Posted: Sep 10, 2013 2:54 pm
I suppose paying oneself for a press release could elicit a negative knee-jerk response, though I guess it's the content of publicity that matters much more than who pays for it - people doing in-house PR for publishers don't work for nothing.
I design/make/sell some products on a small scale, which I have to publicise myself, but if I'd chosen to pay someone else to do that, that's not necessarily 'worse', and either way, I think I could only be justifiably criticised if what I wrote (or approved of others saying) was misleading, dumb, self-absorbed, or seriously unfair to some competing product, or my product was a pile of shite.
Having said that, if we think of actual science as the competing product to Steve's...
I design/make/sell some products on a small scale, which I have to publicise myself, but if I'd chosen to pay someone else to do that, that's not necessarily 'worse', and either way, I think I could only be justifiably criticised if what I wrote (or approved of others saying) was misleading, dumb, self-absorbed, or seriously unfair to some competing product, or my product was a pile of shite.
Having said that, if we think of actual science as the competing product to Steve's...