So yesterday I got a notification on Twitter that the Genetic Literacy Project had posted about my pushback on an account of scientific racism published by NPR. Well, nifty, I guess. I’d encountered the GLP before — it’s a news site covering “the intersection of DNA research and real world applications of genetics with the media and policy worlds in order to disentangle science from ideology”. So, great, they wrote something about my post? When I clicked through, though, it turned out to be a ham-fisted edit of my post extracting the gist … annoying, but bog-standard blog-aggregation, no value added. But something about the layout of page caught my attention.
That’s my name under the GLP post title, where any respectable news site puts a byline. There’s no other authorial or editorial name on the GLP post page. The date, July 11, is the date of the GLP post, not my original. It does say “Molecular Ecologist”, but there’s no explanation what that indicates from the page layout. If you click on my name, you get an “author” page explaining that GLP posts may be original writing for the GLP, or aggregation-posts. And at the end of the GLP post, there’s a disclaimer to the effect that GLP aggregated the post from The Molecular Ecologist, with a link to the original — but it still doesn’t clarify who did the aggregation. There is no indication, on the post page or elsewhere, as to what human being or algorithm is responsible for the bowdlerized “excerpt” of my TME post … except me.
Call me crazy, but I happen to think my byline has some value, and that it means something — specifically, that when it appears on a post on a website, I had some authorial or editorial role in the creation of that post. (For a post about scientific racism, in particular, I want to be in control of what’s attached to my name!) GLP’s site design obscures that — and after an extended e-mail exchange with the site’s editor, I’m inclined to think that’s deliberate. GLP appears to be quite happy to make it look as though writers all over the web are contributing material for them, without any prior consultation with those writers or the sites where their work is posted.
I’ve lodged my complaints on Twitter and on the comments on the GLP post and in that e-mail back-and-forth, and I will not go on at further length. There’s not a lot more I can do, anyway. A DMCA takedown notice is not really appropriate because, as I noted above, the excerpting of my post itself is pretty standard practice, and probably not a violation of fair use — and some sort of injunction against the use of my name in connection with material I didn’t create seems like overkill, and is beyond both my legal ken and budget. So I’ll simply close out by saying: The Genetic Literacy Project doesn’t understand how authorship and web design works, and any post you see there with my name on it was created without my authorization and against my express wishes.