Selling your services as a scientific paper writer?

Nice post on Critical Mass today about a researcher who sold his services as co-author on eBay and actually got 50 bids and many phone calls. It would appear that many people, from industry to students, are willing to pay so they can produce high quality scientific content with their names on it.

I’m not sure it is an interesting line of work though. Most people don’t realize how expensive it is to write a good scientific journal article. Probably upward of $50K. It’d be difficult to sell 10 pages for $50K. Of course, there is other types of “research”, like journalistic research, when you get 10 pages for much less… but real science is awfully expensive.

What’s more interesting to me is the reasons why people where interested: “There’s this whole constellation of things they could get from it. They could get credentials. They would get the ability to have their questions actually answered.”

Why do I pick on this bit of news? Because I was actually offered jobs like this, and I always turned them down. I was offered money to write journal articles at least twice by totally different people. It was meant to promote a product or a service, in the end, or rather, give the product or service some credibility. I think this is misguided since there is an actual proper form for such publications: patents, technical reports or white papers.

In any case, it would actually be doable: sell your services as a scientist who publish papers to give credibility to products and services. It would be similar to a patent consultant, I guess, except that law is not so involved anymore. I found a lot of people everywhere think they have very unique ideas. They’d love them to be validated and have their ideas pushed in a very prestigious publication, just like having patents.

Writting papers is like taking pictures for Playboy. You look at beauty most of the time, and you have to capture the beauty… you have to make sure enough is being shown, but not too much. It is seen as a very romantic job where you are living a dream, but are, in fact, just doing your job. The only difference is that few people write papers attracting as many eye balls as Playboy pictures and most earn less money too.