On Contributions

October 14, 2026.

The Good

Much of what we do as scientists in general and conservation biologists in particular is verbal, informal, unheralded, and unacknowledged. We converse. We write a lot of letters and emails. We teach from books. We teach from experience and example. We prepare the studies and do the fieldwork. We write reports, budgets, requests, and we write scientific papers and provide media for various audiences. That's the expectation, and the majority follow that highly productive pattern. It helps a great deal if you are self-motivated and eager to share your work.

Often at higher institutions and agencies we write papers when our department coffers provide sufficient financial backing and personnel to do the gnitty-gritty and all we need to do is mutter a few sentences and authorship is settled. At these levels, department funding is tied to academic output in scientific journals. Publish or perish. The very role you fill and the privelege of your position and writing publications on your discoveries requires you to do the work in that manner.

The time to publication is on average well over a year. It may take years to prepare a manuscript, then you go through the review process, and then a button is pressed and a year after that your paper may be accepted and finally put into print. It is done.

The Bad

Science is conversational. Go read key scientific achievements. How many paragraphs were required for the discovery of DNA? How many citations were in that paper? Rosalind Franklin wasn't credited whatsoever for the intellectual theft of her work, and only decades after her death was the full disclosure of discovery revealed, sheepishly at that. I read the paper; it was barely a footnote in today's standards. Read it yourself, here. Today she would be required to have a monograph worth of citations and a mountain of ridiculous cross-referenced gibberish to announce the structure of DNA. She would then have to re-iterate 90% of what had been written before adding more to the work in subsequent papers. Not to mention her work being credited to a man. This is still a problem, to put it mildly.

If any scientific thought requires funds to publish, and a chain of reviewers in order to be read, then it is just the wrong way. Reviewing work for errors and conceptual problems is quite acceptable, and should be done in due course of authoring the work with ones immediate peers at an institutional, societal, and relationship level. Once the work is submitted, then off it goes. An annual summary of papers for archival purposes is quite acceptable. 

Publication with bioarxiv.org, through the Cold Springs Harbor Laboratory, ironically founded by the very same rascally intellectual thief of Rosalind Franklin, is entirely in line with my stated position. It offers free online publishing with direct feedback on the manuscript while in preparation. Publishers can shop there. That is the way it should be done, and the only way I, as an independent, will proceed. Even with the likelihood of future stellar Carrington events, Faraday cages protect electronic data from those situations, and the very nature of the multiple redundancy self-replicating internet is more likely to survive in perpetuity than a single book on a shelf in a forgotten library stack. Socrates and the figurative pantheon of ancient thinkers and creators got lucky due to constant re-transcription and translation.

The Ugly

Sometimes we publish and persist through sheer force of will. Sometimes we don't, and must be satisfied that we alone learned something and no one paid you for it, so to heck with everyone else if they won't take you at your word. That is admittedly poor science etiquette, and I am very guilty of that. Times are changing and having ones work distributed in an unfettered manner is sharply improved.

I developed a deep hatred for project leaders who take credit for the work others do. Their mentality is based upon the notion that they are entitled to all credit because they did the hiring and recruiting, and any novel insights and contributions they have were because of themself. Many are hired to do the things, not to think, and therefore would only have had those thoughts due to their position. How could anyone possibly have thoughts of their own accord. The lion's share of my contributions in scientific journals is uncredited or just barely mentioned in the acknowledgements even though I did the background research, wrote the project proposal, grant proposal, methodology, did the work, figures, tables, writing, and  made other key contributions such as authoring analytical tools and methods; designing and maintaining databases and performing all key research to acquire data to populate it for subsequent research that allowed further analyses and derivatives. Just because one may not be in the same office does not mean you are undeserving of proper attribution. You won't see me, but I'm there. And then after all of that to not have a sheepskin decorated with the letters Doctor of Philosophy, with twice as many required credits, just continues to enrage me. I'm told that climate is fading, but that is lip service, because I am alive, and my work is unattributed to this day and cannot professionally benefit from it.  Perhaps I will just put a list of papers of my attributed, barely attributed, and unattributed work and contributions and be done with it, and estivate some more.

Requiring an entire tome to be published before work can be productively shared, known as embargoing, is shameful and is based upon pure publisher and corporate greed, and institutional ego and pride. From the time of Newton and his outrageous behavior towards others, being first to discovery and stamping out all others is a stain on the grand human endeavor of science. Chasing and losing the Nobel prize is a fickle endeavor only the most narcistic pursue, yet foist upon others and present them as failures. Some people crave the pomp and recognition, to be first, to get that credit because of the financial rewards. What a shame to follow that carrot. It is a burden placed unfairly on the backs of the majority of scientists who study for the love of knowledge itself, whether it cures cancer, builds a better ballistic missile, or the ecology and systematics of tiny creatures under feet.

Science is collaborative, and thankfully the age of the image of a lone genius atop the shoulders of another is a vanishing meme. I'm sure Einstein's first wife, Mileva Marić , and numerous mentors would have choice words with him about acknowledgements in this age.  After she was out of the picture his scientific output sharply declined. How unfortunate for the both of them, and the rest of us, that her intellect was effectively squelched. The intellectual teamwork they had is inspiring.

Perhaps my anger is unjustly squared at Watson. After all, the focus of his laboratory is cancer research, and Rosalind Franklin and my wife were claimed by it. Perhaps it was a form of penance on his part, and this diatribe of mine a scream into the void on why the cures have not yet been found, despite all the good intentions one finds on every corner of the scientific block. Re-read what I said with that in mind.