David Tuller: Trial By Error: My Six-Month Review

Avoiding embarrassment. Same with Lancet, Cochrane and everyone else. This is a massive failure and no one wants to be accountable for it so the only option is to continue doggedly despite knowing it is morally and intellectually bankrupt.

 

@dave30th Would you remind me/us about this 2011 article of yours? Did you make any attempts to get it published elsewhere? How much would you have been paid, and how much did you get in donations? thanks

http://www.virology.ws/2011/11/23/chronic-fatigue-syndrome-and-the-cdc-a-long-tangled-tale/

 

Hi, Roy--I didn't get paid anything for that piece. It was 10,000 words and took many months of work. I had no expectation that anyone would be interested in publishing it or paying me. I knew Vincent and asked him about posting it there. He read it and liked it, and so that's how that happened.

How much would I have been paid? Well, that's hard to say. No one would have wanted such a story, so there isn't really a way to say it's "worth" anything at all. But if the question is, how much might I have gotten if someone had actually wanted it, we can look at some payment rates. These days I write stories for Kaiser Health News and they pay $2 per published word. Going by that metric, the piece's value would be $20,000, although of course KHN runs stories that are 1,000 words but not 10,000. But that's not out of line for a major piece in a major national publication. Most pay less. When I wrote an 8,000-word piece for the MIT-based science magazine Undark in 2016, I got $5000. (That was supposed to be $1/word, but I wrote longer--so that ended up in a lower amount per word.)

I didn't ask for any donations then. It would never have occurred to me. I had no plans to do any crowdfunding until the change in my Berkeley position and the university's funding issues in Spring, 2016. If that hadn't happened, I guess I would just have continued my 50% Berkeley job and worked on this as a public service or volunteer project, which is how I thought of it when I started. I certainly had no intention of spending 3-4 years or whatever on this project. I thought the 2015 Trial by Error series was a one-off because it would likely kill off the PACE trial. The fact that it has hung on is mind-boggling to me.

 

I don't mind. I've asked people to chip in a fair amount of money to Berkeley to support me. It seems reasonable that they might want to know how payment works or should work for journalism under ordinary circumstances. It's not quite directly relevant, because I'm determining what I need to raise based on my pre-existing Berkeley annual salary--$94,000.

Of my $87,500 in crowdfunding last April, $47,000 is for my 50% salary; close to $30,000 is used for work benefits, which is mostly health insurance; about $6500 in Berkeley gift/crowdfunding fees; and whatever is left over to cover some of the travel costs related to the project.

Unfortunately, I can't live on a $47,000 salary in San Francisco, so I'm supposed to be doing this half-time and having another half-time freelance income. This project takes up more than half my time. So assuming I'm doing another crowdfunding in April, I need to think some things through. I might need to raise the goal somewhat I can be at 60 or 65% time. Or something. It's challenging to figure it out.

 

Thanks Dave. I seem to recall that the professor asked for donations and about $24 came in. Anyway, nobody was more surprised and pleased than me when the crowdfunding worked so well.

 

Oh, right--what happened was that a science blogger--not Vincent--posted the piece in a list of "10 free stories that should be paid for," or something like that, and urged people to send $$. So I got $24

 

I ping them from time to time, but maybe if more people do it would help

 

Well, if I'd known the money that can be made by writing I'd certainly have made different career choices in my life!!

 

Probably wrong thread, but a great tweet re quality of Lancet peer review
Check out @KurtLass1’s Tweet: https://twitter.com/user/status/1086810234763395077