Column – Suzan Mazur
Now that Nature magazine — pants down — has admitted its theft and has partially and begrudgingly corrected the record regarding my first coverage of the Altenberg story, let’s put blame where blame is due. In a breach of public trust, the coordinator(s) of the Altenberg 16 meeting to remix evolutionary theory announced that the July conference would be “private” — despite tremendous public interest — and then invited one reporter to attend and file a story (it’s unclear if there was a confidentiality agreement). That somewhat timid and clearly anticlimactic article appeared in Nature magazine September 18, 2008, over six months after I broke the story “Altenberg! The Woodstock of Evolution?” carried by Scoop Media, March 4, 2008, followed by my ongoing coverage of the historic symposium. The September 18 issue of Nature not only lifts my theme but leads with it on the cover — “Evolutionary Theory: Echoes from ‘Woodstock’” — to sell its $10 magazine, failing to mention me orScoop Media anywhere in the four-page piece, saying instead:
“The meeting has received a fair amount of hype – in the blogosphere it was dubbed ‘The Woodstock of Evolution’.”
Nature also failed to say that I coined “the Altenberg 16” name, but used the term to identify the Altenberg 16 scientists in a group portrait, spelling out the figure 16 rather than giving credit for the coinage. Nature has yet to officially correct the record on this, although Nature’s managing editor assured me in a phone conversation that it would be done. Equally bizarre is that the Naturepiece came two months after AAAS Science magazine ran a two-page Altenberg article by Elizabeth Pennisi (not reported from Altenberg) which did credit me with naming the Altenberg 16, saying my March 4 story “reverberated throughout the evolutionary biology community”.
I first confronted predatory and “sloppy journalistic practices” (New York Times Magazine Editor Gerald Marzorati’s term for his paper’s tactics) likeNature’s four years ago when the NYT Magazine lifted my celebrated story “Bush Bounced From Carlyle Board”published in Progressive Review July 1, 2003. That story wound up without attribution as the centerpiece of Ron Suskind’s October 2004 election cover story for the Times Magazine ($3.50@ copy). Suskind and the Times were forced to apologize corrected the record and linked my story online to Suskind’s.
We’ve come to expect such “sloppiness” from the Times – pushing WMD stories, sitting on NSA stories, etc. whereas Nature magazine has been perceived as having a higher tone, as being a serious, exacting science magazine. But can scientists “throughout the evolutionary biology community” who read Nature still have confidence in it and the research it presents when its editors apparently don’t even read Science magazine, took six months to report the Altenberg story, stole a theme for the mag’s $10 cover and then ran a partial correction — postage-size — misspelling the offended party’s name?
...
Read more here/Leia mais aqui: Nature: Yes We Stole Yr Altenberg-Woodstock Theme By Suzan Mazur
