Professional Academic Philosophers: Actively support the Gendered Conference Campaign - Petition

A call to support the Gendered Conference Campaign. "We call on all philosophers - male and female, junior and senior - not to organize male-only or male-almost-only conferences,workshops, or edited volumes." Here's the petition site.

I have signed the petition and, on request submitted the following official motivation:

Academic philosophy has a gender problem and has had one for a long time. If nothing else, this becomes obvious when philosophy is compared to other academic areas when it comes to representation at higher levels of professional status and controlled for results in studies. Besides the general political spin that can be made on this with regard to gender equality, I find this situation troublesome also for purely academic and philosophically chauvinistic reasons; our beloved subject misses a large portion of potential talent due to what mainly seems to be structural reasons.The proposed action in this petition in order to influence conference organizers when it comes to keynote speakers is, in light of this, a very modest one.

Further on what's Cookin' at AJOB and Bioethics.net

I have now received conformation and independent corroboration of the rumours and signs I reported about before, which due to a number of factors I was unsure how to assess. Summer Johnson McGee has indeed stepped out of the management of the American Journal of Bioethics, and also announced that she are cutting her ties to Bioethics.net. The actual letter, or email, of resignation has now been forwarded to me and is here shown in its entirety:

From: Summer <summer.mcgee@me.com>

Subject: Leaving AJOB

Date: 10 September 2012 2:31:21 PM CDT

To: <editorialboard@bioethics.net>

Cc: "pwolpe@emory.edu Wolpe" <pwolpe@emory.edu>, "Robert \"Skip\" Nelson" <robert.nelson@fda.hhs.gov>, David Magnus <dmagnus@stanford.edu>

Friends of The American Journal of Bioethics and bioethics.net,

I want to share with all of you that Friday, September 14, 2012 will be my last day at The American Journal of Bioethics and bioethics.net. In mid-August, I had detailed conversations with both David Magnus and the publisher about my desire to leave AJOB. I have elected also that bioethics.net, the blog, the weekly newsletter, and all of its social networking sites (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn) will no longer be owned and operated by me nor will the editorial office reside with me any longer. I have so enjoyed working with you as peers, and I owe you a succinct explanation for my departure. I firmly believe that we are right to be proud of the Journal's last twelve years, the first era of The American Journal of Bioethics.  AJOB accomplished things that no one in bioethics or publishing thought possible, least of all its editors and staff. Until a few months ago, I often said that the work I did for AJOB felt impactful and rewarding, even important. AJOB no longer feels that way to me.  Whether it is me, the field, or the journal that has changed, I know that I no longer want to lead our field's most cited journal. 

So, with thanks to those who have asked me not to depart, I feel I must leave the Journal, a decision made much easier because I know it is in the competent hands of David Magnus and the editorial staff he and I hired in the last few months.  It has been a privilege to spend the last four years working with the journal’s editorial board, authors, peer reviewers, and readers.  My departure from our journal is of course very emotional for me. AJOB has been my labor of love for a very long time. I thank each of you who contributed to that experience for me personally and professionally; your faith in the journal and in me has been unwavering and unforgettable.

I wish The American Journal of Bioethics, its current editors, editorial board, and readers the best of luck in its next era.  I bid you a fond, bittersweet, farewell.  

Cordially,

Summer Johnson McGee, PhD

 The bulk of the text is what is (or was) actually quoted in William Heisel's mysteriously shut down post at Reporting on health (of which you can read a web cached version here), which makes that shut down even more strange.

In any case, the text does not really throw any light on the specifics that has led to Summer's decision. Heisel, as I mentioned in my former post, has a vaguely hinted guess. And in a blog post at Psychology Today, bioethics researcher Alice Dreger offers further possible reasons for Johnson McGee to abandon ship. These, as it were, are further alleged conflict of interest cases that may have been severely manhandled by the old AJOB management, but which are not explicitly connected to the scandal around possibly pharma corrupted pain medication research, that I told about in the former posting, and more extensively in another one before.  That is, there may be yet another complex of COI problems at AJOB to which Johnson McGee (and her husband and former editor in chief, Glenn McGee) might have been connected. In this case, the connection is to clinical experiments involving drugs and prenatal diagnosis on fetuses and children with hereditary abnormalities in the sex-hormone production, which Dreger and colleagues critically assess in a very recent article. In fact, this potential problem for AJOB is connected also to members of its editorial and conflict of interest boards, as well as the editor in chief of its sibling journal AJOB Primary Research, Robert Nelson.

In any case, Dreger in her post describes in exact terms what that is about, and reports that she and a colleague have just written the new AJOB management to look at the matter with fresh eyes in light of what has recently come to pass. The ball is now in the hands of suddenly sole editor in chief, David Magnus.

As for my own worries around the integrity of AJOB, having to do with the not very sound financial ties between the former editor in chief and Bioethics.net, things are still unclear. Nothing in Johnson McGee's letter makes any more clear how the relationship between the new AJOB management, AJOB itself and Bioethics.net now looks like. Do any of the editors of AJOB have financial interests in Bioethics.net that, together with the role of Bioethics.net in the AJOB operation, provide incentives for making editorial decisions based on other grounds that those that should guide a scientific editor? This remains to be seen.

Something's Cookin' at AJOB and Bioethics.net (Now Updated)

Updates added after the original post can be found at the bottom marked by bold text.

Yep, yep - there is definitely something going on - less clear, however, what it is and less clear how it connects to the long string of recent events around the American Journal of Bioethics and the important work of restoring confidence in the journal's integrity.

First, emails have this week been swishing around the bioethics scholarly community, quoting an alleged letter from Summer Johnson McGee announcing her resignation as editor in chief of the American Journal of Bioethics, as well as stepping out of the connected website business Bioethics.net. In both instances effective from September 14.

Second, William Heisel posted about and commented on this news and how it was viewed by remaining editor in chief, David Magnus on his blog at Reporting on Health, where he also quoted the above mentioned letter. The spirit of the post was that, possibly, perhaps as an add-on to the former troubles, Johnson McGee's unfortunate apparent connection to a number of recently announced and rather grave conflict of interest declaration problems at AJOB linked to an ongoing federal investigation of research corruption with pharma money at the former academic home of both AJOB, Bioethics.net and Johnson McGee may have become too much to handle.

However.......

Heisel's post has now been blocked for access since a few days (the link above is to a web-cache of the original page), and Johnson McGee is still listed as editor in chief at the journal website, where the press release announcing her recent appointment is also still available. Nothing is announced at Bioethics.net, except that the information about Summer Johnson McGee's ownership of the website through a company called Bioethics Internet Group that I quoted in my latest post on this topic has now been taken out (and someone has seen to it that former versions of Bioethics.net pages are not being cached). No word either in the AJOB Facebook group.

On twitter, people are asking Heisel about what's going on with no response so far – his account is silent since September 11, when he posted info about an update to the mentioned blog post. I was in contact with him via email the day before yesterday, but he did only want to talk on the phone about this matter and since we are 9 hours apart timezone-wise, this has not yet been possible to arrange. Or he has decided it wise not to communicate on the matter at this point.

Given the past occurrences of lawsuit threats in response to blog posts or articles connecting to AJOB and the businesses of its (now former) editorial management (see my last post on AJOB for more on that), it's not without that one is getting a bit worried. At the same time, if it really is true that Summer Johnson McGee is stepping down in the way indicated by all the rumors and signs, doing it in a cloud of civil law action would hardly make the whole thing more graceful, so I cross my fingers for her sake as well as Heisel's.

Hopefully, not least for AJOB's sake, all of these question marks will be straightened out soon. But, let's play with the thought that the initial rumor is true – what would that imply for AJOB? This, to my mind, depends on two things. First, Johnson McGee's actual connection to the recent round of problems around conflict of interest declarations and the linked alleged pharma corrupted research on pain medication. If this alleged link is weak or non-existent, Johnson McGee stepping down would not seem to help restoring confidence in AJOB through that route. Second, the point that I raised in my latest post on this topic about the problem of having an editor in chief that is directly financially dependent on what pieces are published in AJOB, through how that affects Bioethics.net traffic and advertisement revenue. This aspect of AJOB integrity is not fixed by Johnson McGee stepping down, since it remains to be known how the ownership of Bioethics.net looks from September 15, and how Bioethics.net will be connected to the AJOB operation in the future. Transparency on these points is absolutely crucial for AJOB's reputation, and something should ideally be posted about this in the about section at Bioethics.net and/or the journal website at the publisher as soon as possible.

Update, September 15, 2012:
Just now, when checking for news, I noticed that Summer Johnson McGee's name is off the editor-in-chief listing for AJOB in the about section for the journal at Bioethics.net. However, she is still listed at the actual journal homepage of the publisher Taylor and Francis.

The ownership of Bioethics.net and its role in the AJOB operation is still undeclared. In fact, the about section for Bioethics.net only speaks about AJOB, as if that is equivalent to Bioethics.net.

I can also report that the original web-cache link to Heisel's blog post was killed by Google (possibly on the request by someone of the involved parties), and has now been replaced by another service.