https://twitter.com/#!/ethanwhite/status/94412695587143680 The last week has been an interesting one for academic publishing. First a 24 year old programmer name Aaron Swartz was arrested for allegedly breaking into MIT’s network and downloading 5 million articles from JSTOR. Given his background it has been surmised that he planned on making the documents publicly available. He faces up to 35 years in federal prison.
As you may have seen earlier either on Jabberwocky, EEB and Flow, or over at Oikos’ new blog, the most recent piece about how some branch of ecology is ruining ecology has caused some discussion in the blogosphere.
There is an excellent post over at EEB & Flow on the empirical divide,inspired by an editorial by David Lindenmayer and Gene Likens in the most recent ESA Bulletin, titled “Losing the Culture of Ecology”. It was great to see some thoughtful and data driven consideration of the idea that we should choose to emphasize one broad area of ecology over another.
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.
