I am looking for someone who can make illustrations for publications in scientific journals.  The subject area is plant pathology/genetics/molecular biology.  Would need illustrations of effects of microorganisms on leaves, interactions between plants and pathogens, molecular processes involving proteins affecting cell function, that sort of thing.  I can do photo manipulations, labeling and simple things in Illustrator myself but for anything else we need someone with much better skills.

In real life I work for the Government, and now that we are on maximum telework for the foreseeable future and can't do much in the lab we are focusing on writing up previous experiments and also writing review articles.  Reviews often get cited a lot and that can be helped with some nice illustrations.  Ordinarily we would do those ourselves, but most scientists are not great artists and I would rather pay someone who knows what they are doing to make a good illustration rather than having my people spend time making lame drawings that will not be as useful (like one I just reviewed yesterday).  We have ideas for several possible figures and can outline what we want and provide a (probably handwritten) example.  Several years ago we did an article where the society publishing the journal had an artist on staff who made us a really nice drawing for free (which I thought was nuts - would have happily paid them).  I've seen that illustration used in many presentations since so it definitely is worth the time to make good art.

I have not hired a graphic artist before so don't have a good idea about amounts but that can be negotiated.  It does need to be someone who is doing it as a business and can take payment by credit card (Paypal won't work - sorry).  We would buy the illustration and use it with our manuscripts.  Since I work for the Government everything is in the public domain so it could not be copyrighted if published, although we could provide an attribution (in addition to paying you).  Would prefer someone with experience in scientific illustration, preferably with plants or molecular biology, but others also could be suitable.  We are talking about probably a handful of illustrations during the next few months, but if we find someone we can work with it could be a long-term relationship with from zero to many illustrations per year depending on need.  If you would be interested or know someone you can recommend please PM me and we can go from there.  Thanks.

(Hope I'm allowed to post this kind of thing on MSG).

After being out of town for a few days I went to update my sales numbers.  Hadn't had any sales notices from DP so far this month, but logged in anyway to discover that my account balance had decreased by $115.  A little more digging revealed that the e-mail address on the account had been changed to [email protected] and that a payout request was made to Moneybookers on Nov. 1st.  Of course I immediately changed my password, set the e-mail to the correct one, and contacted DP to notify them about the fraud.  The hackers also had set the account to stop sending e-mail notifications about sales or accepted images.

I was glad they had not changed my password, but then realized they were being smart - that should have triggered a notification that it had been changed and I would have realized the hack right away.  Also stopping notifications for sales and accepted images could have caused me to check in less often.  And they did not request the full balance, just part of it, maybe hoping I wouldn't notice that some had gone missing.  Very sneaky.

I would advise everyone to check their accounts and watch out for this on DP.  They need to put in an automatic notification if the e-mail address is changed - that is a weakness being exploited by hackers.  If anyone has suggestions for what else to do please let me know - and please don't bother with the "why are you still on DP?" responses.  Thanks.

This is a great story and excellent photography

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-34575019

Not stock related, but hopefully the photographer will make a lot of money off of a book or something - this is a great use of photography to tell a stoy in my opinion

Maybe this has been discussed already and I missed it, bit I just logged into FAA for the first time in months to print out a summary for taxes, and there was a blurb about options to sell images RF and RM on pixels.com.  It looks like we can set prices and keep 77% of the sales, which sounds great as long as there are sales. 

Has anybody tried this?  Is it generating any sales?  I assume if we have more than 25 images we will have to pay or is this separate from the print sales there?  If anybody has any experience and would like to share please let me know (or direct me to previous threads if this has been discussed already - I looked but couldn't find anything).  Thanks.