How much to pay identifiers?

[ksanderson]

While I personally donate monthly, no harm in fitting that into budgets plans as well, good idea.

[tristanmcknight]

I asked my Facebook circle a similar question a year or so ago, when a grant I was being written into asked what my rate was for fly IDs (pinned specimens). I’ll summarize and elaborate some of what we discussed there.

For context, as a grad student I did a few small ID jobs pro bono for random folks as a way to get experience and build goodwill. I still do some like that, and I spend way too much time identifying photos of robber flies here on iNat, Bugguide, Facebook groups, etc, which I justify as a) outreach, b) useful experience, and c) it’s probably a more productive form of playtime than normal social media. Whenever I visit a museum for one of my projects I always make a point of reserving the last hour to do triage identifications from their unID drawers, as a small way of paying them back for accommodating me by giving them the most valuable thing I can offer. But now that I’m “an expert” and a “busy professor”, I feel like I probably ought to charge something for a bigger projects. Especially since I don’t have an extension component to my real job-- I’m pure teaching. I’ve seen that a few state extension offices (UC Riverside, Cornell, etc) have regular fee schedules for IDs posted on their museum websites, usually starting at ~$25/hour and getting more expensive for commercial or rush jobs. I know how strapped museums are for funding usually, and I’m not trying to bleed them dry. But I do want to respect my time and if someone asks for my rate I figure they’re prepared to pay something.

Anyway, for my grant in the end they offered $2/specimen and I didn’t haggle. A few other biologists on my thread mentioned seeing rates of ~$15-100 /hour for similar techincian / consultant jobs.

FYI all of the non-biologists who spoke up in the thread were blown away that we biologists sell our expertise so cheaply. Legal and finance types said things like “we hire academics all the time in the form of expert witnesseses. I don’t think I’ve seen anything below about $200/hr and I’ve seen over $500/hr for certain specialities. I think for someone with a doctorate, $20/hr sounds insulting.”

So yes, many biologists do IDs for fun and for free, and the culture supporting that norm keeps our market rates low. But remember that the “do it for free” mentality probably derives from the legacy left by old taxonomic experts who tended to be relatively rich privileged gentlemen who could afford to pursue their passion purely out of amateur love and not for a contract. Darwin could be Darwin partly because he came from old money.

[patrmcgown]

Since chances are you will get hobbyist I would think the best way is having bulk enrolment at volunteer level with a “expert” or two paid through the project to ensure accurate data and management. Dropout rates as any citizen science program will tell you can be high so I would add that you consider “tipping” those volunteers who stick with it what you feel is appropriate. Thanks to the modern net, tip jars can be setup by users easily. Tipping can also ensure that people don’t take your money and not give reasonable identifications or run afoul of wage laws. Another consideration is which taxas are you wanting identified. There is a big difference between identification difficulty for birds vs mammals vs fungi or insects.

[mamestraconfigurata]

Welcome to the Forum! Always many interesting things to discuss.
@tristanmcknight I do not disagree with your points, but I would like to add a d) to your list. iNat, and other similar platforms, also contribute to the documentation of biodiversity of non-human life on earth at this point. Since I don’t have the formal expertise to qualify for an ‘expert’, I consider it my contribution to the non-human life on this earth.

[pisum]

@ksanderson

it makes sense to consider an honorarium for any identifiers I reach out to give us a hand

if you feel strongly about this, then it’s your right to go this direction. i noted the complexity earlier, and if you misjudge the social situation or market rates, you might just make people unhappy. but i strongly suggest that you take a look at tax and HR rules (or have someone look into this on your behalf) before you go paying anything – even honorariums. if you mess up that kind of stuff up, there could be other kinds of consequences to deal with.

[wildskyflower]

@jhbratton

You may end up getting fewer species level ids if you pay for them, because you could be entitled to seek redress if you are given a misidentification.

If you specify IDs only need to make a ‘reasonable effort’ (heck, even ‘best effort’) to be correct, in practice the only redress you would have if you are unhappy with their performance would be to tell them you will no longer be paying them in the future (ie. fire them). Thats basically how academic grants work, as opposed to a contractual award where they funding agency can come after you if you don’t do what you said you would. If you phrase it like a contractual award then yeah, I’d expect it to be harder to find people to do it.

[jasonhernandez74]

@edanko

I would suggest doubling or tripling the normal going rate on iNaturalist

Hilarious. But I have seen a scam that made just that kind of promise. And on the scam watch website, there were lots of rants by people who fell for it, too.

@lotteryd

like for undergrads who help with research and typically get experience/understanding rather than pay, I’m personally already happy with my own compensation here

But that experience/understanding comes about because they have that faculty member there to provide feedback and guidance.

@ksanderson

It’s reasonable to pay the graphic artist for promotional materials

You’d be surprised how many people don’t think so. They go on Craigslist looking for an artist, and say that the compensation will be “exposure” and “building your portfolio.”

[kmagnacca]

I think the appropriate category would be “senior consulting scientist”, where it lists the range as US$194-228/hr.
https://calc.gsa.gov/?q=senior%20consulting%20scientist%2C%20|

If you filter the general environmental results to require 6+ years of experience or a master’s degree, at least one of which is probably required for expert species-level identification, the range there starts around US$90-110/hr.

I do some consulting and IDs (eg for environmental assessments, habitat mitigation, etc.) and as others said it depends on who it’s for, but typical for a commercial client would be $100-125/hr.

[kmagnacca]

@jhbratton

You may end up getting fewer species level ids if you pay for them, because you could be entitled to seek redress if you are given a misidentification. So an expert may voluntarily identify a photo if they are 95 percent sure and rely on someone else to verify, whereas if you are paying them for certainty they will only give you their 100 percent certain ids.

As someone who does this, the person doing it should provide tentative IDs while flagging them as such, since they may still have value (they don’t always tell you what it’s for). Also, errors on identification that have financial consequences (such as incorrectly saying an endangered species is present or absent) are what professional liability insurance is for. Many contracts require insurance at a minimum of $1 million.

[sandboa]

I’m not a big fan of this idea because it raises the following questions:

1. Will identifications by “professional identifiers” be weighed the same as volunteers (regarding research grade, etc)?

2. Will a paid observer be subject to lose that status if they make too many misidentifications?

3. Will people be able to volunteer to be paid observers? How would they be chosen? I can see some enthusiastic young undergrad with limited experience being happy to volunteer for such a gig.

4. Can a professional identifier get others to ID on their behalf (busy faculty having their grad students make IDs in their name)?

I certainly do appreciate everyone who lends their particular expertise to a group, but paying them creates more problems than it solves? Maybe it would be better to offer a social media type reward where someone could earn an “Expert” tag for their IDs in certain groups in certain regions?

Chris

[centratex]

What if instead of budgeting for experts to provide identifications, budget for a project manager that helps project participants make better observations.

[fffffffff]

If it’s a small project, having anyone but professionals would be unusual.

[Elschongar]

I think paying qualified people for their time when they commit a specific amount of time identifying and mentoring project participants is valid. Such people already face reputational pressure on iNaturalist, so they already have reason to do a good job. Many may currently be limited in the amount of time they can commit by financial needs The only risk is if pay is contingent on number and/or level of IDs. Perhaps there should be an iNaturalist guideline against such a practice. This may also increase expert participation in many locations since time to volunteer is a luxury not available to all experts.

[wildskyflower]

I don’t think anyone thinks theres a problem with a park or state DNR or whatever hiring someone to monitor inat for invasives or previously unknown populations of endangered things, right? Or for someone who is working on their PhD thesis or post doc in a particular clade to use grant money to monitor that clade? So I don’t really see anything wrong with the proposal to effectively give a grant speficially to ID things on inat. And corporations like, say, Nvidia give various kinds of financial support to open source projects (including inat), including in some cases paying their own staff to provide support to the users as well as the project itself. While of course they have their own motivations for doing that kind of thing and I don’t know that any major corporations are currently paying people to ID on inat specifically, it is at least a kind of thing can happen without ruining an entire project.

[rolosama]

Sometimes biologists or other experts are hired to carry out inventories (plants, insects, birds) on a specific territory. They’re going to do this over two or three months full time and they can get paid $ 8, $ 10, or $ 12K to do this job (It’s about 25$/h). On the other hand, ornithologists or entomologists clubs can do it for a symbolic sum.