I ask your support of me taking back my participation in science from the observatory I helped start by signing my petition at http://www.change.org/petitions/ucsb-astronomy-journals-starting-with-pasp-and-the-astronomy-community-stop-excluding-me-from-science-i-helped-start?share_id=YMRITJsPRe&utm_campaign=friend_inviter_chat&utm_medium=facebook&utm_source=share_petition&utm_term=permissions_dialog_false.
I choose to continue doing Global Telescope science using the resources I helped create, and no one should stop me. I am LCOGT's banned astronomer: banned only for the false pretense that my personal life is, to quote the Director, "we can't have this kind of behavior." I expect the science community help me in telling LCOGT that "we can't have this kind of behavior": of stopping someone passionate about science from doing the research he helped start as the first LCOGT astronomer.
I first ask for support to persuade science journals that they must uphold the principle of giving credit for work done. I challenge the astronomy journal "PASP" to not expect that only those who have made "critical" contributions be allowed to be author, especially when this is not the standard used for everyone else. More important, I challenge PASP to recognize the responsibility of all authors to promote the opportunity of every author to increase their contributions. PASP must recognize that for any group to reduce one author's contribution leads to a dishonest evaluation of what that author contributed.
I choose to to included, so am required to seek the help of the public and science community to overturn hostile expulsion, exclusion, and isolation by a rogue observatory that has made itself answerable to no one. Everyone has experienced someone or some group wanting to make someone go away, to get one person out of the group. Respectable organizations, however, do not allow people to be expelled for arbitrary reasons. In science, a normal group would never use false pretense to take away one scientist's work and give it to others to take over. Expulsion, exclusion, and isolating a scientist go against the science community's collegial values of inclusion, participation, and sociability.
I also am seeking help in finding support from those willing to support a scientist who has been left unemployed not just because he is standing by his principles, but because he has had a lifelong passion for science and believes that it would be a crime against science for him to accept being forced to leave under these circumstances. I need support for going out and doing my speaking, giving both professional and public talks. I need support to last until I can publish my own new research on planet migration. While I do ask help in finding people who can use the "Donate" button, but I also ask for help in my campaign, especially from people good at writing, or who can help with an online campaign. I ask for the involvement of people who love astronomy, because I believe that there are interested members of the public who can become involved in the research I am doing on planet migration.
I am grateful to all who will follow me not only on this campaign, but also as I go out and give talks, both to other astronomers and to public talks.
