Last Monday, the editor in chief of Chemical and Engineering News, Bibiana Campos-Seijo and the most senior editor, Jyllian Kemsley, were both removed from their positions at the magazine. Here is the explanation from the publisher of the magazine, Dr. Susan Morrissey.
I consider Jyllian Kemsley a friend and a mentor. She is smart, principled and a dedicated science journalist. Her work at C&EN about the Sheri Sangji case was foundational, and a model of how to cover a sweeping story with impacts across American chemical academia. Her influence on how we view and understand academic chemical safety over the last 10+ years is extraordinary. It will take another ten years to develop another reporter to cover these issues with the skill and tenacity Jyllian brought, I estimate, and it remains to be seen if that will ever be in the works.
There will be lots of opportunities to decry the planned changes at C&EN (and I plan to take them!) but for now, in the words of Matt Hartings, eliminating her position was an unforced error and it does not bode well for the direction of Chemical and Engineering News at all. I hope I am wrong. My continued best wishes for the staff of this incredibly important magazine to our community.
If you'd like to contact ACS leadership to register your disappointment with these moves, I suggest the following folks to be contacted.
- Tom Connelly (current CEO): t_connelly@acs.org
- Al Horvath (incoming CEO): a_horvath@acs.org
Be polite, forthright and succinct.
Best wishes to Bibi and Jyllian, the remaining staff of C&EN, and to all of us.
like Comcast or the Communist Party of China, ACS is not something to reform but to abolish. It is less useful than flies to its dog. It is a highly profitable legacy-based publishing company that enriches self-appointed elite, it is ripping off the government by pretending to be a tax-exempt professional organization, it shits on its members. It jacks up the price of subscription by forcing bundled subscription on the universities, it makes the research more expensive without providing much service. It behaves like a landlord who like to charge rent for what he obtained nearly free.
ReplyDeleteA-freaking-men. Realized this over 20 years ago and haven't been a member since. It has been a real shocker to faculty when giving an industrial talk to universities that no professor has a clue about how the responses for the "employment" survey are tabulated. Somehow, I never get invited back after having those conversations.
DeleteI'm a professor. I assume that the sample selection is biased towards full-time academic employees (who can afford the luxury of an ACS membership and might even benefit from it) and that so few people respond to the survey that the numbers are meaningless. Am I wrong?
Delete