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.

*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.

Academic publishing is in a dynamic state these days with large numbers of new journals popping up on a regular basis. Some of these new journals are actively experimenting with changing traditional approaches to publication and peer review in potentially important ways. So, I thought I’d provide a quick introduction to some of the new kids on the block that I think have the potential to change our approach to academic publishing.

{.alignnone .size-large .wp-image-1290 loading=“lazy” decoding=“async” attachment-id=“1290” permalink=“https://jabberwocky.weecology.org/2013/09/09/ecobloggers-the-ecology-blog-aggregator/ecobloggers/” orig-file=“https://i0.wp.com/jabberwocky.weecology.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/ecobloggers.png?fit=1047%2C569&ssl=1” orig-size=“1047,569” comments-opened=“1”

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.

A friend of mine once joked that doing ecological informatics meant working with data that was big enough that you couldn’t open it in an Excel spreadsheet.

This is a guest post by Elita Baldridge (@elitabaldridge), a graduate student in Ethan White’s lab in the Ecology Center at Utah State University. As a budding macroecologist, I have thought a lot about what skills I need to acquire during my Ph.D. This is my model of the four basic attributes for a macroecologist, although I think it is more generally applicable to many ecologists as well: Data

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.

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.