A couple of months ago Micah J. Marty and I had a twitter conversation and subsequent email exchange about how citations worked with preprints. I asked Micah if I could share our email discussion since I thought it would be useful to others and he kindly said yes. What follows are Michah’s questions followed by my responses. At the level of the journal nothing happens.
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As announced by Noam Ross on Twitter (and confirmed by the Editor in Chief of Ecology Letters), Ecology Letters will now allow the submission of manuscripts that have been posted as preprints. Details will be published in an editorial in Ecology Letters. I want to say a heartfelt thanks to Marcel Holyoak and the entire Ecology Letters editorial board for listening to the ecological community and modifying their policies.
Preprints are rapidly becoming popular in biology as a way to speed up the process of science, get feedback on manuscripts prior to publication, and establish precedence (Desjardins-Proulx et al. 2013). Since biologists are still learning about preprints I regularly get asked which of the available preprint servers to use. Here’s the long-form version of my response. The good news is that you can’t go wrong right now.
A couple of weeks ago Eli Kintisch (@elikint) interviewed me for what turned out to be a great article on “Sharing in Science” for Science Careers. He also interviewed Titus Brown (@ctitusbrown) who has since posted the full text of his reply, so I thought I’d do the same thing. Definitely. Sharing code and data helps the scientific community make more rapid progress by avoiding duplicated effort and by facilitating more reproducible research.
A quick blog from Meise, Belgium at the Pro-iBiosphere wrap-up event. Yesterday I gave a talk about my progress liberating, and making searchable, OA figures from academic literature: Liberating OA figures from PDF to Flickr (a Pro-iBiosphere talk) from Ross Mounce I’ve had a lot of great feedback and interest in what I’m doing with this.
Science is reportedly in the middle of a reproducibility crisis. Reproducibility seems laudable and is frequently called for (e.g., nature and science). In general the argument is that research that can be independently reproduced is more reliable than research that cannot be independently reproduced.
[Update: the conference itself will be in November, 2014 – this is just the first announcement!] I’m super excited to announce I’m part of the international organizing committee for OpenCon 2014: You can read the official first press release about this event here: http://www.righttoresearch.org/act/opencon/announcement here’s an excerpt from it:
I’m proud to announce an interesting public output from my BBSRC-funded postdoc project: PLUTo: Phyloinformatic Literature Unlocking Tools. Software for making published phyloinformatic data discoverable, open, and reusable
tl;dr: So far, I can’t see any principal difference between our three kinds of intellectual output: software, data and texts. I admit I’m somewhat surprised that there appears to be a need to write this post in 2014. After all, this is not really the dawn of the digital age any more.