I Swear I Didn't Say That! Having someone else put your foot in your mouth for you

One of the scariest things I've found about being contacted by the media regarding your scientific expertise on a particular subject is reading or hearing the end results. Quite often due to either a lack of comprehension on the part of the interviewer or some final editing what appears is not quite what you meant (or in some cases the complete opposite). It is not so easy to shrug this off in the days of "You Tube" and file sharing as this is now a permanent (and often heavily distributed) record of you saying something that you did not, especially if you do not agree with what "you said" at all. Possibly this could be embarrassing for you as well depending on how your "thoughts" are perceived by your colleagues.

Matt Wedel was the recent recipient of this type of "quote mining" as Darren Naish put it (including having his name mispelled through the entire show). He is quite angry about it and has commented here and here. Several fellow bloggers and colleagues have chimed in as well including Darren Naish and David Hone.

I discussed something similar on this blog a little over a year ago. In my situation I submitted proof corrections that were either not made or incorrectly made. Again this is a situation where something permanent is going on the record with my name on it containing errors that are distorting the information that I wished to provide.

Who 'proofs' the proofs, and who has the final say on scripted interviews? Because our names (and hence reputations) are on the line here, I think that it should be us, the scientists. I think that it is simply common courtesy to check back during final production and make sure that we are being accurately represented, as often we are providing this information also as a courtesy. Maybe it is simply best just not to answer the phone, but really that is against all we stand for as scientists. Science is meant to be shared and discussed and tested; however, it's often pretty rough to have to defend yourself for something someone else actually said.

By the way this also happens in exhibits and interpretive media for museums, National Parks, etc... As the specialist you really have to make sure you are involved in every step of production or you probably are not going to be happy with the end result. The question now is, what collectively as a group we can do about this to make sure it doesn't keep happening (there is actually some detailed discussion of such options going on right now on the various vertebrate paleontology list servers)? How do you get yourself involved in on the final production when simple common courtesy isn't happening?

Proofing The Proof Corrections?

OK...this has happened to me more than once so I would like to comment and hopefully receive some feedback. You send in your final revisions for your manuscript and it is accepted by a journal. Sometime later you receive the proofs with the layout for final publication and a request for you to check it over and correct any final typos and/or problems with the layout. You submit your proposed changes within the time alloted and sometime later the manuscript is finally published. Upon reading through the published manuscript you see where some but not all of the changes you requested in the proofs were made, and thus there may still be some annoying errors (typos and/or layout) that you thought were going to be fixed. I am not talking about major changes being requested (which are costly at the proof stage and thus may not be approved by the editors). Instead this is about small corrections that for some reason were not made.

What do you do next? Of course you can contact the editors and point out were requested corrections were not made, but what does this approach get you? An apology and possibly an erratum in the next issue, but does not fix the actual publication (which is now a permanent record). Maybe it is possible to actually proof the proof corrections? I'm not aware of any journal that does this, but I may start asking.

I guess that hypothetically through the writing, review, and rewriting stages all mistakes should have been eliminated, however, anyone who publishes knows that this is not the case. In fact, the proof stage is one of the most important parts of the whole process because it represents the first time the manuscript has been out of the author's control and as I said earlier it represents the permanent record of your work. Wouldn't you like just one last look before it finally does print? I actually had one manuscript a few years back where we did not even get proofs! The final result was not good and we actually felt obliged to add a disclaimer to the reprints and PDFs that we distributed.

Has anyone else had a problem with this? How common is this type of error?