UP Researchers – How Can You Serve The People When You Are Digitally Naïve!?

Agriculture needs new or improved science, technologies and systems in order to increase food produced for the country and indirectly increase the benefits to farmers. Now, this science requires that first it be published as technical papers by researchers so that it can be popularized by extensionists to share with the farmers. Now, these technical papers cannot be found: UP researchers are hardly publishing! In the almost 10 months since the pandemic lockdown in March in these islands, what have researchers of the UP System done in the matter of publishing technical papers based on completed or promising ongoing research studies? None. Before the lockdown? Hardly. It’s the technology, desktop publishing, DTP – they don’t know.

How do I know? I have been in and out and around UP Los Baños since 1975 when I became the Editor In Chief of 3 regular publications of the Forest Research Institute, FORI, now ERDB, in the upper campus of UP Los Baños: the monthly newsletter Canopy, the quarterly technical journal Sylvatrop¸ and the quarterly color magazine Habitat. The years were 1975-1981. Non-digitalpublishing.

Digital. From 2001 to 2008, I was Editor In Chief of the Philippine Journal of Crop Science, PJCS, and I was the one who made the PJCS world-class or included in the international elite list popularly called ISI, now Web of Science. And you know what? The desktop publishing, DTP, work for all the issues of the PJCS was from beginning to end 100% digital – by yours truly.

UP researchers do not want to do that themselves. They simply rely on layout artists who work with Aldus PageMaker or InDesign. But those gentlemen can only do so much! And they don’t have the mentality of Science Serving Society.

UP researchers just have to master their software – publishing technical journals. I always demand the utmost from my software, so I taught myself to do it: editing, formatting text, creating columns, layouting sections and pages. To show you that I have mastered my software, I am now going to tell you that I use ONLY Word 2016 in working with photographs, pages, papers, books, blogs.

Even with so much time in their hands, why are the researchers in the entire UP System largely ignoring the wonders of digital publishing? UP researchers are not dumb – they are just naïve! Or worst: Uncaring.

Let us take up my alma mater UP Los Baños.

How can the results of research in agriculture reach the farmers eventually when the researchers do not begin the process of publishing them?!

First, the results of researches need to be published as technical papers. Second, the technical language need to be transformed into the popular tongue. Third, the new and improved science need to be extended to the people. To begin that process, the only intelligent way to deal with unpublished technical reports is to publish them!

That’s how important technical publishing of science in agriculture or any other field is. So, UP Los Baños itself should be strongly behind researchers needing to publish!@517

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