Publishing Isn't Any Good at Diversification, and That Has to Change

I’ve worked in publishing since 1984, first as an employee and then as a self-employed editor, and I must say this: “Publishing, you’re killing the industry by not making sure to keep it diversified. It has been mostly all White forever, and it cannot survive that way. The world is not all White, dammit!”

From the New York Times:

“When Lisa Lucas was hired in the summer of 2020 to take a big job at the country’s largest book publisher, there was a sense that things were finally starting to change in what has long been an overwhelmingly white industry.

 

“Lucas, who became the publisher of Pantheon and Schocken, imprints within Penguin Random House, was an unusual choice for the job. Executives in the book business often spend decades working their way up the ranks. While Lucas was a well-known figure in the literary world—she had previously been the executive director of the National Book Foundation, which administers the National Book Awards—she had never worked in corporate publishing. …

 

“This May, Lucas was abruptly let go, informed of her firing just a few hours before it became public. The news stunned some in the literary world who saw Lucas, 44, as a tastemaker and rising talent, and as someone who could help discover and champion writers of color. …

 

“ ‘These Black women who were brought in, publishers looked at them as disposable rather than creating industry titans, which is what they deserve to be,’ said Dhonielle Clayton, a novelist and the board chair of the organization We Need Diverse Books.

 

“ ‘Someone like Lisa Lucas, she’s an industry tastemaker,’ she continued. ‘If you remove these tastemakers, you remove an ability to bring in new voices and conversations and books, and we’re going to see that ripple out.’ ”

Why was Lucas fired?

“A company memo said that Lucas … [was] let go to make way for a more ‘nimble, concentrated leadership team’ that ‘is necessary for our future growth.’ ”

So of course, publishing is sacrificing Black women’s careers and Black authors’ careers on the altar of Big Money. How very American. And how shameful and small-minded.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/21/books/publishing-diversity-lisa-lucas.html?unlocked_article_code=1.Ek4.BuAY.KYSkWVdwExFK&smid=url-share
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American publishing’s attempt at diversification at the top:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/15/books/book-publishing-leadership.html?unlocked_article_code=1.Ek4.DcLJ.4U4uAoCZKV9a&smid=url-share
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“Penguin Random House Dismisses Two of Its Top Publishers”

“Lucas, the first Black publisher at Pantheon in its 80-year history, was hired in 2020 from the National Book Foundation, where she was the organization’s executive director. In her time at Penguin Random House, she published titles including 𝘊𝘩𝘢𝘪𝘯-𝘎𝘢𝘯𝘨 𝘈𝘭𝘭 𝘚𝘵𝘢𝘳𝘴, by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, which was a National Book Award finalist, and signed a two-book deal with LeVar Burton.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/20/books/booksupdate/knopf-doubleday-lisa-lucas-reagan-arthur.html?unlocked_article_code=1.Ek4.-lzx.tg-dMUW71enE&smid=url-share

#publishing #diversity #racism #bias #BigMoney #TooWhite

Using Negative Words to Describe Older Adults Creates Prejudice

 
As a medical editor and as someone who is in her sixties, I am very much in favor of not using #ageist #language when talking about #older #adults.

As the Institute for Public Health reports,

"Eliminating #bias in language about older adults is important because there is evidence suggesting that biased language evokes #negative #stereotypes about older people. These negative stereotypes have the power to impact #policy, group #attitudes, and the #health of older adults."

That article supplies terminology guidance from the American Medical Association, the American Psychological Association, the Associated Press, and the Gerontological Society of America.

And the Reframing Aging Initiative within the Gerontological Society of America is working to change how all of us speak and think about older adults. The initiative has an informative website with some helpful resources for everyone, from the general public to specialists in various professions.

The words we use matter.

#ageism #bias #stereotypes #predjudice #DailyLife #science #health #medicine #editing #publishing #inclusion #respect

One Medical Editor's Method for Editing Journal Manuscripts

I love style sheets. They're wonderful for ensuring consistency when you're editing a big manuscript, and then again when a professional proofreader is working on page proofs of the typeset manuscript.

But the majority of the manuscripts I edit these days are written by authors who will submit them to medical journals in hopes that the journal will publish them. For these manuscripts, I actually don't create style sheets. That’s because the manuscripts I edit wind up being submitted to any one of 65-plus different journals, and I don’t want to have that many style sheets to keep updated.😉 I use this method instead:

All the medical journals whose authors I edit for follow the guidance of the AMA Manual of Style. When I’m editing, I keep the online version of the manual open in my browser so that I can look up all sorts of style points.

In another window of my browser, I keep open the page of the target journal’s website that lists for authors what particular style points and content points they want authors to follow. Journals are picky about how well authors do or do not adhere to those points, so I want to be able to alert my authors that they need to add something or other to make the journal happy. On rare occasions, I’ve come across journals’ style guides!

Also, I make sure to download a PDF of recent article published in the particular journal that the authors are wanting to submit their manuscript to. I make sure the article is on a topic similar to the one of the manuscript on my screen. For each manuscript, I skim the downloaded PDF to see how the journal handles the following things and more, because although the journals generally follow AMA style, sometimes they make interpret it slightly differently:

• Various heading levels in the article
• New-to-me medical terms in the author’s area of specialization
• Reference-citation style
• Reference-list style
• Table style
• Use of abbreviations
• Figure-legend style
• Figure-citation style
• Style for a short list of keywords about the article’s topic
• How acknowledgments are handled
• How authors’ names and location information are handled
• What subsections the journal divides abstracts into
• What headings the journal generally uses in the text for the type of article I'm editing (research article, clinical study, review or meta-analysis, etc.)

If you're a medical editor as I am, I'd enjoy hearing how you maintain style consistency in journal articles.

#editor #MedicalEditor #editing #style #StyleSheets #journals #science #publishing

What Do Editors Do With Faked Reference Lists?

If you edit manuscripts for academic books and journal articles, you’ll likely run into fake reference lists. That’s because in the academic publish-or-perish setting, authors are desperate to write their articles quickly, and they may use large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, to help them. And what is the one thing LLMs are really bad at? Reference lists. But there’s a tool that can help you detect them.

I use Edifix, subscription-based reference-checking software that users access online. Said Edifix on its blog recently:

“2023 has seen the explosion into the public consciousness of ChatGPT and other large language models (LLMs), and these AI [artificial intelligence] applications have been rapidly and widely adopted in educational and research writing settings. Much has already been written about the potential benefits and pitfalls of using LLMs in scholarly publishing, including 14 posts on the Scholarly Kitchen blog alone (listed chronologically under ‘Further Reading’ below).

“The rapid embrace of LLMs has brought with it another flavor of potential reference manipulation: fake references. …

“ChatGPT does not have a true understanding of the questions it is asked or the tasks it is set. Among the ‘nonsensical answers’ that ChatGPT can give, one type especially pertinent to research publishing is its inability to generate relevant and accurate citations.

“This failure was highlighted by Curtis Kendrick on the Scholarly Kitchen [blog] just two months after the public launch of ChatGPT. When he asked ChatGPT to provide a reference list for a piece it had written on racism and whiteness in academic libraries, the list of 29 references it provided revealed a number of eye-opening problems.

“First, half of the citations were from just two journals, and typically these references were incomplete, generally lacking volume and/or issue numbers. Partly this reflects the limitations of the dataset used to train the model, which, for example, had access only to open access articles. Much more worrying was that ChatGPT didn’t always admit to not knowing the answer, sometimes appearing to lie instead. Of the 29 references it came up with, only one was accurate; some contained elements of genuine references but with parts transposed, and others were completely fake.”

Now, how the heck are editors to straighten out this mess alone? Fortunately, they’re not.

First, in its blog post, Edifix gives us 3 clues to possible reference fakery:

1. A low overall rate of the reference list having links to the individual references on Crossref and PubMed
2. Warnings from Crossref or PubMed Reference Correction about significant differences between the reference and the service metadata
   
3. An excessive number of “unknown” references

Second, Edifix parses all entries in each of your reference lists and gives you automated comments when something isn’t right, like this comment:

Crossref does not recognize the DOI [digital object identifier; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_object_identifier ] “10.1016/j.jaridenv.2019.0”, and reports it is not registered at any other registration agency. Please check the accuracy of the DOI.

Then you’ll have to query the author about those particular references and also likely alert the managing editor or other appropriate person affiliated with the publisher or journal. Meanwhile, read the blog posts from the Scholarly Kitchen that are listed and linked at the end of Edifix’s blog post. You’ll find plenty of good stuff on AI.

#editor #academic #editing #Edifix #ArtificialIntelligence #ChatGPT #FakeReferences #ReferenceLists #PublishOrPerish

Editor for Life

Now, this is gonna have me smiling all day!

I was interviewed by Keith Goddard, editor-in-chief of the Editors Toronto blog BoldFace, for the blog's series of posts in the "Editor for Life" category. The post is now up for folks to read. Thank you, Keith!

Oh, and it is cooler than cool that another Katherine (one of those whose middle vowel in their first name is an e, whereas my middle vowel is an a) copyedited the blog post. Thank you, Katherine Morton!

#editor #career #SelfEmployed #freelancer

How to Handle Text Recycling When You're Writing a New Research Paper

Science researcher–authors, you need to know this information about text recycling, which is sometimes called self-plagiarism. The term text recycling means reusing some of the text from your previously published papers in new papers you intend to submit for publication.

Says an open access article in the journal Science Editor:

"Deciding whether any instance of text recycling is ethical, legal, and appropriate—and possibly even desirable—depends on factors such as the amount and nature of the recycled material as well as copyright laws and any limitations on reuse that are part of an author–publisher agreement. Thus, there is a need for clear and consistent guidelines on text recycling. ...

"The Text Recycling Research Project (TRRP) defines text recycling as the reuse of textual material (prose, visuals, or equations) in a new document where (1) the material in the new document is identical to that of the source (or substantively equivalent in both form and content), (2) the material is not presented in the new document as a quotation (via quotation marks or block indentation), and (3) at least one author of the new document is also an author of the prior document."

The project has now developed the document "TRRP Best Practices for Researchers," which will help you understand how to reuse and how not to reuse your own work. Please note that, as the document says, "[t]hese recommendations apply only to reusing [your] own work, not using material written by others. Authors should not engage in plagiarism. For advice on avoiding plagiarism, consult" guides available in your science discipline.

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Editor colleagues, please also see "Understanding Text Recycling: A Guide for Editors." Information about members of the advisory board for the TRRP can be found here.

#ResearchPaper #science #authors #writing #TextRecycling #plagiarism #editing #editor #EditorMom

The Stages of Life and Being a Freelance Editor

My family and I are dealing with change, and two of the the things it will do for me are (1) decrease stress levels and (2) eventually allow me to get back to teaching editing courses and attending (virtual) editing conferences. I've missed teaching and intense learning so much!

My 86-year-old mother-in-law, who has dementia, has now been declared eligible for Medicaid* coverage, so she can get the constant support she needs in a long-term memory-care facility. This will be helpful for her, and it will provide reassurance and stress reduction for my family. I have been her daytime caregiver in our home for several years now, and things are at the point that we no longer feel that we can keep up with her care needs.

I'm posting this to let those of you new to freelancing know that your career in self-employment will go through stages over the years, and you can find ways to make it work.

Here are the stages that I edited through:

• I began freelancing full time 2 weeks after my second child was born. I often ended up, when he was a baby, editing onscreen while he slept on my chest in a baby sling.

• I had a third child 6 years later; baby-sling time again.

• Had frequent #StetWalk** breaks necessitated by chasing toddlers around the house.

• Took breaks from my computer to supervise homework sessions and to read with my kiddos.

• Did parenting between editing bouts and during editing.

• Relearned how to edit in total quiet while my kiddos were at school.

• Lived through the kiddos' adolescence, years getting degrees, and years getting their first jobs, because they have lived with us as young adults and could always vent to me when they got home for the day or night.

• Trained my retired in-laws, who lived with us, that "freelancing" does not mean "available to chat at every moment throughout the day."

• Periodically got to lunch here at home with my mate, a cabinetmaker, who was self-employed for a time instead of being an employee who worked an hour away from home.

• Took work breaks to assist my mother-in-law in providing care to my father-in-law, who had Alzheimer disease.

• Realized that my exercise routine had become going down and then back up the stairs between the part of the house that is where my husband and I live and the part where my widowed mother-in-law was living, so that I could test her blood sugar three times a day and administer insulin, because she developed type 2 diabetes and felt overwhelmed at handling it all on her own.

• Became my mother-in-law's daytime caregiver when it became apparent that she had dementia and needed me to make her healthy meals and needed supervision for daily life tasks.

And here I am, still editing. You too can do the tough things.

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*Medicaid provides health-care coverage to Americans who qualify, including those with low incomes like my mother-in-law.

** https://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/what-is-stetwalk

#editing #editor #freelancing #freelancer #selfemployment #caregiving #balance #dementia #Alzheimer #Medicaid #stamina #EditorMom