Scientific American In Blog Removal Controversy

Lasrick writes "Danielle N. Lee, Ph.D, the Urban Scientist blogger at Scientific American, has been mistreated twice: once by the blog editor at biology-online.org and now by SciAm itself. The blog editor asked Dr. Lee to contribute a blog post at Biology-Online, and when she declined (presumably for lack of monetary compensation), the blog editor asked her whether she was 'an urban scientist or an urban whore.' Then, SciAm deleted her blog post, in which she wrote about the incident."

Surprised? Not Entirely

[rueger]

It seems that the whole scientific publication industry is undergoing big changes, and as a result a lot of sloppy and/or dishonest behaviour is popping up.

As reported at The Guardian [theguardian.com]and elsewhere:

Hundreds of open access journals, including those published by industry giants Sage, Elsevier and Wolters Kluwer, have accepted a fake scientific paper in a sting operation that reveals the "contours of an emerging wild west in academic publishing". The hoax, which was set up by John Bohannon, a science journalist at Harvard University, saw various versions of a bogus scientific paper being submitted to 304 open access journals worldwide over a period of 10 months.

Re:New Season of Big Bang Theory

[ancientt]

I thought it was just me. I enjoyed a subscription for quite a while, and was content to ignore the political and social commentary for quite a while. Eventually, however, I found it just more effort to focus on the actual science than it was worth. With plenty of other sources to turn to for actual science, finally I just decided not to renew.

I miss the old days when I could hold the printed pages in my hand and learn something. I still get the data from other sources of course but it isn't quite the same. From time to time I have considered resubscribing in the hope of finding that missed feeling, but it sounds like I wouldn't be pleasantly surprised.

Re:New Season of Big Bang Theory

[icebike]

But there was no management involved. No one to complain to.
Am-Si had no way to police the issue. No control at all.

She got a nastygram from a website.
She had her own platform to pontificate on the matter.

Why take it to some third party site and cause an flame war to ensue there?
Its like taking your family squabbles into Starbucks or starting a shouting match in a Restaurant.
When they throw you out, how is any part of that THEIR fault?

Two stories?

[rabtech]

Why is SciAm claiming the post was off-topic (clearly a bullshit excuse given other bloggers posts) then claiming it was due to legal reasons?

Oh and blaming not telling the author on poor cell phone reception... Right. Someone can click the delete button but can't be bothered to send an email?

It's just lies and more lies, a non-apology, and bullshit. I don't buy it for a second.

My bet: someone at biology online emailed SciAm to complain and SciAm was more than happy to censor Dr Lee. Now that they've been caught, they are furiously trying to backpedal and pretend it's all just a big misunderstanding.

I'm canceling my subscription, I don't want any part of such a two-faced crappy organization.

Re:Not innocent-- but they did apologize

[Anonymous Coward]

Oops, the link for "as of October 4" should have been to the archive.org version: http://web.archive.org/web/20131004230702/http://www.scientificamerican.com/partners/ [archive.org]

The fact that they apparently deleted it from their partner list indicates that they do seem to have some sense of shame about the issue.