For shame: Trolls defeat Scientific American, Popular Science

flickr user: Isaac Mao

Every publication makes mistakes. Great publications learn from those mistakes, and the best publications also learn from the mistakes of others. So imagine my surprise at seeing two legendary publications make compounding mistakes by taking serious missteps with their communities. I'm talking about Popular Science and Scientific American, two of the oldest and most revered publications for the popularization and support of the scientific enterprise. Both publications will easily survive these missteps, but they are leaders in the field, and those who follow their recent moves will be led astray.

SciAm nukes its own righteous blogger

Scientific American (SciAm) Online features, among other things, a science blog network. The network's bloggers are paid to write for SciAm, and until this weekend, most of them thought they understood the rules of the quasi-independent relationship they had with the publisher: share their love of science, make a little money, and be part of a real community. But this past weekend, SciAm pulled a post made by one of the network’s writers, Dr. Danielle Lee, and so far the publication has failed to explain its actions in any believable way.

For those of you not familiar with the blog network, it features routine science content as well as posts about being a scientist generally (including a celebration of things that scientists geek out over, etc.). Dr. Lee’s post was prompted by a rather reprehensible event that occurred when her work at SciAm attracted the attention of another publication. An editor from Biology-Online liked Dr. Lee's work so much that he asked if she would contribute to BO as well. After learning that BO was not paying, Dr. Lee politely declined. But the response from the editor was incredible: he asked Dr. Lee if she is a real scientist or a whore. (Yes, you read that right.) By not agreeing to work for free, this professional scientist was apparently a whore in this editor’s view. The editor, an individual named Ofek, has since been fired.