We had a great time at ESA this year and enjoyed getting to interact with lots of both old and new friends and colleagues. Since we’re pretty into open science here at Weecology, it’s probably not surprising that we have a lot of slides (and even scripts) from our many and varied talks and posters posted online, and we thought it might be helpful to aggregate them all in one place. Enjoy.
Slides and script from Ethan White’s Ignite talk on Big Data in Ecology from Sandra Chung and Jacquelyn Gill‘s excellent ESA 2013 session on Sharing Makes Science Better. Slides are also archived on figshare. 1. I’m here to talk to you about the use of big data in ecology and to help motivate a lot of the great tools and approaches that other folks will talk about later in the session. 2.
We have started a new R package interacting with NOAA climate data called rnoaa . You can find our package in development here and documentation for NOAA web services here. It is still early days for this package, but we wanted to demo what you can do with the package.
One of our primary goals at ROpenSci is to wrap as many science API’s as possible. While each package can be used as a standalone interface, there’s lots of ways our packages can overlap and complement each other. Sure He-Man usually rode Battle Cat, but there’s no reason he couldn’t ride a my little pony sometimes too. That’s the case with our packages for GBIF and the worldbank climate data api.
I’m a big fan of preprints, the posting of papers in public archives prior to peer review. Preprints speed up the scientific dialogue by letting everyone see research as it happens, not 6 months to 2 years later following the sometimes extensive peer review process. They also allow more extensive pre-publication peer review because input can be solicited from the entire community of scientists, not just two or three individuals.
Over at Dynamic Ecology this morning Jeremy Fox has a post giving advice on how to decide where to submit a paper. It’s the same basic advice that I received when I started grad school almost 15 years ago and as a result I don’t think it considers some rather significant changes that have happened in academic publishing over the last decade and a half. So, I thought it would be constructive for folks to see an alternative viewpoint.
The Ecological Society of America (ESA) would like your input on how to expand access to their publications and what they should do if * gasp* the USA also mandates some form of public or open access …like the rest of the world seems to be doing at the moment. The official call is here in this new free to access ESA publication (at the end): Collins, S., Goldberg, D., Schimel, J., and McCarter, K. 2013.
The following was a guest post from Ignasi Bartomeus, originally posted on his blog on 26 Nov, 2012. Check out a related blog post here. Note the functionality discussed in this post is now in our taxize package under the function gisd_isinvasive. We hacked out a quick Shiny app so you can play around with the below function in taxize on the web to get invasive status and plot it on a phylogeny.
We’re looking for a new student to join our interdisciplinary research group. The opening is in Ethan’s lab, but the faculty, students, and postdocs in Weecology interact seamlessly among groups. If you’re interested in macroecology, community ecology, or just about anything with a computational/quantitative component to it, we’d love to hear from you.
Over the weekend I saw this great tweet: Personal publishing policy for the PhD: always submit to http://t.co/dE2HMGlP and only publish (as 1st author) in arXiv-friendly journals. — P Desjardins-Proulx (@phdpqc) July 14, 2012 by Philippe Desjardins-Proulx and was pleased to see yet another actively open young scientist.