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The British Ecological Society has announced that will now allow the submission of papers with preprints (formal language here). This means that you can now submit preprinted papers to Journal of Ecology, Journal of Animal Ecology, Methods in Ecology and Evolution, Journal of Applied Ecology, and Functional Ecology. By allowing preprints BES joins the Ecological Society of America which instituted a pro-preprint policy last year.

I’d just like to point out to anyone who asks, particularly CRC Press (part of Taylor&Francis Group, who are in turn part of Informa PLC) that by posting the full text of my book chapter to Academia.edu I am *not* breaching the copyright transfer agreement I signed.

Upcoming Book on Open Science with R We’re pleased to announce that the rOpenSci core team has just signed a contract with CRC Press/Taylor and Francis R series to publish a new book on practical ways to implement open science into your own research using R. Given all the talk about the importance of open science, the discussion often lacks practical suggestions on how one might actually incorporate these practices into their

*This is a guest post by Dan McGlinn, a weecology postdoc (@DanMcGlinn on Twitter). It is a Research Summary of: McGlinn, D.J., X. Xiao, and E.P. White. 2013. An empirical evaluation of four variants of a universal species–area relationship. PeerJ 1:e212 http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj.212.

UPDATE: Both Ecology Letters and the British Ecological Society journals now allow preprints. Thanks to both groups for listening to the community and supporting the rapid and open exchange of scientific ideas. Dear Ecology Letters and the British Ecological Society , I am writing to ask that you support the scientific good by allowing the submission of papers that have been posted as preprints.

It might just save your life (via Upturned Microscope): BTW, even if your life is not at stake, someone else’s may be. So you should publish your results if you are sure something definitely will not work, for instance in F1000 Research, where you can publish negative results for free until August 31, 2013. Your colleagues will be grateful.

Today we are pleased to announce that rOpenSci has been awarded a generous 180K grant from the Alfred P. Sloan foundation. This funding will allow us to develop a whole new suite of tools and provide scientists with general purpose toolkits to access various kinds of scientific data. We will also be traveling a whole bunch this year and running workshops at several conferences and universities.

This post was originally posted over at the LSE Impact blog where I was kindly invited to write on this theme by the Managing Editor. It’s a widely read platform and I hope it inspires some academics to upload more of their work for everyone to read and use Recently I tried to explain on twitter in a few tweets how everyone can take easy steps towards open scholarship with their own work.

This article is cross-posted from the main Open Knowledge Foundation blog, where I occasionally post. I realise I haven’t had time to post here on my own blog for over a month now(!), so I may well copy across a few more posts I’ve written for OKF. Here at the Open Knowledge Foundation, we know Open Science is tough, but ultimately rewarding. It requires courage & leadership to take the open path in science.