BJKS Podcast
A podcast about neuroscience, psychology, and anything vaguely related. Long-form interviews with people whose work I find interesting.
BJKS Podcast
115. Melinda Baldwin: A triple history of Nature, scientific journals, and peer review
Melinda Baldwin is an associate professor of history at the University of Maryland. We talk about her work studying the history of Nature, scientific journals more broadly, what it means to be a scientist, peer review, the Tyndall project, and much more.
BJKS Podcast is a podcast about neuroscience, psychology, and anything vaguely related, hosted by Benjamin James Kuper-Smith.
Support the show: https://geni.us/bjks-patreon
Timestamps
0:00:00: Melinda's chemistry-history double major
0:03:42: Why Melinda did a PhD on the history of Nature
0:07:06: The glorious beginning of Nature and the history of scientific journals
0:17:00: How Nature became a journal for scientists (rather than the educated general public)
0:19:59: When did scientists start calling themselves 'scientists'? The mergence of science as a profession
0:26:26: The history of peer review: How to get into Nature in the 19th century, and the rise of peer review during the Cold War
0:40:53: Establishing causality in historical research
0:48:33: The future of peer review
1:06:16: Tyndall, why?
1:19:02: A book or paper more people should read
1:22:24: Something Melinda wishes she'd learnt sooner
1:29:05: Advice for PhD students/postdocs
Podcast links
- Website: https://geni.us/bjks-pod
- BlueSky: https://geni.us/pod-bsky
Melinda's links
- Website: https://geni.us/baldwin-web
- Google Scholar: https://geni.us/baldwin-scholar
- BlueSky: https://geni.us/baldwin-bsky
Ben's links
- Website: https://geni.us/bjks-web
- Google Scholar: https://geni.us/bjks-scholar
- BlueSky: https://geni.us/bjks-bsky
References and links
eLife peer review: https://elifesciences.org/about/peer-review
John Tyndall project: https://tyndallproject.com/
Baldwin (2017). In referees we trust? Physics Today.
Baldwin (2018). Scientific autonomy, public accountability, and the rise of “peer review” in the Cold War United States. Isis.
Baldwin (2019). Making" Nature" The History of a Scientific Journal.
Gordin (2012). The pseudoscience wars: Immanuel Velikovsky and the birth of the modern fringe.
Poehler (2014). Yes please.
Zuckerman & Merton (1971). Patterns of evaluation in science: Institutionalisation, structure and functions of the referee system. Minerva.
[This is an automated transcript that contains many errors]
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: [00:00:00] If I remember correctly, you studied chemistry and history which is a,
Melinda Baldwin: major.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: okay, so interesting combination. I mean, I guess history in a way can kind of be applied to any topic. So in a way it's not actually that in a way not that unusual. But I don't think I've, I've seen many people with exactly that kinda background.
So I'm just curious why, why those two topics.
Melinda Baldwin: Gosh. Um, so when I was in college, um, I went to this very small school in North Carolina, Davidson College. We're best known probably as the alma mater of, uh, Stephan Curry, who is a basketball superstar now. But uh, while I was at Davidson, I had this great career plan. I was going to go to law school and I was going to be a patent attorney, and that's how I got into studying chemistry.
I, um, my idea was that the chemistry degree would be a leg up applying to law schools, because that would be a bit of an unusual background. I loved history. I kept taking courses in it. I got far enough along that I thought, well, I might as well just finish the history major. And [00:01:00] I was getting deeper and deeper into studying history, I really fell in love with the field of history of science.
And I realized that I, I didn't really wanna be a patent attorney and I really also didn't wanna go to graduate school in the sciences, that it turned out that I liked writing about scientists and their institutions and their stories a whole lot more than I liked being in the basement of a chemistry laboratory trying to figure out why my experiments weren't working. So I pivoted. I was lucky enough to get a scholarship to do a one year master's degree at the University of Cambridge in the history of science. And after that, that was, that I was, I was completely in love with the field and I decided to move forward to graduate school. I. And then after that I bounced around a little bit.
My, my academic, uh, trajectory was a bit unusual, but I'd be happy to talk about that more later.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: So two questions. First is uh, so in, in the US [00:02:00] then I'd actually, I guess it differs a bit between countries, but, so I guess then in the US you, or maybe the contrast is, I think in Germany you contrast study law. That's like, you would agree from the beginning, but it sounds like in the US it's more of a, you do something else than usual law.
Um, that's, uh, just whether you could clarify that and the, the actual question is that's a very specific job idea for someone in school. How did, like why that exactly.
Melinda Baldwin: Gosh. So I'll answer the fir the second question first. I had done mock trial camp as a student in high school, and I'd really enjoyed it and I got it in my head that I wanted to be a lawyer. and so I started looking into different fields in the law and I found out that there was a thing called patent law where basically you could apply scientific knowledge to the practice of law.
And I thought, well, I'm really good at science. I'm really good at math, and I wanna be a lawyer. This seems like a great fit. This is perfect. And so I, I really did, uh, kinda [00:03:00] start off college with that idea in my head with law school as my goal and the idea that I would set myself apart as an applicant by being a chemistry major who wanted to be a patent attorney. So I, it, it started as something extremely nerdy in high school. And then yes, in the United States, you generally don't major in law as an undergraduate. You also wouldn't necessarily major in being pre-medical in, in, in, uh, the study of medicine. Those are considered just graduate programs in the us so usually you major in something else for your undergraduate degree, and then you apply to law school or you apply to medical school, and that's where you get your, your qualification.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Okay. So I mean, the, the main thing I guess, well, not the main thing, but the, what we were talking about, I guess today is mainly the history of the journal nature, the history of peer review, the history of what it means to be a scientist and who kind of, what we can consider someone who does science.
Uh, [00:04:00] and it, from what I understand the one part with the history of the general nature then started prettier. I mean, that was your PhD basically, right?
Melinda Baldwin: It was, yes, it started as my, my PhD research and then later I, I expanded it into my first book.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: So was that. Yeah, I find it, it's, it's so funny because I mean, as, as I mentioned before we started recording that, you know, there's, there's lots of things that you know, when you're a scientist, you, you know about, and you know, there's all these different aspects, but you often presume that they're kind of, it's kind of the way it's always been, you know, like the way it is today is the way it's always been.
Um, which I mean basically couldn't be further from the truth with nature. So I'm just, I'm just curious, like how did you basically, what, what, what got you interested to do a history of a jour of a specific journal also? Uh.
Melinda Baldwin: That actually also started with something extremely nerdy in high school I, to make extra money in the [00:05:00] summers I worked for a little bit at uh, the university library at the university where my parents worked at the Colorado School of Mines. one of my big jobs was journal counting. So what I would do is I would take a big cart and I would go all up and down the floors of the library picking up specifically the scientific journals that people were reading.
So this was, this was 25, 30 years ago. This was before most people were accessing journal articles online. And it was my job to count which journals were being pulled off the shelves most so that the library would have data on which subscriptions they really needed to renew. You know, what were the journals that people were using heavily?
I. And so that's how I got interested in journals and that's how I became aware of a hierarchy of journals that some journals were considered high impact and necessary for the library to subscribe to. And other journals were considered more marginal, maybe subscriptions that could be cut in the, [00:06:00] in the event of a budget shortfall. And I kind of carried that interest with me through my chemistry degree. And I, I started getting more familiar with different types of journals. Um, I got interested in nature specifically because its format seemed so unusual to me that it, you know, an article in nature didn't really look anything like an article in the Journal of Physical Chemistry B for example. And then in graduate school, um, I decided that I wanted to know more about the history of scientific publishing. And nature seemed like a really great case study, in part because it's so unusual. It's considered a scientific journal, even though it does a lot of things that most specialist scientific journals don't do.
It has a news section, it has commentary, it has, um, a very active, uh, letters to the editor or correspondence section. And so I wanted to dig a little bit deeper and find out exactly why nature was so unusual and why despite it being so unusual, it seemed to [00:07:00] occupy this really lofty place in the hierarchy of scientific publishing.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: So how did it start? What was the, the glorious beginnings of nature?
Melinda Baldwin: Oh, well, the glorious beginnings of nature arguably starts with the, the not so glorious firing or not firing demotion its first editor, Norman Lockyer. Norman Lockyer was an astronomer. He was a British astronomer. And. the mid 19th century in Britain, science was not necessarily a stable career lock.
Your's day job was working at the war office. He had a government job and astronomy was something that he really did in his spare time. And that's most people did scientific research at that time. It would've been very unusual for a man of lock year's generation to earn his living by doing scientific research.
The jobs just didn't exist yet. So Lockyer was, um, moving happily along, working at the war office, um, doing his [00:08:00] astronomical research on the side. And he picked up a little bit of extra money by doing some consulting for the McMillan and company publishing group or publishing house. The McMillans used Lockyer to consult on their scientific books, which were a very profitable wing of the McMillan Publishing empire. And so Lockyer had this really nice income knit together until there was a reorganization at the war office. He got demoted, his salary got cut almost in half, and he was incensed. He was furious, and he decided that he was going to find some other way to make his income. So he approached the McMillan company and asked them if they would consider bankrolling a new scientific periodical and installing him as its editor the McMillan company said yes. was the beginning of nature. That was how nature got its start. And it wasn't just about the money for lock year, I should say lock year had long, had this vision of a journal that would be [00:09:00] by scientific researchers, but read by a broad cross section of British elites. He and his friends were, were watching the rise of scientific periodicals that were written by journalists, and they were very frustrated that qualified scientific researchers didn't seem to be a big part of that conversation and didn't seem to be a big part of that popularization of science.
They felt like the science journalists often got things wrong. Lock's friend TH Huxley was very concerned that a lot of these science journalists seem to be women, which he didn't approve of. so they, they were really trying to create a periodical that was by scientific researchers, but for people who were laymen, for people who were not necessarily qualified researchers themselves.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah, and I think the, the interesting thing for me was also like really how it, and I think this was not, uh, so you also had this article, um, called, uh, in Referees We Trust, and you there had this, uh, [00:10:00] section, uh, which I copied out because I found it quite funny when you think of, you know, the first journal because we just imagine something quite different than whether it is today.
So you wrote there was not even a formal submission process. Denberg the founder, I if, uh, or who was Denberg again, just very briefly.
Melinda Baldwin: Oh, olden. Uh, so Henry Oldenberg was the founder of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, which was, it's, it's a
Periodical. It's a much older publication, uh, founded in the 1660s. It's generally considered the world's first scientific journal, and there's a whole lot of mythology about it that turns out not to be true, but
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah. Sorry, I, I forgot to mention what the journal was and, yeah, sorry. So anyway, uh, so about, this journal, he said there was not even a formal submission process. Denberg would simply print what interested him and what he thought might be a value to his readers, including not only experimental papers, but second and accounts of others experiments, discussions of recent books, and even his own personal correspondence.
And so, end quote, uh, and to me it seems like that's a [00:11:00] kind of nature was somewhat in that vein in a way. Um, maybe, well, more for the general public than for scientists per se. But I find it just funny when I read that because that's basically like a blog, right? For how, however we would think of it today, where people just, you collect some stuff you find interesting, you put it there.
Or like some people have YouTube channels that do roughly similar things. And I just find it funny that like these journals that have this very specific format today, basically it seems like they started out much more as a kind of very casual and loosely defined collection of different stuff about science.
Melinda Baldwin: They really do, um, older. The, the, the first scientific journals are much more eclectic than the ones that we know today. the thing with nature that I think shaped its content a lot in the early years is that it's a weekly publication. If you've worked in magazines, if you've worked in publications, weekly is a tough schedule. have to constantly [00:12:00] be generating new ideas, new pieces, and lock your always out there hustling to use the modern word for pieces that he could print in nature to meet this incredibly demanding weekly publication deadline. so there's a lot of stuff in nature that is going to make, uh, the, the first issues of nature, I should say, that is really gonna make a modern reader scratch their head and wonder what was anybody thinking? There are poems. There are. So the very first article ever published in Nature is a translation of Aphorisms by Goethe, the great German romantic poet. And that was very deliberate. That was, uh, Lockyer and his friend Huxley who did the translation. That was sort of their grand statement about the beauty and cultural importance of science and nature, uh, that the title they chose, But there's also a lot of stuff that is, is in there primarily because lock year has got to get an issue out. And I think that is something [00:13:00] important to keep in mind when reading these early issues of nature, just how much pressure lock year was under to keep the journal publishing on that rapid weekly schedule and to hopefully generate a profit for McMillan and Company so that they, they ended up, uh, so that they would continue to bankroll lock yours project.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah. Weekly schedule is also hard for podcasts. I've tried it. It's, uh, it's, if you wanna have guests, you know, it's genuinely because like, if you have to have a weekly thing, you have to, if you wanna take some time off, do more than weekly for the. For the rest of the year. Right. So, uh, I I, I imagine that, I mean, also one of the thing I imagine is that like, at the time, you know, I mean the printing press was obviously a thing, but I, I, I think it would be a bit easier to, to have a weekly schedule these days than, than back then when everything had to be sent by mail.
Presumably the printing wasn't maybe quite as, you know, autotomized and fast and that kinda stuff as it would be today, I imagine at least. So yeah, weekly schedule was, yeah. In hindsight, when you think about it, like, almost 200 years ago, it's crazy.[00:14:00]
Melinda Baldwin: Yeah. So, uh, John Maddox, who was a very influential 20th century editor of Nature once wrote in an essay that he thinks one of the big factors that enabled nature to do what it did in the early years was the royal Mail, which at the time delivered incredibly quickly, you know, some multiple times a day the postman would come. Um, I've done work on the correspondence of a physicist named John Tyndall, and we found letters in his correspondence where he and a friend are responding to each other multiple times in a day because they can just get hand their letter to the postman and it'll be taken to the other side of London, and then the reply will be back after lunch.
So the speed and reliability of the royal mail was a big factor in enabling this to go forward. But yeah, even so, it's, it's really astonishing to think about a weekly periodical. published in the age of, of steam powered printing, you know, you when you couldn't just post everything online, you actually had to print it, bind it, and have it delivered.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Do you [00:15:00] think he could have done that? Any other, in any other country or was really the particular royal male? I mean like, basically like the question is like, how serious was that statement by Maddox? Because I mean, genuinely, especially if you what you mentioned there was several a day. I mean, that's faster than I often correspond with people by email.
Right. Um,
Melinda Baldwin: Yes.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: that's yeah. Do you think you could have do you think there's actually some real, real truth to that or
Melinda Baldwin: Gosh.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: it more of a joke?
Melinda Baldwin: I. I don't know enough about what the male systems were like in Europe at that time, to, to say that, you know, oh, they couldn't have done it in Germany, or, oh, they couldn't have done it in Switzerland. I don't know that they could have done it in the United States at that time because the country was so much more scattered and so widespread and so, a lot of its population centers were so distant from each other. And that's actually one of the really interesting things that I learned as a historian of science was just how backwater the United States was in the 19th [00:16:00] century compared to the great scientific centers in Europe that, for example, uh, Ernest Rutherford, um, a great physicist who worked at McGill University in Canada. He was an important contributor to nature and he was offered a job at Columbia University and he turned it down flat. He didn't want to go to America because he considered it scientifically, not even second class, more like third class.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah, and I think you also wrote that he, uh, pretty much tried to get back to the UK very much from, from McGill, even though it was very well funded. It's just there was no one else there. And it was a bit lonely, I guess, compared to being in Cambridge or London or whatever.
Melinda Baldwin: Yes. Yeah, Rutherford. Um, from, from almost the moment he got to McGill, he was working to get his career to a point where he could be hired at a, a British University. He really wanted to go back to what he considered to be the, the epicenter of the scientific [00:17:00] world.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: So we mentioned the Royal mail earlier and the weekly schedule, but that's not just, you know, I guess we didn't mention it just as a curiosity, but from what I understand, that was also actually a crucial part to how nature became, I mean, maybe we should trace the history first a little bit more in terms of you know, it obviously didn't end up becoming something just for the general public, but um, in particular, in becoming important for scientists.
Uh, how was the weekly schedule important there? Like, why does that matter what the frequency is? You know?
Melinda Baldwin: Yeah, so it, the, the weekly schedule of nature ended up mattering largely for the letters to the editor section. So. What I saw studying the history of nature was that nature never really found the audience that Lockyer imagined it would have. He had this vision that nature would be read by barristers in London and members of Parliament and, um, men of letters, sort of the literary [00:18:00] scholars who were considered the intellectual giants of the day. And Nature never really had that kind of readership. And the big reason for it is that Lockyer was really, really set on having only scientific researchers write for his periodical. It turned out that by the 1870s and 1880s, researchers were much more interested in writing for each other. And what had changed from when lock year was a young man was that now there work. Paid permanent scientific jobs. There were things like university professorships and government funded researcher positions that a younger generation of scientists were working in, and they wanted to advance in those positions. And advancing in those positions depended not on the opinions of men of letters, but on the opinions of other men of science as they called themselves at the time. So lock your's. Contributors were much more interested in writing specialized articles that were of [00:19:00] interest to other researchers, and that really ended up pushing nature in a much more specialized direction. One of the reasons that scientific researchers really liked writing for nature, even though it had kind of this weird mismatch between audience and contributors. that there was a letters to the editor section that could get things in print very quickly because of that weekly schedule. And so British researchers found that if they wanted to engage in a scientific debate or if they had a new scientific finding that they really wanted to announce and get in print quickly, letters to the editor was perfect for that.
And so Nature's Weekly publication schedule actually ended up giving it an advantage when it came to attracting a certain type of contribution from men of science in Britain at the time. And I'm using that term specifically because that was what they would've called themselves. And the gendered element is very deliberate.
But I will stop there.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah. I think, I can't [00:20:00] remember where this was, but you also had this general, what I find kind of funny, the, um, at some point then there was a discussion about the term scientist, whether it should be used or not. So what was the, what was the problem there with the, with the, with the term,
Melinda Baldwin: Oh
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: why do I.
Melinda Baldwin: So the problem with the term scientist, uh, kind of depended on who you asked. In the 1920s, there was a debate in the letters to the editor column about whether nature should start using the word scientist. And the people who didn't want to use it had a couple of problems with it. So first of all, um, a lot of them thought that it was an Americanism, which it wasn't.
It was, it was a word invented in Britain by the British polymath, William Huel in the 1830s. But it was much more popular in America at that time. And so a lot of contributors thought that it was an Americanism and it was nothing that belonged in a respectable British journal. But there were also a lot of concerns that scientist was just too vague a word, [00:21:00] people preferred to be called a physicist, or a zoologist, or a botanist.
Something that I. their expertise more clearly. They were worried that scientist, as a term, was so vague that just about anyone could lay claim to it. And if they started calling themselves scientists, they would unintentionally be identifying themselves along with a bunch of other, uh, people who were, they considered essentially frauds. So they, they're really worried about kind of holding up the boundaries of their community and making sure that only respectable researchers are considered part of the community that they identify with.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah. I found that an interesting part in the, in the book on nature, about the like late 19th century when there was this whole, like who's part of the club, who's not part of the club and this whole, like who's allowed to comment on things? Who is, uh, I think, I can't remember what it was now exactly, but you had this one section where, um, you know, there was a [00:22:00]politician who'd once published a paper and then based on that he became fair of the Royal Society.
And then I. You know, 20 years later, I, I guess he'd been a politician and then wanted to comment on scientific matters nature. And one of the main criticism was like, well, you're a politician. What do you know? And uh, yeah, I just find it interesting how that in these like I guess the second half of the 19th century, that just as you said, like it became from like this, this gentlemanly kind of thing you do in your spare time to No, no, you have to be like someone who commits to this and does it full time.
Melinda Baldwin: Yes. And that, that to me is the big story of science in the 19th century. How it goes from being something that people do. For the sake of the love of science. And you know, often they have to invest their own income into it and they have to find another job to support their scientific work because it's not a source of income. And then by the end of the 19th century, it's actually a career trajectory. You can train to [00:23:00] become botanist or a zoologist or a physicist, and you can expect to earn a living doing that. You can expect to earn a living doing scientific research. that is a big change for the British scientific community.
And I think that it's a change that reading nature really helps you track.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah, and I think the you mentioned the first article in Nature, the Translation by Goethe, I mean he, I guess, you know, resembles that stereotype, at least in Germany, of someone who I. He kind of did everything, you know, to somebody. I mean, he was, he was a novelist, opposed a playwright. But then he also worked in court for decades and he wrote his scientific, uh, uh, books.
I dunno exactly, I dunno how well they, you know, stand up the time now, whether there's actually anything like valuable in there. But it's kind of interesting to me that that's actually the very first article starts off that way. And then from then on that just changes completely.
Melinda Baldwin: Yes. Yeah, I mean, Goethe is a great example of, uh, sort [00:24:00] of the, the, the classic polymath, the type of person who kind of, by the end of the 19th century just doesn't exist in the same way that he did at the beginning of the 19th century. And again, I'm saying he, because these spaces were, were very often closed to women by, by deliberate choice.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah, I mean, as you said, like people like Huxley very explicitly deliberate choice.
Melinda Baldwin: Yes. Huxley uh, Huxley did not have a high opinion of the intellectual abilities of women. Although I will say here that Norman Lockyer himself, the first editor of Nature, he was actually, uh, quite a supporter of women's rights especially by the Sanders of the Times. So, uh, when the physicist, Hertha Aton applied to be the first female fellow of the Royal Society, uh, Lockyer supported her application. He, uh, authorized editorials in favor of women in science being admitted to things like the Chemical Society. His second wife was, uh, a very, very, very active in the British Suffragette movement. So it wasn't [00:25:00] all men of science who were necessarily opposed to the equal rights of women, but you definitely see pockets of it among nature's early contributors.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah, I think he had a beautiful quote. Unfortunately I didn't write it down, but it was something like, again, it was also this discussion about, um. You know, you have to be a practicing scientist to actually
count As one. And then there was this discussion where, yeah, one woman was supposed to be allowed in or be allowed to comment on things or whatever.
And what was it, it was like, you know, basically like, why should we exclude these people from it? Was it like something like, just because they didn't have the privilege of being able to grow a mustache or something like that and,
Melinda Baldwin: Yes. Yes. And I, yeah, there, there, there's some wonderful early editorials in nature, um, arguing that women who are researchers ought to be admitted to these kinds of professional societies and ought to be welcomed as part of members of the community because they're doing research, because that is increasingly considered the rule for [00:26:00] membership in the scientific community.
It goes from. A system where the Royal Society of London kind of welcomes anyone who is sufficiently interested in science and also able to pay the dues to a system where you really have to have some serious research bonafides to be considered for fellowship in the Royal Society.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah. I mean, I think these days it's slightly harder than it was in the 19th century.
Yeah, just a little bit. Um, I mentioned at the beginning that this was, I guess we're, we're tracking three histories in a way, uh, that kind of go in parallel. One of the journal nature, two of what it means to be a scientist and three peer review.
Uh, so maybe what was going on with period at the time. How do you get into nature in the 19th century?
Melinda Baldwin: in the 19th
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: I.
Melinda Baldwin: honestly, in the first decades to get into nature, you have to, I mean, there, there is a minimum bar lock year is not just going to print anything. He's not gonna print flat earth stuff. He's not going to print, uh, you know, anything that he [00:27:00] considers crazy or disreputable. But if you clear a very minimum bar for scientific credibility and you submit it on time, you're gonna get into nature.
Because weeklies are incredibly content hungry. Lockyer does not have enough time to reject a whole lot of stuff, and he certainly does not have enough time to send anything out to referees. So one of the things that I learned while studying nature. Was that in the 19th century, there's really no system in nature that resembles what we would consider peer review today. And that surprised me a little bit. I, and I realized as I was working on this project that I didn't really know much about the history of peer review. I'd seen evidence in correspondence that other journals, like the philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London were, uh, using something like a referee system. But there definitely wasn't anything like that at nature. And so I kind of started tracking when I, when I [00:28:00] started to see evidence that referees were being used, it turns out that it was not until 1973. That every paper in nature had to have referee reports in order to be published. And I was really shocked when I found that out.
For a moment, I actually thought that I, I had uncovered some great scientific scandal and that, you know, I sort of went home from, from the interview with David Davies, the editor, who made it a policy that everything had to be refereed to before publication. And I thought, oh my God, can I print this?
Am I gonna get sued? Is this a big scandal? But it turns out that that's actually not that uncommon, that peer review as a system is far younger than I had understood it to be. And that this idea that something has to be peer reviewed to be scientifically legitimate or scientifically credible, really doesn't crop up until the Cold War. And that was kind of the genesis of my second book project, which is on the origins of peer review in the sciences.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: I mean, is is peer review to some extent then a bit of a, so [00:29:00]one, one thing I found interesting, I think you, um, wrote that you know, for example, I think in the Annalen der Physik or whatever it was it was mainly Max Planck, I believe, right? Who, who was kind of the editor of that and who just decided whether stuff was good enough or not.
And to some extent I think there's a kind of understanding that maybe he knows a bit of what he's talking about, um, as, as much as like bias and that kinda stuff might crop in. Like, you know, if you have an editor like that, it's, it's slightly different than if it's just a random person. Um, so is.
Peer review to some extent than just a natural consequence of the specialization of different research areas where at some point no one really knows anymore, all these different things, or is it, is it, is there something else that's also going on?
Melinda Baldwin: Yeah. So I would say that there's nothing necessarily natural about the story of peer review. That what struck me as I started to sort of unravel the story of where refereeing came from and how it spread [00:30:00] is how haphazard it was. so the very first publications that tended to adopt refereeing systems were publications affiliated with what, uh, what we call learned societies, places like the Royal Society of London, and the major reason that, uh, the Royal Society of London and other scientific societies wanted to have refereeing was not about making the papers better.
There was no such thing as a revise and resubmit decision. Um, so it's not about making the papers better, it's not about, uh, making the journal better. It's largely about social factors. It's largely about the desire to maintain the society's reputation by making sure that nothing obviously terrible is printed by the society.
And it's also about social cover for the editor, because it's very, very awkward in these kinds of gentlemanly spaces when a senior fellow who's been a member for a long time comes to you with an absolutely terrible paper, your [00:31:00] editorial board doesn't wanna print it. editor doesn't wanna be the person who sits down with him and says, okay, um, Bob this is really not great.
We can't print it. Telling Bob that the referees found the following problems with it is a much, uh, gentler solution. To the awkward social problem. So the history of peer review is a lot about social factors. In fact, I would argue that it's a lot more about social factors than it is about epistemological factors, about anything focused on making the science better or more true. And for a long time you have journals that use referees and you have journals that don't. And they're considered equally reliable by the researchers who read them because ultimately the readers think that the responsibility for whether or not an article is good and high quality work is not necessarily with the journal, it's with the author. And so you have a system where non-peer reviewed nature and [00:32:00] peer reviewed philosophical transactions or proceedings of the Royal Society of London, those are both legitimate places for a researcher to publish. Today, of course, if you've got a great article that you think is terrific science and you want it to get a hearing from your peers, you would never send it to a non-peer reviewed journal because that's not the case anymore that you can publish in someplace that's not peer reviewed and have it considered scientifically reliable or scientifically rigorous in the same way that a peer reviewed article is.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: To, so one thing I just realized whilst you were talking and, and this is, I mean this is a thought I've. Much before. So there's basically this difference between the arts and the sciences in terms of editing, uh, like outside editing. So like, so I did lots of music and, uh, especially my teenage years and the idea that, you know, some editor would come and tell Beethoven or Chopin whatever, well that's not really how you, or, you know, that's, that's not really how you write a symphony or a sonata or [00:33:00] whatever is ridiculous, right?
Like, they just do what they do and then they publish it and then people like it or they don't. And also, I dunno exactly what it was like with, you know, novelists or whatever of the century, but my impression has always been that, especially like, let's say before the 20th century you do what you do and either people like or they don't, you know, that's, that's kind of it.
Maybe there's somes like small editing around it, but not really that much. Now one big difference I guess is that, you know, in science you're trying to say that something's. Specifically true about the outside world. So that's the difference. Uh, but I'm just curious, like the should put, like, in a way these days it seems fairly obvious that having peer review might be a sensible idea, um, as many problems as there are with it.
But I'm just wondering like to what extent the did it maybe take that long for people to realize that it might be a good idea just because it's very specific to science in itself, or, um, do you see what I mean? Like that the basically like, especially [00:34:00] when everything was mixed in like the early 19th century like it seems kind of weird that let's take er again as an example.
Like he can write his plays and all these kinda different things and he can just do whatever he wants there. But then like, why would they then start having some random person comment on his scientific work?
Melinda Baldwin: Yeah, so I think that one of the reasons that we don't, um, so I, I think that often the way that we imagine the story of peer review is that it gets invented and then everyone is like, oh my God, what a great idea. Why weren't we all doing this? Let's all do it now. And that, that was the very much the story that I expected to find when I started, uh, working on this project.
That's not at all how it happened, and I think the big reason is that the system of trusting editors worked so well for so long. you had people like Max Planck at the Annalen der Physik who was basically selecting the papers that went into his journal by himself. But he's Max Plunk. He's, he's one of the greatest physicists of his generation.
You know, who is going to say, oh yeah, well, max should be [00:35:00] reaching out to all of these other people who are not as well qualified as he is to help him make the decisions. That sounds crazy to people. And a lot of journals had editorial boards of people who were experts in different fields. And so they had people in-house who could evaluate contributions without having to send them out for outside refereeing. And so it really wasn't obvious to a lot of working researchers or to the people who were running the journals that the kind of intensive, time intensive refereeing that learned societies were doing was something that they wanted to expand to all publications. The reason that it does expand in the late Cold War which is what I'm arguing in, in the book that I'm working on, or I'm sorry, it expands in the Early Cold War because science starts expanding. And so one of the case studies that I look at is the journal science, which is the American equivalent of nature. And I say that because very explicitly in the first issue of science, that the first editor [00:36:00] says, we want science to be the American version of nature. But what science find the Science editorial Board finds in the 1950s is that there's been a huge expansion in federal funding for science from the US federal government. And there are more young scientists being trained. They are producing more papers, they are sending more submissions to science, and the editorial board is just drowning. They absolutely cannot keep up with the volume of submissions. And so they decide to start consulting referees, not because they think it's a better system than what they've been doing, but because they need the work, they need help.
They cannot keep up with the volume of submissions that's been happening. So it's not about making the journal better, it's about reducing the workload. For the editorial board, there's this wonderful quote in the, their editorial board meeting minutes where they say. The editorial board agrees that the task of reviewing and suggesting revisions on dozens [00:37:00] of scientific papers is not pleasant, satisfying work. And so basically they, you, you, you can feel how exhausted they are and how tired they are of having to go through all these papers themselves, and that's the point at which they pivot to a refereeing system.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: So mean, as you mentioned, you are working on a, you know, a book project on peer review. Uh, so I've only read your article, uh, scientific Autonomy, public Accountability in the Rise of Peer Review in the Cold War United States which is published in the beautifully named journal isis. Um, I'm totally sure where that comes from, but, um, I guess the point you're making there is that it's also, I mean, as the, as the name suggests, it's about accountability, it's about justifying you know, your work and that you deserve to get paid and continue doing this kinda stuff. So what's the, could you maybe briefly describe kind of how you got to that conclusion?
I.
Melinda Baldwin: Yeah. [00:38:00] So in studying the history of refereeing, I realize that you, you have this 19th century story of some journals use it, some journals don't. Researchers publish in both kinds of journals and, and it's sort of a, a mishmash of systems. So I got interested in the question of how did we get from that situation to the situation we have today where if you are a scientist, you publish in peer reviewed journals.
End of story. No other type of publication is considered valid for promotion, tenure, hiring, et cetera. What I found was that a lot of the rhetoric about peer review being something central to science could be traced to a very specific historical moment. And that very specific historical moment is fights over how to award US federal grant funding for the sciences. in the 1960s and 1970s, you start to see legislators push back on all of the money that the US federal government has [00:39:00] been spending on the sciences. As an economically tough period, especially as you get into the seventies, there's a period of stagflation where there's high inflation combined with high unemployment. government is looking for ways to cut the budget and organizations like the NIH and the NSF get in the government cross hairs, and you have legislators start to argue that. Scientists should not be involved in deciding how the federal government spends its money because you've got these systems at NIH and NSF where scientists give advice on which grant proposals they think are the best and they think should be funded. And there are certain fact forces within the US federal government that say, that's not the way we should be doing things. Why are these outside scientists being allowed to come in and tell the feds how to spend their money? And the scientists respond that, well, we're giving expert advice. We are giving peer review the applications for grant money.
And if you wanna fund [00:40:00] the best science, you have to use peer review. And that's really where you start to see the argument. Take hold. That peer review is something central to science. It's something that you have to have in order for science to work properly. So basically what I'm, what I argue in that article is that the reason that scientists start describing peer review is something central to their work is to preserve their autonomy when it comes to determining what kinds of grants, what basically how science should be funded going forward.
In the United States, they don't want legislators telling them which grants to fund. They don't tell, certainly don't want legislators telling them which research projects to pursue. So they lean on peer review as a way of maintaining space for scientists to help decide where the money goes. For scientific research.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: So I have one, uh, a very broad question here. Because I, you know, no very little history. So what, whilst I was reading the article, [00:41:00] I thought it was very interesting, but part of me also thought like, but like, how do you know that's where it comes from in a way, right? Like the, the kind of okay.
Like it started becoming more popular after World War ii. Let's, maybe it was even that, maybe it was even at the same time, right? But like, so I'm just curious, like from a, from the spectrum of someone who's, you know, not a lot of, read a lot of historical research, like how do you know that? Like how can, or like, how do you think about these kind of factors and establishing that is an important reason and not just like, you know, some story is a co uh, basically some stories, a couple of scientists taught, some politicians, and they never thought about it again after that.
Melinda Baldwin: Yeah, it's, um, tracing the origins of, of an idea is really hard. Um, so, uh, in, in, in the book that I'm working on, um, I, I have, I have a line early in the book where I say, okay, if, if we're imagining, you know, who, what was the first instance of peer review, it's probably some mathematician in an ancient civilization who, uh, you know, asks his friend, [00:42:00] does this look right? Before committing it to, uh, sort of a, a more permanent, uh, form of recording tracing the origins of an idea is hard. What I try to do in my work is trace language. Where do I see people saying that peer review is something central to science? Where does that kind of language first crop up? So that means that I look at a whole lot of discussions about how science should be evaluated. I read a whole lot of correspondence between editors and grant officers. how they describe their jobs and how they think of the role of the referee. And I try to kind of plot out patterns and see where I start to identify language about the referee being something central to science really emerge.
And so I think it takes hold among scientists and among the broader public during these, uh, controversies about federal grant review in the seventies. But I think that one of the groups that really starts using this kind of language is actually sociologists and philosophers of [00:43:00] science in the 1950s and 1960s. So you have this group of scholars that's interested in studying scientific institutions they start to identify the refereeing process as something that is central to scientific knowledge making. And uh, in my book, I specifically call out a pair of Columbia sociologists Robert Merton and Harriet Zuckerman, longtime collaborators who did an incredibly influential study of refereeing at physical review.
And I really think that a lot of this language about the referee as central to scientific knowledge making comes outta that field of science studies, which was not a finding I was expecting, but which I think is really, really interesting.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: So it's basically the argument that the sociologists start picking up on this and that then influences how scientists do their work, or is it more that this is a commentary that's running parallel to it and. You know, because basically the, the reason I'm asking is that I've, unfortunately, I can't remember where I read this, but I remember reading [00:44:00] somewhere once from a very eminent scientist who wrote like a, I can't remember who, who it was, but like one of those like big, big science names was saying something like, you know, even like philosophy of science is kind of like, I think, think the particular criticism was like, you know, people are like Francis Bacon and people say that's where the scientific methods started, but the guy basically didn't really know what he was talking about and people ignored him until like a hundred years later or something like that.
So I was just reminded of that. Um, so I'm just curious, like, is the argument specifically that they influenced the way scientists thought about the value of peer review? Um, or, yeah.
Melinda Baldwin: Yeah, that is the argument. And I think one thing to remember, or, or one thing that I think is important for, for understanding that claim is that people like Merton were widely read among scientists. So in the 1990s we had this period that, um, we call the science wars, where sociologists, philosophers and historians of science found themselves very much at odds with [00:45:00] scientists about the way that the field of science was described, about the way that scientific truth was conceptualized. And I think that a lot of modern scholars have kind of the science wars as their point of reference for how sociologists, philosophers and historians, on the one hand interact with scientists on the other. That is not at all true in the fifties and sixties when Merton and his contemporaries are active they are interested in scientific institutions.
They are interested in describing what they believe makes the scientific community unique. And scientists are really interested in their work and they find it very compelling and very influential. You see the works of people like Merton and Thomas Kuhn and uh, Michael Palani. It's widely reviewed in scientific publications like Physics Today, like nature, like science. are enthusiastic about Merton and his findings. You've got the US federal government coming specifically to Merton to get him to consult on [00:46:00] their grant making processes at the NSF because they see him as the great expert on how to identify good science and how science ought to be run. So I think that's one important thing to keep in mind when, when thinking about this argument is that in the fifties and sixties. These groups of sociologists were very respected among natural scientists, and they were seen as experts in what they did and people worth listening to.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Is so you mentioned that in in nature only in, I think you said 73, it became standard, uh, practice. That peer review was, uh. Apply to every article, research article. I guess there's still different types of things that I published there, but was that, was, was nature late to the game or was that pretty, pretty standard that most journals until that time had a kind of, a bit of a you know, as you said, some of them had it, some of them didn't.
So basically, I guess my question is like, okay, so the argument for peer review starts in the fifties, sixties, seventies. Was, was then at that point, like peer review [00:47:00] pretty much universally accepted, or, or did it take even longer? Yeah. What's the story there?
Melinda Baldwin: It definitely took even longer. It's not, um, there's not sort of one moment where suddenly everybody adopts peer review and sees it as completely necessary. of the findings that really surprised me as I was working on this project is that during the Cold War, America seen as unusually reliant on referees.
And so for a British commercial periodical, something that is for-profit that is not affiliated with a learned society, 1973 is actually not late to be adopting these kinds of systematic refereeing systems. That's actually pretty typical, because commercial periodicals were often much later than learned society, uh, periodicals in adopting refereeing systems. so it's definitely not late when we consider the fact that nature is a commercial journal and that it's outside the United States. because there, I've, I've found a [00:48:00] lot of correspondence and a lot of, uh, published editorials indicating that the Americans were seen as being kind of weirdly obsessed with this strange quote unquote peer review idea. Um, as late as 1989 the British Medical Journal, the Lancet was running editorials saying that, oh, in the US there, they're weirdly focused on peer review. But don't worry at the Lancet editors make the decisions. We, we consult reviewers for advice, but they, they don't make the decisions. We editors make the decisions.
And that's 1989.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Not that long ago. Yeah. , One kind of very easy question about the future is kind of like, yeah. In a way, like where, I mean, the que the question's obvious, right? Like, where's this going? Um, because to some extent now it feels like, I mean, so number one in the, the fields that I care about, there's a journal eLife that now basically is.
Technically they're not a peer review journal anymore. 'cause I think the editors basically say, okay, we, you know, you [00:49:00] have to pass right now the, the current, um, so I think they implemented this like a year or two ago. Um, you still have to like desk rejection, you're still at that stage. But once the editor think like, okay, this is interesting enough, they send it out to peer review and then the authors can publish it either in the original form or whatever.
So, but the, the peer reviews will be published alongside it. But there's not this stage anymore where you say like, oh no, look, the peer review has found this problem, this problem. Therefore we're gonna reject it. But instead they just publish the peer reviews and the authors are, from what I understand, they can publish the article kind of the way they want to.
Either the original version or they update it with comments by the people and that kinda stuff. And um, and you know, obviously that's not happening in, in isolation, you know, archive and these kind of things. And preprints, uh, have been. Uh, well around for, I guess about 20 years now, or 30 or something like that, um, in various forms, uh, and very widely accepted in, in some fields, especially I [00:50:00] understand mathematics and well, the more mathematics stuff like physics and computer science.
A as a standalone product, right? From what I understand often, not just like in psychology, neuroscience, where you publish it as a way to get it out early and then you still have to publish it. And you know, one thing I'm hearing more and more these days is that editors are really struggling to get peer reviews for articles and that it's just really hard to get good people to, you know, spend the time to basically, especially if it's a for-profit journal, give them free labor.
So yeah, I'm just curious kind of where you, amongst all of this, you see like there's rise of peer review becoming more and more accepted and now. I dunno, it feels like we're going back again because it's just as a whole functioning system, maybe not working particularly well.
Melinda Baldwin: Yeah. So the thing that I really feel is happening right now is that the modern peer review system has a labor problem. In the 1950s, the editorial board of science started reaching out to referees [00:51:00] to solve their own labor problem. But now. The size of scientific research has become so large that it may have outgrown the solution that the science editors found, which was to, to start relying on external referees. Because yeah, studies have consistently shown that acceptances for peer reviews have dropped. And they've, they've dropped a lot during the pandemic as people were, were kind of triaging trying to keep their workloads manageable while also having their kids at home all the time. Uh, I, a situation in which I found myself certainly, and we're also in a situation where full-time jobs for scientific research are becoming more and more competitive. if you are a young researcher and you're in a postdoc, or if you're a young researcher in a tenure track job and you know that in six years you've gotta submit your CV to find out whether you get to keep your job or not. You know, do you wanna spend two hours in your laboratory working on your own research or two hours refining your own paper that's going to, you know, [00:52:00] help get you to that next career milestone? Or do you wanna give two hours of your time for free to Elsevier review someone else's paper? And so a lot of scientists just out of self preservation are having to say no to the papers that they are asked to referee. And, you know, none of that I I, I certainly don't wanna accuse scientists of being selfish or self-interested, or not ever doing this because oh, I ran across a study that, uh, calculated the number of man hours that scientists spend every year on a refereeing, and it's somewhere in the billions. It's, uh, it, it, it was a really eye popping number.
I'll have to see. I'll look it up and see if I can find it for you. You know, scientists still still do this as much as they can, but every editor that I've met and to talk to about this project has told me it's so hard to get people to say yes to referee reports these days. So, yeah, I, I think modern peer review has a labor problem and. There's no real easy solution in [00:53:00] my view, because a lot of the experimental forms of peer review that I read about, like people you know find papers and comment on them publicly, instead of soliciting referees or having referees kind of consult with each other and with the editor to generate just one report that the authors have to respond to, or writing a referee report that's going to be published alongside the original article the way eLife does. I think all of those are really good and interesting innovations. None of them solve the labor problem.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: And you? Yeah, there's no obvious solution on the horizon.
Melinda Baldwin: mean the, yeah, the, the, the solution is, is more permanent academic jobs for for, for scientists and maybe finding some way to confer professional rewards for doing referees or for doing referee reports. But you suggest that, there's often a lot of pushback because one of the features of the referee system, um, for the scientists who were arguing that this was central to science in the seventies, [00:54:00] was that peer reviewers were supposed to be completely disinterested.
You weren't supposed to be getting paid for it. You weren't supposed to be getting any professional credit for it. The reason that it worked, according to the scientists who really pushed it as a central feature of science was that peer reviewers had no personal stake. In doing this, they were doing it solely for the good and the support of the scientific community. And whenever I see somebody say, propose a, a small honorarium for doing peer review, I will immediately see scientists pushing back and saying, but that's not what peer review is for. We're not supposed to be getting personal benefits from it. They're really uncomfortable with that idea, and I certainly understand why it, it is antithetical to how we've been taught the peer review system works.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah, I find it interesting because, you know, especially at, at my career stage, I finished my PE or I started my postdoc, uh, less than a year ago. There's ob there is an actual benefit to doing peer review because you can, you know, put another, [00:55:00] the journal on your CV that you reviewed for that kind of stuff.
Obviously at some point you lose that incentive. But that's, I think that's pretty much like, I mean, for me it's also useful, you know, to, to see the other side. Um, so, you know, sometimes you can get very annoyed with peer reviews and then you review a paper yourself and you go like, oh, I'm annoyed about the thing that they were annoyed about that may, maybe my initial article was just annoying in certain ways.
So like the, it seems like, you know, if you had a more junior position, there is an actual like, benefit to doing it, to understanding the whole thing, but yeah, at some point it's just, I guess like a sense of obligation or something like that. And yeah, I do wonder what happens because then again, as soon as you start paying stuff, well I guess I don't know what would happen, whether that would just be people who would just be doing that all day.
But then at some point they're also just editorial staff for a journal, right.
Melinda Baldwin: Yeah. Yeah. It's sort of, they, they become freelance editorial staff and, [00:56:00]It's, it's a challenge for sure. And, uh, I, I can kind of feel, um, editor's desperation as they try to solve this problem. I, uh, I have, I have a dear friend who, um, has a physics PhD, got a very prestigious postdoc, ended up transitioning out of academia because he, he couldn't find a job in a permanent job in the sciences in his field. And, uh, he works for a bank now, uh, doing data science and he still gets referee requests. You know, people look up where he is now based on the papers that he published as a postdoc, and they're like, uh, dear Dr. Jones, this paper cites your work. Can you please review it for us? And, know, he, he always has to answer no, like, that's not what his job is paying him to do. And he certainly doesn't wanna donate his free time to writing a referee report when he feels 12 years out of date on the current science. Yeah, I mean, it's, it's, it's a problem at a whole lot of levels.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah, so I guess, is it, is it just the kind of situation where. [00:57:00]You know, the problem's just going to keep getting worse until we reach some sort of, some sort of form of crisis when like something has to happen and then we'll see what, or is it just like different solutions, people will suggest different solutions and then we'll, you know, organically find out maybe this works a bit better than this and yeah.
I don't know. Because it seems like, you know, the way that yeah, I mean, as you said, I like, I guess in the way the whole thing is that more and more people are scientists. Uh, so there's more and more, you know, like the initial problem from the whatever it was, early 20th century. And I don't see that changing drastically anytime soon.
Uh, even if it just stays at the con current level. Right. Yeah. Yeah, it is interesting because it seems like there's a big problem that everyone's aware of, and no one really knows what to do.
Melinda Baldwin: Yeah. And I, I think that one of the problems is that, uh, you know, there is one obvious solution that would solve the labor problem in one fell swoop, and it's getting rid of peer review.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Sure.
Melinda Baldwin: that I have seen seriously floated among some science, science [00:58:00]communication scholars among some philosophers of science. it's a solution that I don't think is going to go forward for very good reasons. And the major concern that I have as, as a historian of peer review is that what I've seen in the history of peer review is that the quality of science. only ever a minor consideration the way that peer review changes science and in the way scientists adopt peer review. I almost never see people saying, oh, well we have to use referees because they'll make the science better, or because they'll make the journal better. It is much more about social factors. It's much more about factors like trust and respect between scientists or trust and respect between science and outside stakeholders.
And the thing is that scientists have for decades described peer review as the key to scientific credibility. We talk about peer review by qualified scientists as [00:59:00] the way that you know that a scientific paper is more reliable than some blog entry on an anti-vaxxer website. So peer review has become key to public trust in scientific reliability. You can't just get rid of that in one fell swoop and expect that there are not going to be any consequences for public trust in science. And I think that pe people who are interested in eliminating peer review are, are aware of that as a problem. But I haven't really seen any good solutions for how do you maintain that relationship with a broader public and with broader stakeholders. If you start overhauling or getting rid of the thing that you've told them, make science special.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah, I mean, one thing I heard once, uh, someone say is something that, well, I heard someone say that someone else said, so it's a bit indirect, but, uh, it's an interesting idea. I thought that basically in the future there will [01:00:00] be maybe you know, there will still be the big journals. There'll stupid nature, there'll be science, there'll be whatever.
But like all this other stuff that currently, you know, is, uh, you know, probably like this be like 95% of the research or something like that, right? Um, all these like small journals that, uh, you publish in that uh, you know, is obviously important for ative science, that stuff. But that maybe all that stuff will kind of just be preprints.
And then when we have like the big, basically when people wanna make like a big statement every once in a while, then that will be a, you know, peer review journal and everything else is just gonna be work in progress more. I dunno, I find it funny because in a way it goes back to, you know, in many ways the way it was not exactly back in the day, but, you know, when they wrote the, the books and that kind of stuff.
Uh, so more like you have like the, the major events and then yeah. You know, almost like when I think back to like, uh, I guess what you wrote about the mid 19th century you had, it was kind of expected that people published their major books where they have their major discoveries. [01:01:00] And then the kind of smaller stuff was done at the meetings of the societies and the, these kind of things.
Because in, in a way that would, you know, I guess it would to some extent still maintain certain standards for, for certain aspects while reducing the workload. But I also don't know whether that just yeah, just doesn't solve the problem at all. I find it very difficult to,
if I do it.
Melinda Baldwin: the difficulty too, the, the, one of the difficulties is that the peer reviewed paper has become sort of the relevant unit that people count. For job applications, tenure and promotion. part of why we have such a voluminous publication of, of scientific papers is that people are trying to, uh, make their CV look better.
They're trying to get as many papers into print as possible to illustrate that they are productive working scientists. And long as we're working in a system that counts only peer reviewed research as sort of the unit [01:02:00] you know, can go towards tenure and promotion in the sciences we're gonna have a system where people insist on only publishing and peer reviewed journals and they're not just gonna wanna post something on the archive and call it a day that they're going to, you know, continue to push to publish in some kind of peer reviewed journal so that they know that their work counts for their career. I think that until those career incentives really change. I don't know that I see a big shift coming in how scientists publish. saying change is impossible. In fact, I, I think that we're, we're in something of a moment of crisis given, given the labor problem, um, associated with peer review. But I, I think that finding a solution that acknowledges career realities for young scientists, that keeps in mind this question of public trust and respectability that, you know, maintains some of the features that we might like about peer review, like having consistent communication between you and your scientific peers [01:03:00] about your work. A lot of moving parts and I, I don't think that there's an obvious path forward for scientific publishing. I, I think that we may just have to try out a couple of different solutions and, and see what sticks.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah, I mean, I'm definitely seeing some, so some things I'm seeing now that, you know, I've started writing like fellowship and grant applications and these kind of things. It is interesting to see that most of them that I've applied to for so far, well, not most of 'em, about half of them. Uh, so half of them had, you know.
No restrictions in a way, in what you can say about what you did with your research. But then there's also others where they say, you know, so the, the Swiss National Foundation right now, or Swiss National Science Foundation, uh, for example, there, they have this narrative CV now where you have like three boxes, you can, you can mention like three accomplishments.
I mean, within that you can cite multiple papers. So in a way it doesn't really eliminate the problem per se. Um, because I guess someone who cites, you know, four of their own papers and each of them versus three still looks like they [01:04:00] did more. But I don't know, I am seeing some of these things where people say like, tell us about like the five best publications or most relevant of yours, or something like that.
I mean, again, there are others who just have none of those restrictions. But I do wonder whether, whether just saying like, kind of just show me your best work to some extent eliminates the whole like, oh, let's try and get papers, you know, 21 and 22 out. Also just for the sake of it.
Melinda Baldwin: Yeah, I, I, I think that, that, that is one solution that seems promising to me that maybe some of the professional rewards could shift to on a scholar's, you know, three best or five best, depending on the career stage, rather than considering the, the overall length of, of the cv. Um, and I think that one, one nice feature of that system is that it gives scholars, the opportunity scientists specifically the opportunity to talk about what they specifically did in a collaboration. Because, you know, it's not the case anymore that most of the scientists best papers are going to be single authored things that he or she did entirely on their own. Right. They're [01:05:00] working, they're working with a, a large number of collaborators. And so giving, giving people the opportunity to talk about their three best papers and what they did to contribute to them might actually be a really good way of, you know, solving this, this sort of, um, ballooning CV issue.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Okay. So that's a semblance of a start of a solution. But yeah, I mean, obviously I didn't expect you to have a, you know, by the way, I figured it out. Yeah.
Melinda Baldwin: at predicting the future. I should, I should have admitted that at the start. Uh, historians are terrible
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: I mean, everyone is right
Melinda Baldwin: come next.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: is,
Melinda Baldwin: I feel like historians are particularly bad at it somehow. Maybe because we, we feel like we should be able to predict what happens next based on what's happened in the past.
But it turns out history is not a predictive science.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: You mean like, because it's easy in quota marks to draw a straight line through a couple of events. You know, it, it's maybe leads to the prediction like, oh, then it's just gonna continue. Like even if it's all straight line, living's, [01:06:00] curved line or whatever, right? Like you can, you connect the dots, but like it's going to depend on influences that we don't even know our influences right now or whatever.
Melinda Baldwin: yeah.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah. Yeah. Well, anyway, on your website, you also mentioned one thing that I thought was kind of interesting or to, to be completely honest, uh, my, my note on this is Tyndall. Why, because you have, you basically say that you are part of a group of people who transcribe all the letters by a guy called Tyndall who lived in the 19th century or something like that.
Uh, for the correspondence at least. What's that? What's going on there
Melinda Baldwin: Oh,
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: and who is Tyndall? Because like, yeah, I didn't know who he was. I mean, he, he appears in your nature book, so I dunno whether that gives a clue to how you found out about him, but
yeah.
Melinda Baldwin: Um, and, and that, that is actually how I got the job. So when I was finishing my, uh, my PhD [01:07:00] at Princeton, um, I applied for a couple of jobs and the job that I got was as a postdoc at York University in Toronto, working on the John Tyndall correspondence project. John Tyndall was an Irish born physicist.
He was born in 1820. We think his birthdate was not terribly well recorded. So there's, there's some debate about whether it was 1820 or 1821 or 1822. Anyway, he's born roughly 1820 and he ended up moving to London. Um, he got his PhD in Germany, so he teaches himself German in, in the span of a couple of months, enough German to go to Germany and to get a, a doctoral degree in, uh, mathematics.
And then he comes back to the UK and he makes his career as a lecturer. He's the, a professor at the Royal Institution. He delivers these public lectures on science and what it's doing today, they're, they're kind of grand spectacles, very fashionable tickets for, for London society. [01:08:00] he's also the person who uh, carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas, where he's, he's one of the first people there.
It's, uh, kind of a case of simultaneous discovery, but he is the most famous person who, uh, made that scientific claim. so the, um, the, the project that I was hired to work on was to transcribe all of his correspondence. Uh, so all of the letters to and from John Tyndall and, uh, Bernie Lightman, uh, my postdoctoral advisor at, at York University.
He wanted to do this because he's interested in science popularization in how scientists talk to the broader public about why science is interesting and important. And Tyndall is the perfect person to study if you are interested in that question. Because he was incredibly famous in his lifetime. He did a whole lecture tour of America.
He delivered a famous address at the British Association for the Advancement of Science, arguing for, uh, scientific naturalism, basically taking supernatural explanations and religion out of [01:09:00]science. The professor of the Royal Institution, he's very influential on, sort of London society's understanding of what science is. So Tyndall is a perfect person to study. If you are interested in this question of science popularization and how science goes from something in the 19th century, which is a li considered a little weird, and, um, not all that intellectually reputable to at the end of the 19th century in Britain, science does have social respect and scientists do have a much more secure place in society. So that's kind of the, the story that I see the Tyndall letters telling. And it's, it's been a lot of fun. I mean, there, there are just, uh, pockets of the most unusual things that you would never expect to find in the correspondence of a scientist. So, um, I'm working on volume 19 now, which is, uh, towards the end of Kindle's life.
And he's corresponding with people like this actress named Fanny Kemble, who she's fascinating. She's British. She kind of got swept off her feet by an [01:10:00] American heir, and she marries him in England and she moves to his plantation in Georgia she is promptly horrified by chattel slavery.
She just, she, she is appalled by what she sees, and she becomes a very outspoken abolitionist. She ends up divorcing the plantation owner. Her, she, she has to give up custody of her daughters, but as soon as they reach their age of majority, they're on a boat to England to be reunited with their mom. Uh, she resumes her acting career. She publishes a very widely read book of her memoirs about what she saw while she lived in Georgia. She's a fascinating person and Tyndall just meets her in the Alps where he has a second home and they correspond about mountaineering. And the time that Tyndall was nice enough to show them, you know, an easy walk for ladies to do in the foothills of the Alps.
And you get to meet, you know, quote unquote, all of these just really fascinating 19th century figures. So I've, I've had a lot of fun working on the project.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: So the actual work is that then. There's an archive somewhere where [01:11:00] people have, so is is, is it mainly there's an archive with all the letters and then it's, you know, reading and transcribing them? Or is it also the process of getting letters that are, you know, scattered throughout the world?
Melinda Baldwin: Yeah, great question. By the time I came onto the project, um, Bernie and the rest of the project members had already collected all of the letters and they had digitized copies. So early on in the project, I oversaw the initial transcription of the letter where basically, you know, you would just put up the handwritten copy and then you would type out what you saw, and then it would go through a couple of stages, because often there were words in the handwritten copies that were difficult to read.
And so you'd kick it up to a higher level transcriber and you'd say, okay, I'm not sure about this word. So I put it in brackets. And then the higher level transcriber would say, oh, well that's obviously this name of a Swiss city you've never heard of. And so that's what I was doing early in the project, and now we're in the stage where we actually get to publish the letters.
So we're taking those transcriptions and we're annotating them with information like, [01:12:00] okay, who is this Fannie Campbell person? What is this Swiss city that she refers to in her letter? Things like that. Just, uh, giving historical context to enable a reader who, you know, doesn't have exhaustive knowledge of the 19th century sciences to understand what, what these people are talking about in their letters.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Is this project, like, I guess my question is a bit, whether it's a means to an end or whether it's also an end in and of itself. So like, is the, is the idea also to have you know, a full understanding of this man's life and then a biography can be written based on that or something like that? Or is it also just, I dunno, I've never really read someone's personal correspondence.
Um, or is that also like part of it, just having those annotated books and that's, that's kind of it. And it's not supposed like that's where it's supposed to go and not any further.
Melinda Baldwin: I think our, our vision for, for the volumes of Tyndall correspondence is that this is going to continue to be a research [01:13:00] resource for people who kinda can't go to every single archive all over the world to see all of these letters. Because the thing is that there wasn't just like one archive that we got to pull from.
A lot of Ty's letters were held at the royal institution, and so we got a lot of letters that way. But we've got letters in the correspondence from the British Library, from the University of Cambridge library, from, you know, random libraries all over the world that just happened to have a couple of Tyndall letters somewhere because he was corresponding with, with a person who is in their papers. So in collecting all of these, yeah, we do really wanna give people a full picture of Tyndall, the person, what his life was like, where his interest in the sciences came from, et cetera. we also really hope that it's going to be a resource for any historian working on 19th century science because there are things like correspondence with this famous abolitionist. There's a lot of discussion of health and medicine and what it's like to visit the doctor and to have a chronic illness In the 19th century Tyndall [01:14:00]struggle, had a lifelong struggle with insomnia, um, ended up addicted to opiates. Uh, a lot of his friends write about their health problems and their letters, so it really gives an interesting window onto 19th century medicine. And there's also a lot of stuff in there about politics. Tyndall Irish born, he very passionately believed that Ireland should be part of the United Kingdom. He was not a supporter of Irish independence at all. And so there's a lot of correspondence in the letters between Tyndall and, and uh, like-minded people who really were against this idea of Irish home rule.
And I think it gives a really interesting window into why someone born in Ireland, who is very proud of his Irish heritage, ended up on the conservative side of that debate, arguing that the Irish should not get home rule.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Hmm. Well, one, I dunno how, how directly relevant this is, but it just reminded me of something which is, it's kind of funny to me that like how letters are such a useful tool for historian biographers. Uh, so I [01:15:00] remember, um, what's his name? Bta Isaacson, uh, who did I remember when he wrote the Steve Jobs biography.
Uh, you know, someone, he was still alive when he started doing it. Um, and then I believe died during the writing process or something like that. Uh, but he'd also written biographies about Einstein and other people who'd, you know, lived during the letter era. And one thing I found fun is that he mentioned that like, you can find Einstein's letters, but you can't find Steve Jobs's emails from like the 1990s.
Like, there's just, all of that stuff is just gone basically. So I, I find it kind of funny that like, you know, I. Letters and paper are a very good way of storing information for 200 years or something, even if it's I mean, you know, some random letter he sent off to someone, uh, yeah. 200 years ago, or not 200, but you know what I mean?
Yeah.
Melinda Baldwin: Yeah, paper, uh, paper and pen turns out to be a remarkably, uh, stable technology.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah. [01:16:00] Um, Okay. So, uh, maybe final question about Tinder then. So that's just something you are continuing working on with some other people until it sounds like you're, then you've, assuming you did this chronologically, you're reaching the, the end of his correspondence or like what's the, what's the kind of plan with that kind of project?
If it reaches its end, yeah.
Melinda Baldwin: We're, we're really close to the end. I'm, uh, I'm a co-editor of Volume 19, along with my, uh, colleague Shane Stein. And volume 20 is scheduled to be the last volume of letters. So we are really close to the finish line with the project, which is, is exciting. You know, I've, I've been working on this since, since 2010 when I finished my PhD and started my first job.
So it's really thrilling to imagine all 20 volumes sitting on a shelf next to each other representing all that work by, by so many scholars all over the world.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Uh, and then you wanna do more stuff on Tinder or just like a complete different project or, or just not decided yet?
Melinda Baldwin: not [01:17:00] decided yet. I, I have this idea that I might work on the, the career of a, a psychologist named Frederick Worthham. He, so he's famous, uh, in the US because he came up with a theory that reading comic books led to criminality. And he was very passionate about this
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: So when was this?
Melinda Baldwin: this was, uh, the, the fifties and sixties.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Okay.
Melinda Baldwin: So he's very passionate about this idea. He's a very skilled public communicator, and he ends up being really influential over the US comics code. So because of his research there are actually rules put in place about what can and cannot be depicted in comic books and where comic books can and cannot be sold. And really interested in his story because it, it's about this intersection of scientific expertise and public trust and which are all work, uh, sort of issues that I got interested in working on the peer review book. And Worthham has papers at the Library of Congress. So, uh, once, once my, [01:18:00] my peer review book is, is finally done and in the hands of the publisher and outta my hands, I may start poking around there.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah. Yeah. But I guess it's also slightly rude to ask like the, not even the current projects for the Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Okay. Cool. Is the, is the peer review book then in, its in its final stages or what's the
Melinda Baldwin: It is, it's actually currently in the hands of my peer reviewers.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Ah, okay.
Melinda Baldwin: on peer review gets, gets very meta at a lot of weird points. Uh, so right now, um, the completed first draft of the manuscript is in the hands of referees. They're gonna send me their feedback. Uh, I will revise in accordance with that feedback, and hopefully by the end of the year I will have the, the finished book in the hands of the press and it'll move from there to publication.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Exciting. Unless there are anything else, I'll go to the recurring questions. Okay. Uh, so at the end of each episode, I ask my guests to send three questions, and by now, actually usually with the same phrasing. Also, it's kind of just like [01:19:00] over time burnt itself into it. Uh, the first question is, what's a book or paper you think more people should read?
Can be famous or, uh, unknown, old or new to something you think? Yeah, more people should read.
Melinda Baldwin: Okay, so I will, I would admit up top that I am about to recommend a book by my graduate advisor.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Okay.
Melinda Baldwin: I, I get, I get no kickbacks from this, uh, I, I, I get no, uh, no preferential treatment of any sort. But a book that I think more people read should read is The Pseudoscience Wars by Michael Gordon. I love this book because it's the story of somebody who was a scientific outsider. usually the way that we think of stories of scientific outsiders in the history of science is that, but they were right all along and now they've been vindicated This is the story of a scientific outsider who has not been vindicated. for very good reasons. Um, his name was Immanuel Velikovsky and he had this theory that, uh, the reason that there is so much [01:20:00] catastrophe imagery in mythologies from all over the world that there was a major collision with what is now the planet Venus sometime in our ancient history. And that the reason that we have things like the Grand Canyon and the reason that we have things like the Noah's Ark flood myth and all of these other mythology, uh, mythological tales of Cata, of catastrophe because at one point the earth collided with the planet Venus. And uh, Velikovsky really believed that he was onto something and he really thought that this was a scientific theory worthy of discussion. And there were entire peer reviewed journals devoted to Velikovsky in theory. So they, they kind of set up this whole shadow ecosystem of Velikovsky in journals where, of course, all of the peer reviewing is done by other Velikovsky. And I love this book because I think that it's important to understand, especially at a moment when public trust in science seems a little [01:21:00] shaky. I see a lot of people like oh, anti-vaccination a, um, activists. Arguing that sort of their branch of the sciences is the new Galileo, that they're being punished for their theories and when they are obviously correct and later they will be vindicated. I feel like it's important to understand that in the history of science, yeah, sometimes people are galileos who are speaking truth to power and being punished for it, but sometimes people are Velikovsky and that is a part of the history of science too. it also gets into some really thorny questions about what is and is not science.
And it's, it's a very thought provoking book. So I, I recommend it to anyone interested in the history of science.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: That sounds great. And I feel so bad for the guy that now being a Velikovsky is a, at least in some circles, a term for something that he probably doesn't want it to mean. But yeah, that sounds, that sounds fascinating. And the guy sounds, I mean, like for me, yeah, he sounds very wacky, was what I [01:22:00] was gonna say.
But, uh, for me the main question is like, how would collision with another planet Exactly. Explain those things. But yeah, maybe that's, maybe I should read the book to
Melinda Baldwin: so, there there's a whole lot of Freudian theory that that goes in there too. And it's sort of, um, collective trauma, uh, collective memory, things like that.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Okay. Yeah. Sounds interesting. Um, Second question is something you wish you'd learned sooner. This can be from your work life, from your private life, whatever you want. Just something, you know, if you'd learned it a bit sooner, maybe your life would've, some problems would've. You know, might've helped you a little bit and if you can or want to also, like maybe what you did about it or how you found it out or whatever.
Melinda Baldwin: So, um, I've, I've been thinking about this a bit, uh, um, because you'd indicated that this would be a question you'd ask and I remember a really important moment for me in my career was reading an essay by, uh, the comedian Amy Poehler. So I mentioned very early in the interview that I had kind of an unusual [01:23:00] academic career trajectory.
I graduated, um, outta my PhD right after the 2008 economic crash and, did end up in this great postdoc working on the Tyndall correspondence. But after that, I just bounced around between, you know, one year positions, two year positions, adjuncting, and I kept applying for tenure track jobs and it just, it seemed like it was never gonna happen for me. And you know, that's, that's very hard when you've invested so much of yourself in your education and in this career path. And it seems like you're not gonna get to keep doing it. And you're, you're kind of thinking, what am I gonna do with my life? If not this, if, if there are not opportunities to do this. And I read this book, uh, yes, please, by Amy Poehler, and it's got this great essay in there called Treat Your Career Like a Bad Boyfriend, where she talks about, um, how your bad boyfriend doesn't come around when you're desperate and needy and you know, you're, you're seeking his approval. Your bad boyfriend tends to knock on your door when you've got other [01:24:00] things in your life going on when you are happy and fulfilled for reasons that have nothing to do with him.
And then the essay closes with, uh, this wonderful line. And remember if your boyfriend treats you really bad, you can always go kiss someone else. Uh, she doesn't use the word kiss. Um. But I, I am going to keep the actual word out of this podcast. and, and I remember that was really eye-opening for me.
You know, the idea that your career should never be the thing, the only thing that gives your life meaning the only thing that is the source of your self-esteem. And it eventually, I did transition out of academia. I took a position, um, as an editor for Physics Today. Um, a magazine published by the American Institute of Physics.
Um, I got to continue writing about the history of science. I got to learn a whole new skillset, which was science, writing, and editing. I eventually did end up back in academia, hired to a tenured professorship of history, which I had not expected when I decided to leave. But it turned out that that was really good advice.
Treat your career like a bad [01:25:00] boyfriend, and remember that it can't be your only source of happiness.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah. Yeah. Is just a quick follow up is, um, how did you then get the professorship if you'd left, I don't know, like how different what you did there was to, to what you do now, but, I feel like it's, I mean, in some circles it, it can obviously happen. For me it's like, you know, I've seen cases where people go to, I guess these days, especially if you go to Deep Mind, Google, deep Mind, that's, well that's not really even, it's kind of leaving academia, but also in some ways it's very easy to go back again after that.
But yeah. So I'm just curious, like how different was what you did there from, from what you did before and after? And like, how did you then end up getting this job? Because it sounds like you didn't apply for it, right? Or, or did you?
Oh, you did. Okay.
Melinda Baldwin: absolutely did, did, did apply for this job. Um, you know, went through the Zoom interview, uh, and then the, the on-campus interview and was, was eventually offered the position. Yeah, so I think that the, the key to how I [01:26:00] was able to transition back into academia was that when I took the Physics Today job, I had a draft of an article that I'd been working on, and it's the article that was later published as Scientific Autonomy, public Accountability, and the Rise of Peer Review. I'd been working on this article for years and I decided, you know what? I really wanna publish this. And so, in my off time, uh, you know, kind of in my, on my personal time, I continued editing the article. I pulled it together into a format that I was pretty happy with, and I sent it to isis, which is the flagship journal of the History of Science Society. It goes through peer review. It eventually does get published, and it came out right as the University of Maryland was advertising for an associate professor. And my advisor, uh, Michael Gordin, actually called me up and he said, you should apply for that job. And I said, that's crazy. I've never been an assistant professor.
They're not gonna tenure me. And he said, well, at the University of Maryland, the standard for tenure is a book and major progress towards a [01:27:00] second project, and you now have a book between covers. That's, that's my nature book and an article that shows major progress toward a second project. Throw your hat in the ring, see what happens. They liked the article, they liked the book. Uh, they, I went to the on-campus interview and they, they liked my job talk and they ended up making me the offer. I think that keeping a foot in the world of research is what really helped me transition back into a, into academia. Um, I. But that said, the big difference between working at physics today and working in an academic job is that research was not part of what I was hired to do at physics today.
I would not have felt good about coming to my desk in the morning and working on my personal peer review research unless I was doing it to publish an essay for physics today. You know, kind of pursuing independent research was not part of my job. It was not part of what I was supposed to be doing for 40 hours a week.
And so, um, when I published that article on peer review, I, I really kind of thought of that as the [01:28:00] last academic thing I was going to publish because I no longer had a job where, you know, my boss was gonna say, well, yes, of course you should go and take a month and live in England and read all of these archival papers.
You know, that was not part of what I was hired to do at Physics today at all.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Okay. Uh, what I found interesting there is just the, uh, you know, getting something that you thought you weren't even eligible for.
Melinda Baldwin: Yeah.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Uh, you know, I mean, I dunno how common that is, but I've definitely had some of the things that I applied for and got with things where I thought, like, I mean, sometimes like writing an entire application for stuff like in two, three hours, just like, you know, not being able to polish anything or whatever, right.
And, uh, it, it wasn't probably ally as competitive as getting as a professorship. But yeah, I find it funny that like a lot of the times it seems to me that just trying something actually gets you very far [01:29:00]because you often dunno really whether you are qualified for something or not.
Melinda Baldwin: Yeah. And I guess maybe, maybe that's another piece of advice that, um, that I would get is that it never hurts to throw your hat in the ring. Even if you think that you, you might not quite be what you're looking for, what they're looking for, it never hurts to try. It never hurts to put yourself out there.
Rejection is scary. Rejection can really hurt. But don't ever let feeling like you're, you know, you're like 90% qualified, but not a hundred percent qualified. If you're 90% of the way there, go ahead and apply. See what happens.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah. I don't know whether that was the answer to my final question, but the final question was, uh, advice to full PhD students or postdocs people on kind of that, that border. Um, maybe with a slight reminder that academic discipline is very different, so exactly how things work in history. I dunno, but I've definitely seen that in economics it's very different from psych engineer sense, even though some of it is basically the same work.
So a lot of [01:30:00] economics to me seems like I. Uh, a subdivision of psychology, um, at least the stuff that I interact with. Um, but, and yet completely different norms and all this kinda stuff. But yeah. Any advice.
Melinda Baldwin: Yeah, I think so of the things, uh, so as an American, I find this kind of a scary moment to offer advice on academic careers because we are watching just a, a massive disruption and, um, disruption may not even be strong enough a word. But the, the way that science is funded and run in the US seems to be in a moment of rapid, rapid change. So for listeners who are, um, outside the US and considering applying for positions in the us, I would say my big advice is familiarize yourself with what's happening to science funding in the US right now. And consider whether that is a move that you actually really wanna make. And you should probably also read what's happening with US [01:31:00]immigration cases at the moment too, because I, I think that this is a very challenging moment for international scholars to come over to the us. on a less depressing note, I think that my, my big piece of advice to any young academic would be remember that you are not your career. I. That if you are not seeing the career success that you were hoping for, if you are rejected for a job that you thought you were a really fantastic fit for, or so I had an experience of getting all the way to the campus interview for a job and just falling in love with it and then not getting it.
And I, I think I cried every day for a month. Um, You know, it, it, it can be really emotionally hard to be on this, on this track of, of of, on this academic track. And so, yeah, the big advice I would share is make sure there's stuff in your life that gives it meaning that is not your job. And remember that you know, you are more than your career success.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah. The worst is when you think you're [01:32:00] gonna get something. Also, isn't it? When you're like, I've got this, and then you don't.
Melinda Baldwin: Yeah. I mean, and, and, and in that case, like the, the feedback I got from the committee was so kind. They're like, we loved you, you were fantastic. It's just that this other person was a little better, bit better of a fit for what we thought we wanted. And I was like, oh, thank you. That's so nice. And then, you know, I hung up the phone and immediately
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah.
Melinda Baldwin: tears because I really had fallen in love with that job.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah, the whole, it's, it's not you, it's us kind of thing.
Doesn't, Doesn't help. Um,. so, yeah. So thank you very much for your time and your questions looking forward to the, to the peer review book.
Melinda Baldwin: Oh, thank you so much. Uh, well, knock on wood, uh, probably 20, 26 sometime, I think.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: I.
Melinda Baldwin: close, close to the end Anyway, although academic publishing is, as you probably know, quite slow,
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah. And you do have the, the, the process of peer review itself to go through still so.
Melinda Baldwin: I do.