I’d really love to know more of the context of this complaint to Nature — what the paper was, what he was complaining about, what happened in the followup.
Not because it would excuse it, but because it would give me more reasons to point and laugh.
I guess the idea was, and I’m speculating a bit, that he’d get a more favorable review from a guy, because he’s a guy, and all guys stick up for each other against the bitchez.
He’s in for a shock, I think. I hope.
He can do the laundry too while he’s at it.
“male editor”
Like making a characater in Skyrim? I always make the eyebrows too weird.
Yahweh was the first male editor when he used the rib.
Gotta love “We do not accept your decision”. I’m not sure they understand how submissions work.
Is this the meme that scientific journal editors are mostly women looking for a science job with easy hours?
Interesting strategy. I wonder if it’ll work.
We or I?
Well, maybe…. But I think at a much more fundamental level it’s about males, whereas a rejection from a male might be legitimate, assume a rejection by a woman is because the woman is obviously too stupid to recognize the his brilliance.
Oh…. I took it for granted that this meme was a “good” one mocking the arrogance of sexist male submitters (like that post PZ did a few weeks back about the guy who did an article about a painter of dinosaurs who argue with the editors and called them pouty little girls for rejecting his application).
I guess this could just as easily be a “bad” meme representing a revenge fantasy against the perceived influx of assumed incompetent icky women editors.
I prefer to see it my way but I don’t know the origin of this particular meme. It’s funny my way. The other way it’s… ick.
Ask and ye shall receive!
I wish they would do what you do, PZ, and publish who sent the letter so we can express our dissatisfaction with their sexism.
@9
Oh… it was an actual letter.
That didn’t occur to me at all. I’m batting 000 this morning.
So, apparently the paper was about prostate cancer and the author assumed a woman editor would not appreciate the seriousness of prostate cancer as well as a man would….
*sheesh*
Right, because females can’t understand statistics. That must by why my job is focused around them.
Not to spoil the fun, but I have to ask what is the provenance of that? It was posted by a grad student. Where would she have gotten it from? She doesn’t say.
cervantes,
See the link docfreeride provided @9.
So, using the author’s logic, a short list of topics men can never research or review:
Breast cancer
Ovarian cancer
Menstruation
Menopause
Childbirth
Laundry
#15
Don’t forget, “Making me a damn sandwich!”
Also by that logic, men can’t be capable of having a say in abortion, can they?
Excellent catch, Saad.
I think I would have replied.
Dear sir,
You do not accept my decision. I do not accept your manuscript. Look we have so much in common.
Sincerely go fuck yourself.
Good point, Saad.
Also, most forms of birth control.
Oh, okay, but this happened in 2005. Ten years ago. Not clear it would be as likely to happen today.
I would have replied,
Dear Sir,
Per your request, I have sent your manuscript to a male for review. Alas, Max the schnauzer agrees with my assessment. I would return the manuscript with his comments, but the postal service will not delver urine-soaked mail.
Sincerely…
The “…” after “we do not accept your decision” implies more, perhaps lengthy, exposition that was cut out.
It would be fascinating to see what that was, and how the rhetorical “logic” streamed into “transfer to a male editor”…
cervantes:
2005 was such a different time! We are a whole new country now, basically.
Yep. Everything is fixed now. Sexism, racism, homophobia…all gone. That was the past. This is now. The better now. The perfect future.
Wait, you mean to say sexism HASN’T been fixed since 2005? THANKS, OBAMA
I am just praying that cervantes was using dry wit. In my experience, it would be in keeping with cervantes to agree that sexism is still a problem.
Also, it would just make me too fucking sad to interpret it as anything other than dry wit and it makes me too fucking amused to experience it as dry wit for me to even consider another interpretation.
Yay! that must mean my flying car has arrived, right?
And my wheelless hover-chair that enables to to go on actual nature hikes again?
Wait, where is that blasted lightsaber? i know it must be around here somewhere…
The obvious response would be: “We refer you to the response given in Arkell v Pressdram.”
Appears as if it was sent to Dr. Barbara Marte
… and according to that presentation “this appeal wasn’t successful either”. Just in case anyone was wondering.
“We do not accept your decision”
To quote Adam Savage, “I reject your reality and substitute my own!”
anat @5
Is this the meme that scientific journal editors are mostly women looking for a science job with easy hours?
…Doesn’t EVERYONE want a science job with easy hours? Who the hell says “I want my work day to start at 4 AM and finish with labs at 10, finish with students at 6, followed by essentially mandatory socializing at a bar with coworkers until midnight?”
Show me this person, and I will kidnap them in the interest of harvesting their energy to power my machines.
Oh, it’s the ‘women don’t care about my research’. Interestingly, I know a (het) married couple of researchers, she works on prostate cancer, he works on breast cancer. It does happen.
Although it is possible, and has happened, that research in “women’s” diseases might be underestimated and ignored by male (and female) editors due to prevalent sexism and it might be that a woman (or feminist male) editor might be more interested to buck and rectify the sexist trend, I really doubt that there has ever been a case of a female or male editor underestimating a culturally respected (“man’s disease” or otherwise) research topic solely because the individual editor isn’t affected (individually or via gender) by the research in question.
Anyway, a quick google search on Dr. Barbara Marte and prostate cancer shows that she has indeed accepted many articles on the subject.
OK, PZ, everything is fixed now, no racism, sexism, bigotry, but I still don’t have my flying car that folds up into a briefcase. Seriously, this is maximum facepalm material of supernova magnitude. What a jackass.
Maybe the paper was written in penis code?
lolwut
Yeah, it’s called “submission” for a reason… comment 19 is exactly what would happen if the editor deigned to respond at all.
In fact, this part (not the sexism straight from the 18th century) is why I doubted whether this was real all the way to comment 9.
…No, why? Not only have I never heard of such a meme, and men seem to be massively overrepresented among journal editors, but journal editors are not paid*; it’s not a job you look for, it’s a service to the community you grudgingly accept once you’re just famous enough – in return for improvement of your CV.
* With a few exceptions who get symbolic awards like 250 $ per year.
I wonder. I guess maybe the corresponding author pretends to speak for his coauthors, but hasn’t actually talked to them, so he slipped…
Seriously? I know reviewers aren’t paid, but they don’t even pay the editors? What on earth is wrong with academic journals? o.O
jste wrote:
Paying people gets in the way of making even more profit. Do you want the companies to be grotesquely profitable, or do you hate freedom and America?
Nature would pay at least some editors, just as they pay reporters who produce articles for the “front of the book.”
Crip Dyke #27:
Nope, that’s a long long time ago, not the future. Even longer back than 2005 when men would actually question the capability of women compared to men. A problem never seen today.
That’s gotta be snark…It’s just TOO pat…
The short list? They’re created using mostly unpaid labor that academics do, often on top of their teaching and service requirements, in a desperate rat race to get additional lines on a cv in order to procure tenure, while the companies that publish them charge obscene amounts of money to universities for bundled subscriptions to their journals and rake in money. (Bonus if the journal has gone electronic so the costs of printing and layout have been drastically reduced but the prices have not gone down at all.)
In other words, a university professor does a shit ton of labor to produce research using university facilities and while serving the university, writes up the research, does not get paid by the journal for the research, then the company that owns the journal sells the research back to the university while expending as little money as possible on acquiring and presenting said research, using the unpaid gatekeepers of editors and peer reviewers to create a false aura of value.
If that sounds more than a little bizarre and ridiculous, that’s because it is.
(Disclaimer: one of the many reasons I left academia was that I was sick of the charade involved in this process. I still remember trying to explain presenting at conferences, which works in a similar way, to my family, who couldn’t understand how I had to pay to do all the work and then present the work to others.)
“B-B-But I strenuously don’t accept your decision!”
“Oh, okay. We’ll accept your paper.” — said no editor, ever.
David Marjanović @39
Some journals have editors who work on a volunteer basis, but Nature has a staff of full-time editors.
@16: Men can get breast cancer.
This isn’t a “what about the menz” complaint-for-the-sake-of-complaining. The effects of breast cancer in men are exacerbated by the possibility being overlooked, more than is justified by the relative rarity of breast cancer in men. Almost all breast cancer diagnoses in men are stage IV.
I’ll revise “all” to “almost all”, then. “Some” is grossly misleading.
The big 4 publishers – Elsevier, Springer, Wiley, Informa – make mind-blowing profits.