Here at Weecology we’re really into open science and that’s why we’re excited to announce our first serious attempt to facilitate open science beyond the confines of our own research – The Ecological Data Wiki. The idea behind this project is simple.
When I started graduate school (a little over a decade ago): Online literature searching was just becoming common You had to mail your manuscripts to the journals in triplicate Responses to published articles (when they happened) took a year or more. Mostly people just talked about problems they saw (or thought they saw) with people in neighboring offices.
A few weeks ago, I mentioned something about being half of Jabberwocky to Ethan and, after a sardonic snort, he replied: You’re only loosely affiliated with Jabberwocky Ecology, right now. Ouch. But not untrue, sadly. While I have had some grandiose plans for things to post on, I have been sadly remiss in my duties here.
UPDATE: As of April 2012 Wiley has now changed their feeds to include the full list of authors. Thanks to Brady Allred for letting us know. An open letter to John Wiley & Sons Inc. Dear Wiley, I like a lot of things that you do, but a few months ago you quietly changed your RSS feeds in a way that is both disrespectful and frankly not good for your business.
Our truly excellent postdoc, Kate Thibault, is moving on to bigger and better things heading up the mammal work at NEON. So, we’re looking for someone to join our group to do research in the areas of macroecology, quantitative ecology, and ecoinformatics.
A couple of months ago we took a poll to see what the attitudes of ecologists were towards the concept of senior authorship. Twenty-seven folks (including the two of us) weighed in (thanks everyone!) and here are the results: Of those who where confident that the field was in one state or the other, twice as many thought that the concept of senior authorship did not apply in ecology.
I’ve read two great posts in the last couple of days that highlight what the recent debate over the the possibility of ‘arsenic based life’ has shown about how scientists are leveraging the modern web to quickly evaluate, discuss and improve science. Marc Cadotte, Nicholas Mirotchnick and Caroline Tucker have a great post over at EEB & flow that will fill in the background for you.
We’ve had a bit of discussion here at JE about potential solutions to the tragedy of the reviewer commons, so I found a recent letter in Nature (warning – it’s behind a pay wall) suggesting that there may not actually be a problem interesting.
