A postdoc by day and a scientific activist by night, Nick Anthis isn't letting his research in protein structure and function get in the way of defending scientific and social progress.
Newsweek has a story online today about a passage, in a book published by Wiley, that was recently discovered to have been plagiarized (D'oh!) from Wikipedia. Fellow ScienceBlogger Shelley of Retrospectacle gets a mention, though, for her run-in with Wiley earlier this year over her inclusion of a few figures from a Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture article in a blog post... a post that just so happened to be slightly critical of the article's press release. From Newsweek:
In an ironic wrinkle, this isn't Wiley's first embarrassing encounter with new media. In April, Shelley Batts, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Michigan, posted figures from Wiley's Journal of Science of Food and Agriculture on her site. Her post--which credited the journal--compared the raw data on antioxidant effects of fruit in alcoholic beverages with how that data was being spun in the journal's press releases. Wiley's response: an e-mail that read, in part, "if these figures are not removed immediately, lawyers from John Wiley & Sons will contact you with further action." Batts took the offending data down and posted the note, causing a minor stir online--and leading the journal to apologize. "I don't have any ill feelings toward Wiley or the journal," Batts now says. "The only thing I wanted to come out of it was a discussion."
The fact that this incident is coming up months later--in the mainstream media--demonstrates the staying power of this incident, and it's another example of the impact that blogs (and science blogs) are having outside of their blogospheric realm.
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