The creation of The Orbit blog network got mentioned on Religion News today. They got quotes from me and Ed, too.

Many Orbit bloggers migrated from other atheist platforms, including Skepchick and Patheos, but the bulk came from Freethought Blogs. Rumors of discord at these platforms spread throughout 2015, but writers say they are focused on the future.

“This group decided it wanted to go off and do its own thing and more power to them,” said P.Z. Myers, whose Pharyngula blog is among the most popular at Freethought Blogs, which he now manages. He has already replaced The Orbit’s bloggers with new ones.

Ed Brayton, founder of Freethought Blogs who now writes at Patheos, said, “The Orbit is being launched by people I think very highly of and consider friends . . . I see no point in building up some sort of rivalry between blog networks. There’s room for everyone.”

I have to make some additions and corrections. Note that link about “rumors of discord” up there? That was from me. The “discord” came not so much from internal problems, but as I say there, from trolling assholes who harass just about everyone here. So if you’re looking for confirmation of Hemant Mehta’s bloviating, it ain’t there.

The other thing is that our new bloggers are not “replacements”. I’ve been nagging everyone in the back channel for years that we have to bring in fresh blood regularly^*, and that our old method of delegating recruitment to a committee — when people are here to write, not serve on committees — was not working. We’ve got this nice flush of new voices here because we’d put together an alternative mechanism that is actually working.

^*My secret is out, that I’ve been straining to draw in new people simply to sate my vampiric hunger.

Academics have this scheme to rank different universities — many of them revolve around publication metrics, which is one entirely reasonable way to assess one part of the research enterprise. Unfortunately, if a university is ranked by how many publications are produced by affiliated faculty, one way to jack up the numbers is to buy nominal affiliations — pay researchers with successful publishing careers to put their university’s name on their CVs. All it takes is lots and lots of money.

King Abdulaziz University (KAU) in Saudi Arabia is playing that game. They are contacting highly ranked researchers, offering them a pile of cash, and asking them to list KAU as one of their academic affiliations.

UC Davis professor Jonathan Eisen also contacted Pachter. Almost a year ago, Eisen had been solicited by KAU but ultimately declined the offer.

Most researchers, such as Eisen, were initially contacted by KAU via email and asked if they would like to join the university’s faculty as a “distinguished adjunct professor.” Eisen traded emails with several people at KAU, trying to figure out what the catch was.

“I tried to get them to explain what they were trying to do,” Eisen said. “It smelled really off.”

KAU offered him $72,000 per year and free business-class airfare and five-star hotel stays for him to visit KAU in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, according to an email sent to Eisen by KAU. In exchange, Eisen was told he would be expected to work on collaborations with KAU local researchers and also update his Thomson Reuters’ highly cited researcher listing to include a KAU affiliation. He would also be expected to occasionally publish some scientific journal articles with the Saudi university’s name attached.

So, basically, free money for sticking KAU’s name in a paper. I have to respect all the people with the integrity to turn that down, like Eisen did. Unfortunately, not everyone rejected them (and it’s also kind of hard to blame them — the life of a college professor rarely provides opportunities to get wealthy), and the stratagem worked.

Even more surprising, though, was that a little-known university in Saudi Arabia, King Abdulaziz University, or KAU, ranked seventh in the world in mathematics — despite the fact that it didn’t have a doctorate program in math until two years ago.

Who knew you could just buy an academic reputation?

I put out a call for applications for new FtB bloggers a while back, the response was a bit overwhelming — we got scores of applicants. Every minute of my free time today was spent organizing and reviewing and making short summaries for other FtBians to help them get through the pile, and I’m feeling a bit bleary-eyed now. So stop applying! No more for this round!

If you’re one of the applicants, we’re going to have the big evaluative review over the weekend and make some decisions then. We’ll contact people yes or no early next week.

Note that if we turn you down this time, it’s not necessarily an absolute rejection — we’ve got so many applicants that the field is particularly competitive, and some applicants will be deferred simply because we can’t cope with suddenly adding 40 blogs to the network. Don’t be discouraged, it may be that we’re just trying to get our first few bites down, and we’ll get around to gobbling you up eventually.

We’ll have a whole bunch of changes appearing next week, so stay tuned.

Me. I’m the example given for ludic.