Saturday, October 12, 2013

Refusing to work for free = "whore"?!?

Apologies for posting two in a row, but this seems worthy of attention, and certainly qualifies as academic misery*: Dr. Danielle N. Lee, a biologist and blogger for Scientific American, was called a "whore" by an editorial functionary of some sort for  biology online, which has an advertising relationship with SA, when she politely turned down an offer to work for them for free.  As of this posting, Scientific American took down a blog post by Dr. Lee relating the incident (the post has since been reprinted by Dr. Isis, among others), but neither SA nor biology online have dissociated themselves from the editor's words, nor apologized to Dr. Lee, despite urgings from multiple directions to do so. 

*and besides, according to her twitter profile, Dr. Lee is an actual rodentologist; she studies African Giant Pouched Rats. Clearly her story belongs at CM. 

14 comments:

  1. Gah! When I was young whipper-snapper I was bemoaning getting jobs for being a girl. My mentor then told me to take every advantage I could. He told me I would be shocked at the number of male profs at did not think women belonged in the University!! That was 15 years ago...

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  2. I know my people on committees always look shocked when a female turns down the role of being a 'secretary' during a meeting. I've declined to take minutes several times... not so much because of my gender, but because I cannot pay attention enough to write things down.

    Attitudes like this show how people still believe professors have all the time in the world to do nothing.

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  3. Welcome to administration. Somebody at the top of SciAm is getting chewed out for bringing "Biology Online" on board. If DNLee was an employee of SciAm--and if SciAm knew this kind of shit was going on--then she might have a lawsuit. Hostile work environment. Fucking Nature Publishing Group is just a business like any other business.

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  4. Not an uncommon position when people are used to getting something for free: http://deadspin.com/if-arian-foster-is-a-prostitute-is-dick-vitale-a-pimp-1362197182

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  5. @Cassandra, apology for posting this not accepted. This ABSOLUTELY belongs here and members should be posting as they see fit.

    I don't know where to begin. Unprofessional doesn't begin to cover it. The Editor Who Would Be Pimp wasn't even using a full name in the email exchange, so he remains anonymous. And SciAm deleted Lee's blog entry about it? Gah. Hrng. Eeng. Agch?

    Kudos to DNLee for saying no and for taking this public. I love her attitude. The huge response on the Dr Isis blog is phenomenally affirming, not least because it includes many men, including Sean Carroll, who reposted DN Lee's SciAm blog entry.

    As for the issue of free or low-cost work, I was astounded a decade ago when a publisher offered me a pittance for serious work. I'd written with a list of errors in the online quizzes for a textbook and said that such shoddy attention to detail was making me rethink my use of the book. An editor responded with an offer for me to copy edit the quizzes and the other online resources for a one-time honorarium of $100. I knew the prevailing wages and how much time copy editing takes and declined less politely than Dr. Lee did. Haven't used anything from that publisher since.

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    1. Whenever I get offered something like this, I say, "Oh, my rate for consulting is $150/hour, and this will be more than an hour's work." The conversation quickly ends after that.

      Harlan Ellison has some choice words on why creative people must be paid, here:

      http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mj5IV23g-fE

      I know the feeling all too well.

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  6. I thought Whores got paid. That editor needs to work on his vocabulary! /snark

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    1. That editor needs to work on his logic, but more urgently his manners, professionalism, and basic human decency.

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  7. This is absolutely appalling. It's bad enough that the anonymous editor, known so far only as "Ofek," did this, but just as bad is how Scientific American so far has responded by trying to pretend that it didn't happen. The excuse that Scientific American is a forum for only science does not cut it, since workplace conditions for scientists is very much part of science. Also, didn't SciAm publish an article on Modern Slavery?

    I see, however, that www.sciam.com right now has this link:

    http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/doing-good-science/2013/10/12/standing-with-dnlee-and-discovering-science/

    It also has this:

    http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/rosetta-stones/2013/10/12/now-is-the-time-we-raise-our-voices/

    Here's what the editor of SciAm has posted on their web page:

    http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/at-scientific-american/2013/10/13/a-message-from-mariette-dichristina-editor-in-chief/

    Does this suffice, as an apology? I'm not sure that it does. A proper apology might be to make public the identity of this anonymous figure "Ofek," and to demand an apology from them, and quite possibly also to sever ties with Biology Online, if this is how they operate. My condolences to Dr. Lee, for having to put up with this garbage.

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    1. Thanks very much for finding the follow-up, Frod. DiChristina's post strikes me as a beginning, but I still think she should have communicated with DNLee before removing the post, and should have described the situation more clearly (rather than, as she argues, not at all): "post hidden for fact-checking to avoid legal liability" would have done it (I'm assuming -- hoping?-- that there's something in whatever contract SA has with its bloggers that deals with such situations. Publishing of private emails may raise some legal questions, but it's also true that nobody should write an email, especially a professional one, without at least allowing for the possibility that it could become public at some point. If you want to say something stupid, say it on the phone. Or, better yet, in person in the middle of a wide-open area after patting down your interlocutor. If it's not worth that hassle, or if the delay causes you to think twice, just don't say it.)

      The other problem, of course, is the untrue reason DiChristina gave for taking down the blog post: that it supposedly didn't have to do with "discovering science." She herself seems to recognize what you say above: that the conditions under which scientific work is done matter a great deal. The positive part of this whole mess is that that issue -- which DNLee raised herself, and others, following her lead, elaborated on -- has received a thorough and thoughtful airing.

      It also seems that DiChristina doesn't quite understand what's involved in being responsible for an online publication. While I'm the last one to argue that anybody should be available to their work 24/7, one has to have mechanisms in place to deal with this kind of thing, even over a holiday weekend (and the judgment to realize that sometimes you do have to work over a holiday weekend, because something big is threatening to blow up in a way that could seriously damage your reputation. The same issues arise, of course, in relation to online teaching.)

      SA doesn't seem to be in a position to out/otherwise deal with Ofek; that is presumably biology online's job. And apparently they have fired him (and apologized to Dr. Lee fairly promptly in an email, which they have now released): http://www.biology-online.org/biology-forum/about34647.html . (The email is, as others have pointed out, rather informal in tone for the situation, but at least everybody seems to be equally first-named).

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    2. Well OK, but this connects with another issue we grouse about often in CM: e-mail from students. Whenever a student sends e-mail that is illiterate, or does not identify the sender by name clearly, I return it. So, all faculty need to remind students that any e-mail to professor should be written like a business letter, and to give them an example of one. (Whenever I give my students an example of anything, in no time they're plagiarizing it. One could only hope so, in this case.)

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    3. A "recent" hire, apparently (no word on whether "hire" is to be taken literally enough to assume the relationship involved the exchange of money). But his erstwhile boss is apparently also unaware that, when apologizing for an exchange that has shocked people on multiple continents (bio-online is apparently based in Australia) and threatened the reputation of one's company, it's time to trot out the full, formal names and titles of all involved, the recipient of the apology most of all. (I'd also argue that, when choosing whether to first-name someone without prior permission -- not a good practice in any case -- it's an especially bad idea to do so to someone whose grandparents may well have been denied the dignity of full name plus title address).

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  8. I very firmly believe in getting paid after getting fucked.

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