I was somewhat surprised to see that one of the eminent scientists who accepted the heavy mantle of responsibility of IPCC Lead Author, is now advertising for a post-doc to ghostwrite it for him. Nice opportunity for some young thrusting ambitious person to get a co-authorship of the AR5, I'd have thought.
9 comments:
I hope you don't end like ewan mcgregor...
Uh... It doesn't say anything about ghostwriting.
Ice, what, you mean a popular, talented, handsome Scottish actor? I think I'll have to settle for 4 out of 5...
rocco, undertaking a literature review, designing graphs and liaising with the other authors is basically the lead author's job in a nutshell. I am of course speaking from outside the circle of trust here, but I think it's a pretty accurate summary.
James Annan: Well yeah, but it doesn't say "do the IPCC stuff for me". To me it seems like he is looking for an assistant, which from for I've read not exactly unusual (e.g. http://klimazwiebel.blogspot.com/2010/11/luxurious-life-of-ipcc-lead-author.html)
Well, this person is going to be a co-author of the report, which is not what I would think of under the description "assistant" (and hence my use of the term "ghostwriter" is a bit factious, of course). Maybe it is indeed common - I've not noticed such an advertisement before, but I haven't exactly been looking.
I kind of heard, that most lead authors received money to pay a scientist as "editorial assistant" or so
James, I don't know if you are familiar with the ghostwriting business, but a typical job description for a ghostwriter is something like "write ten movie reviews for my column". The original author is rarely involved in the actual writing {that's the whole point).
Now sure, you could say this is just semantics, but given the fact that the job offer doesn't say anything about writing the IPCC report, I think that calling it ghostwriting is somewhat unfair.
Rocco, my usage of the term seems entirely in line with wikipedia, which seems very flexible about both the proportion of input, and credit assigned. What is very clear is that Fichefet will get the main credit as a lead author, and the pd will have to be listed as a contributing author. Even if you consider the "literature review" as merely a product that Fichefet will then re-write, the creation of graphs of analyses of model output for the report is indisputably an authorship task (especially considering that the IPCC quite explicitly has a category of "contributing authors" which describes precisely this role). This is not an administrative or editorial assistant but a scientific role.
James: Of course it is a scientific role, otherwise he wouldn't be hiring a scientist :)
The only point I am trying to make (as someone familiar with ghostwriting) is that the job this person will be doing is probably quite different from that of an actual ghostwriter. That's all, no big deal.
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