Image by Gideon Burton via Flickr It hasn’t been a real good week for peer review.

I just read the excellently forward thinking year end editorial of the new journal Ideas in Ecology and Evolution. The editorial was written by Lonnie Aarssen and Christopher Lortie and is filled with Aarssen’s trademark,creative, outside the proverbial box, thinking.

I had an interesting conversation with someone the other day that made me think I needed one last frequency distribution post in order to avoid causing some people to not move forward with addressing interesting questions. As a quantitative ecologist I spent a fair amount of time trying to figure out the best way to do things. In other words, I often want to know what the best method is available for answering a particular question.

Many of us have had the feeling that something is not right these days with the peer-review system in science. Whenever I chat with colleagues about the peer review system, two issues consistently crop up: an increasing number of review requests that we cannot possibly keep up with and/or reviews that seem to indicate a reviewer did not spend much time with the manuscript they were reviewing.

A couple of weeks ago we made it possible for folks to subscribe to JE using email. We did this because we realized that many scientists, even those who are otherwise computationally savvy, really haven’t embraced feed readers as a method of tracking information.

I’d recommend checking out this post by River Continua about an impressively sophisticated phishing scam targeted at academics. They’re going to catch a bunch of folks with this one. UPDATE: Apparently this is something that the EPA does that the EPA employee who wrote the original post was unaware of. They definitely need to rethink the composition of the email though as I would have been (and obviously was) equally suspicious.

A session entitled “The Future of the Paper” at Science Online London 2009 was a panel made up of an interesting set of people, Lee-Ann Coleman from the British Library, Katharine Barnes the editor of Nature Protocols, Theo Bloom from PLoS and Enrico Balli of SISSA Medialab. The panelists rehearsed many of the issues and problems that have been discussed before and I won’t re-hash here.

If you don’t have an easily accessible RSS feed available (and by easily accessible I mean in the browser’s address bar on your journal’s main page) for your journal’s Table of Contents (TOCs), there is a certain class of readers who will not keep track of you TOCs.

During the course of this long volume I have undoubtedly plagiarized from many sources–to use the ugly term that did not bother Shakespeare’s age. I doubt whether any criticism or cultural history has ever been written without such plagiary, which inevitably results from assimilating the contributions of your countless fellow-workers, past and present.