ACS: Why it matters

I have posted as an outsider why I am concerned about the current state of governance at ACS, particularly with regard to truth and integrity in the scholarly process. You may ask “why is this Brit slagging off a society in a different country of which he is not a member. Or why doesn’t he join and change it by democratic processes?”. I have explained my position here. I have tried to pick up signals from correspondents and the blogosphere, and I have to be VERY careful not to reveal my correspondents. First I give an amalgam of replies and then I comment on what seems to be the most serious allegation and what I think the ACS needs to do if it is to retain respect.
To reiterate very briefly, the key role of a learned society is to represent its members but with a wider responsibility to the national and international communities. It must be transparent, it must act justly and impartially and it must be seen to be doing so. It must uphold the basic tenets of scholarship. It may be involved in professional certification or people, courses or procedures. In all of this it governs only if it is seen to command respect from the chemical and wider community.
As background I restate that the chemical community generally does not care about any of this.
Here are some private quotes from ACS members (anonymized) [I have not deliberately omitted positive comments – there were none, but that is probably not a surprise]:

“By the way, I enjoyed your blog piece on the ACS.”
“The basic problem is the ACS management/staff is not accountable to anyone at the end of the day.”
“I believe that many within ACS do support things like open access, but they are drowned out by people who are very frightened by the prospect of losing the CAS cash cow”
“I almost posted a comment, but decided against it because I’m [… quite active in ACS…]”

and the ChemBlog, :

I’m far more incensed that the ACS isn’t a transparent organization …
I am a lover of open access, but I’m not so sure I can demand that those capitalist pigs, hogging the peoples’ science for themselves, give it to us for free since it was already done using the tax dollars.  […]  I think it’s an obvious concern, but the ACS doesn’t read these blogs anyway.

PMR: … many of the staff do read them – the blogosphere has power.

In order of increasingly dubiousness:
  • CAS (through ACS) lobbied the government to have Pubchem effectively shut down. The words may indicate slight differences but the public intent was clear. This was done with no explicit support from the membership and this makes it particularly unacceptable for a learned society to maintain a monopoly in this manner.
  • ACS officers have bonuses that depend on publication income. This, in itself, is not insurmountable, but it needs careful independent oversight. However it seems increasingly clear that “PRISM” is largely, if not wholly driven by the ACS and that its statements – known untruths – are made deliberately to mislead the wider community. There is now widespread comment that this is for the personal benefit of the officers. This is unacceptable for a learned society.
  • industrial lobbying. I was taken aback by Paul Thacker’s allegations of corporate lobbying and his allegation of the ACS’s subsequent suppression of the normal scientific process. I make it quite clear that these are currently simply allegations and I have no independent knowledge of any of the issues. I post below some extracts from his article

Thacker: But I believe that what lead me to resign last September probably was set in motion months earlier. In February 2006, Bill Carroll, an executive with Occidental Chemical, called some of the society’s publishing executives to complain about my reporting.
The American Chemical Society is a nonprofit that is run by an elected board and Bill Carroll was the president. Because of Carroll’s call, my editor, Alan Newman, had to defend me to his bosses. In a three-page letter, Newman, responded to Carroll’s characterization of my reporting as “anti-industry” and “liberal,” and that my articles were “not news” but just “muckraking.” Specifically, Carroll had cited my articles “Hidden Ties” and “The Weinberg Proposal.”
In the first article, I documented a hidden campaign by industry lobbyists and the PR firm Pac/West Communications to undo the Endangered Species Act. Pac/West had previously run a multi-million dollar covert public relations drive to pass President Bush’s Healthy Forest legislation in 2004.
The article on the Weinberg Group, a product defense firm, grew out of a letter written by the Weinberg Group to DuPont that I discovered in EPA’s docket on PFOA, a chemical used to make Teflon and other non-stick products. In this letter, the Weinberg Group detailed a campaign they hoped to organize for DuPont to protect them against lawsuits and federal regulations on PFOA. The Weinberg Group suggested creating studies to show that PFOA was not only harmless but actually beneficial and offered to find expert scientists that could help DuPont to prove this.
Newman bristled at Bill Carroll’s attack on my reporting and ended his memo to the ACS publishing executives by saying he was deeply troubled that some individuals feel that they can “go to the top of ACS” as their way to respond. “This is not a genuine attempt to engage in an open and transparent conversation on issues of national importance,” he stated.

Newman added that we had tried to be transparent in our reporting, posting interviews and documents with the story. He ended by saying he stood behind the stories and they had revealed valuable information to the environmental science community.

In reply

ES&T, ACS officials respond:
The policy of ACS, as expressed in the ACS governing documents, clearly prohibits interference in editorial decisions by anyone on the staff of the society or in its governance structure. Editors of ACS publications exercise complete control over the content of their journal or magazine. Any suggestion by Paul Thacker to the contrary is entirely without merit. Britt Erickson and I were uniformly unimpressed with Paul’s journalistic skills, and we told him so. We said that, especially on his investigative stories, he needed much more editorial supervision than ES&T had the resources to devote to him. We did not tell Paul that he could no longer work on such stories, only that he needed prior approval to work on them. As to the specific case of the story on the Weinberg group, it was a hatchet job and running the transcript was embarrassing to Paul and ES&T because Paul’s questions were almost incoherent.

Rudy M. Baum, Editor in Chief, Chemical & Engineering News

Bill Carroll, former ACS president, wrote to say he did not interfere in the ES&T editorial process, but did question editors about whether the stories were more appropriate for Chemical and Engineering News, another ACS publication, because the stories were critical of industry. Carroll added that he chaired the compensation committee but it does not evaluate or award bonuses to editorial employees.

PMR: The matter is summarised by a campaigning group SourceWatch (a Wikipedia-like community). I repeat that I have NO idea whether Thacker’s allegations have any substance. I have met Rudy Baum in the past and I have tried to understand his viewpoint that the NIH is a socialist organisation which is “hell-bent on imposing an “open access” model of publishing on researchers receiving NIH grants. [This] action will inflict long-term damage on the communication of scientific results and on maintenance of the archive of scientific knowledge.”
However I find that the ACS has increasingly fewer supporters outside its doors and increasingly many detractors. When I move in the – admittedly woolly liberal –  arena of digital scholarship the ACS is often mentioned among the most illiberal organisations and the one that causes most problems. The Pubchem and PRISM affairs have damaged it deeply.
If the Thacker affair is true, that is very serious. If it is not true, then the ACS should investigate it publicly and demonstrate its falsehood. That cannot easily be done by officers whose actions and motivations are increasingly in question and would require external investigators.
I do not intend to write further on this issue in the near future unless new information comes along.

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One Response to ACS: Why it matters

  1. I certainly do not know about the ACS, and would indeed have assumed that democratic forces within the ACS would have some effect. It is worrying that you believe otherwise. I was asked last week to become a member (likely because I attended the ACS meeting), for which one actually has to be introduced by another ACS member, as was made very clear in the letter.

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