they need—is exceptional these days. Those people actually turn out to be the most successful people because they can bring new directions to their research, but the habit is to have in place search queries that return you only the information you’re looking for, and those things can be in place so that the information comes to you as soon as it’s published. So I’m presuming this because I’m not a scientist myself, but I presume that one’s vision gets very narrowed after a while. I know of a few faculty that are—I mean there are lots of successful faculty, but I know well a few faculty who are successful because they are looking everywhere. They’re not just looking at their little slice of the pie. They’re looking to see if there’s something going on somewhere else that could be—is or could be related to what they are doing.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Do you feel comfortable giving me an example of someone?
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
I do. Gigi Lozano has worked in the area of p53 since her post-doctoral fellowship with Arnold Levine—I think at Princeton—and thinks always about what else is going on that could affect understanding of how p53 controls or is involved with what they call the master switch in the cell cycle.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
The tumor-suppressor gene.
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
Yes that. But the way it does it is through the control of the cell cycle, so there are many other factors that affect it. There are many other diseases that it might be involved in. She’s always paying attention. She’s always deliberately paying attention to who’s doing what somewhere else, and she’s in their laps as soon as she hears something that she thinks possibly could be related to what she’s doing, and they’re in her lap because they know that she’s interested.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
And how have you seen that awareness yield a result in her productivity, her career, her writing?
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
She has been published in Science and Cell and Proceedings of the National Academy and so on. Those are one measure. Her grant proposals get very high ranks. I think it’s—to be honest I think it’s because people know that she’s paying attention everywhere. She’s not just taking a little slice out of the pie. No matter what she reports they know that—she says she’s going to do they know that she’s going to be paying so much attention to everything else that if something more valuable to the granting agency comes up she’s going to pursue that, and they’re going to trust her judgment in pursuit of it.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Wow.
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
It’s very interesting to me actually. There are lots of—no. I’m going too far here. But anyway, there’s lots of advice about how to write a grant proposal, and we know it and we use it. The people who don’t have her kind of reputation really need that kind of approach to grant writing, but because the scope of her thinking about her field is so broad and yet can switch so quickly, I don’t think people hold her to that same standard. They hold her to a different standard that is really more productive, frankly. In fact, she’s been a member of many of the panel discussions I’ve organized over the years, and the most recent one she gave was on grant writing—the strategies for grant writing that went beyond just choosing—went beyond—I don’t even remember what it went beyond. But anyway, her single, most important piece of advice was that if you are still working on the last aim—if you haven’t changed the last aim in your grant by year five, you are not going to be re-funded. Meaning if your work has not evolved beyond what you said it was going to be in your original grant proposal, then you’re doomed when you submit a competitive renewal.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Is that a surprise to audiences? To researchers?
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
I don’t know.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
I just could imagine that that would be kind of scary. It really makes people feel—it puts the pressure on.
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
Well, I’ll bet you she wouldn’t say that. I’ll bet she would say, “This keeps me interested in what I’m doing.” And surely somebody who sets out a five-year plan—which is what you’re doing in a grant proposal—if they are still working on exactly what they said they were going to be working on by year five has gotten bored with it in a way.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
I read someplace that creative temperaments reorganize themselves every seven years and it’s kind of sounding like that. With innovative thinking—that’s what feeds an innovative thinker is moving beyond, moving beyond. People can get in—people who don’t live in that place can hang on to habit, and that’s security for them. But it sounds like at least for the granting agencies they really are responding to someone who is on the cutting edge and lives in that innovative place.
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
Innovation is the number one—there are five criteria by which they evaluate grants and best as I can tell innovation is number one—realistic innovation not wild thinking but realistic innovation.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
What are some other ways that the arena of publishing has changed over the course of your career?
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
No more hot type.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
I don’t even know what that word—I don’t even know what that word means.
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
It was a lead—pieces of lead with letters on the end of it. It was inked and pressed into another piece of paper so computerized typesetting and page layout and negative creation and printing—
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
What’s negative creation?
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
I don’t know. I’ve gone beyond what I really know about production other than to tell you that a—some sort of image of the page is created that can be used in printing machines. I don’t know that you would call them presses.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
The actual creation of the final product—
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
It’s all on the computer now.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
It’s all on the computer now. Yeah. Yep.
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
It’s no surprise today, but twenty years ago it would have been just an unbelievable innovation.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
What about the economics of publishing in-house? We spoke briefly when we were looking at the timeline about molecular carcinogenesis, which was an initiative that you encouraged a colleague to take up I believe in 1988, and that was an in-house publication, and I’m talking about the financial viability of that for a department such as this. Has that been a—maybe you could talk about that publication, and then we could talk about the economics of it.
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
First of all, I’m not—I’m a publisher in a sense, but I’m not a publisher in the sense that I understand the full dimensions of finance that go into this—the revenue-generated revenue stream, how your expenses have to be related to what you can expect the revenue stream—I don’t know any of that stuff. The notion that you would take on a publishing project that hadn’t earned its keep and more for us was pretty big, and the more we worked on doing it ourselves the more we realized we didn’t know. The biggest problem there is that you’re taking the risk when you self-publish; whereas if a publisher takes it on, they’re taking the risk and you’re not, so you set up a contract in a way that gives you certain amounts of money for doing the work. You’re not going to make the big profit either, but an institution like this is—at least in those days was not out to make big profits on projects like this.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Tell me about Molecular Carcinogenesis though. How did it get started as being part of this department?
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
A woman in my department decided that the way we could have the best connections with faculty was to work on very important projects for them, and those would be journals. If we had the editor-in-chief of a journal on staff here and we worked closely with them, we will become known for this kind of work and that would be important, she thought. And she had a friend who worked in the area of carcinogenesis—that is investigations of how normal cells become eventually cancerous cells and what the factors that change those are. What are the external factors? What are the internal and molecular factors? The director of Science Park at the time named Tom Slaga was interested in being—in assuming the editor-in-chief role. He had a reputation in the country so that was a good thing—that a journal could have a great—a well-known scientist at its helm and the other person was Stuart Yuspa at the National Cancer Institute. Y-U-S-P-A, and between the two of them and Carol Cohn—who was the woman who had the idea—they came up with a list of potential board members, which you have to have for a journal, and went about the process of inviting them and telling them—working out what the journal would look like and what its goals were and what its scope was, and so on, and so forth.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
How many issues went to press?
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
Eventually or when?
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Before—well, because you were telling me that it got turned over to another publisher, and I’m wondering how many were published in-house before that happened.
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
I’m thinking just two or three.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Oh, really? Really? What handwriting was on the wall about that?
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
Money.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Money. Okay.
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
It was all about money and how we didn’t know how to make it be sure that it made money. We were—we got a grant from the institution of $125,000, but that wasn’t going to carry us very long we realized fairly quickly, and the institution does not expect to give you another $125,000 and another $125,000 until you finally learn what you’re doing and make money.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
What institution did it get turned over to?
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
It got turned over to a company called Wiley-Liss. W-I-L-E-Y-hyphen-L-I-S-S.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Oh, okay. Do you feel that it’s a handicap or do you think that an institution like MD Anderson should have a journal that it—or a journal series that it’s publishing for the sake of its reputation?
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
I certainly once would have thought that, and there once was one called The Cancer Bulletin. But again, the same revolution—the revolution that gives us all kinds of information available to anybody at anytime from anywhere practically and makes it easily accessible and easily sortable—makes the institutional journals less and less valuable. They essentially re-digest what is known into new pieces through the perspective of their experts, but what’s available to the professional audience that wants that kind of information are the articles written by the people who made the discoveries. Unless you’re a generalist—which there are fewer and fewer of—you don’t need that kind of magazine anymore. I’m not sure I answered your question.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
I think you did. I think you did.
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
Even Molecular Carcinogenesis was not an institutional publication. It never would have succeeded had it been one. It had to be a publication with an international editorial board. It had to have submissions from scientists all over the world. It had to have people from all over the world making judgments about what kind of articles got published. If they were all MD Anderson people, people would not—people at Memorial Sloan-Kettering would have gotten no credit for submitting to an MD Anderson journal. That would have been meaningless to them—to their promotion-tenure committees. Even the people at MD Anderson who got their stuff published in an MD Anderson journal—they would have gotten nothing as far as their CV goes. It just is meaningless when it’s your own thing. Am I talking too loud?
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
No.
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
My wife says I’ve been talking too loud lately.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
My machine says no.
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
Okay.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
And we know, you know, the machine—
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
The machine never lies. Right.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
The machine never lies. That’s right. I wanted to ask you—we talked briefly about the fact that the office of science—or the Department of Scientific Publications used to produce the general report, which is now the annual report, but it’s worked on by another part of the institution. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that responsibility that the department had and why it got turned over and what the challenges were in it.
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
The challenges were to get people from all over the institution to produce material that you could use, to write chapters that you could alter enough to make them useful. People over time have gotten less and less willing to write reports to your standards for your publication, for institutional publications. It’s harder and harder to get people to do things on time. It leads you to examine more and more carefully why you’re doing this, making you wonder why you’re essentially hounding all these people to do something to put in a book that you’re—you begin to wonder if it actually has the use, a use, a good use, a use that’s equivalent to the effort you’re making the institution go through and the cost of producing the publication. So these kinds of publications just get sent everywhere, but you have your doubts. I mean, who the heck wants—I don’t know if this is good for a recording—but who the heck wants to open the general report of MD Anderson Cancer Center?
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
I was going to ask you what was the purpose—what was the intended purpose of the report, and who was the audience for it?
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
The audience probably was people who wanted to read the general report.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
And what was in the general report?
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
Stuff. Stories about departments and what they—what their missions were and possibly a little bit about what they accomplished and a few photographs and a bit of statistics. And it just didn’t fit the world today. It was important back in the days when MD Anderson was a young institution and needed to show that it was of the same caliber as other great institutions or eventually better we hope, we think. But once people were no longer wondering whether MD Anderson was of good caliber probably, the thing probably should have stopped. So now public affairs does an annual report, and you must—if you’re a state-run institution you need to report to the citizens of Texas what you’ve done with their money and to your donors what you’ve done with their money, but that’s not what the general report tried to do. I’m sure it had that secondary purpose, but it’s too big, it’s too dense—or it was too big and it was too dense for those purposes really, so the one public affairs produces is much shorter, is written by them, by journalists who know how to capture people’s interests and know when to stop talking.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Yeah, I’ve had a look at it actually. It’s pretty good reading. Yep. What—did you learn any new lessons as an editor from working on the general report during those years?
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
No. How hard it was to get people to do things they didn’t want to do. I imagine I learned to think more carefully about audience, and I imagine that I didn’t—I don’t remember anymore, but I imagine I did not undertake some projects I realized had an indefinite or undescribed or vague audience that I could tell this publication wasn’t going to meet their needs.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
And probably an outdated purpose, too.
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
Yeah.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Yeah. When was the last—do you remember about the time when you stopped working on the General Report?
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
I don’t but I’m guessing 1990.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Okay.
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
It might have been earlier.
Recommended Citation
Pagel, Walter ELS and Rosolowski, Tacey A. PhD, "Chapter 07: Reports, Changes to the Field of Scientific Publications, and the Challenges of In-House Publications" (2012). Interview Chapters. 1276.
https://openworks.mdanderson.org/mchv_interviewchapters/1276
Conditions Governing Access
Open
