Monthly Archives: August 2011

George Monbiot has just published a piece in The Telegraph berating for-profit academic publishers that will surely be castigated by some as over the top hyperbole and praised by others as a trenchant criticism of the state of academic publishing*. Starting off with the, perhaps, ever so slightly, contentious title of Academic publishers make Murdoch look like a socialist Monbiot proceeds to fire zingers like

Murdoch pays his journalists and editors, and his companies generate much of the content they use. But the academic publishers get their articles, their peer reviewing (vetting by other researchers) and even much of their editing for free. The material they publish was commissioned and funded not by them but by us, through government research grants and academic stipends. But to see it, we must pay again, and through the nose.

and backs up his position with a recent analysis by Deutsche Bank

The publishers claim that they have to charge these fees as a result of the costs of production and distribution, and that they add value (in Springer’s words) because they “develop journal brands and maintain and improve the digital infrastructure which has revolutionised scientific communication in the past 15 years”. But an analysis by Deutsche Bank reaches different conclusions. “We believe the publisher adds relatively little value to the publishing process … if the process really were as complex, costly and value-added as the publishers protest that it is, 40% margins wouldn’t be available.”

finally ending with a call to arms that even your, never shying away from a good fight, narrator would have toned down a bit**

The knowledge monopoly is as unwarranted and anachronistic as the corn laws. Let’s throw off these parasitic overlords and liberate the research that belongs to us.

Go read the whole thing. This is something that folks are going to be talking about, and I think it’s another good opportunity to ask ourselves whether the the group that contributes the least to the overall scientific process should the one that benefits the most financially. I take it as yet another sign that 2011 is the year that the war over academic publishing officially began.

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*Yes, once I used the word “excoriation” in the title I got a little carried away with the big words.

**Though not for lack of agreement with the general sentiment; clearly.

As some of you may have heard, the BIO directorate at NSF has implemented some sweeping changes to the proposal process. Some of you youngsters may be unaware what the ‘old’ system was, but it involved two submission deadlines per year. At these deadlines, scientists would submit to a panel** one or more full proposals*** which were then reviewed by external reviewers and deliberated on by the panel the proposal was submitted to. Starting in January, this is changing. Some of the important highlights include:

1) Preproposals: we will now need to submit a preproposal before we can submit a full proposal. Preproposals will be 5 pages, 4 of which are for the science/broader impacts. These preproposals will be considered by a panel and full proposals will be solicited for a subset of those preproposals. No full proposals can be submitted unless solicited by NSF****.

2) fewer full proposal deadlines:  The early year proposal deadline has been converted to a preproposal deadline so there is now a deadline for preproposals (January) and one later in the year for the solicited full proposals (August).

3) limits on submissions: the NSF info says, “In a given year, an individual may participate as a PI, co-PI, or lead senior investigator of a subaward on no more than two preliminary proposals submitted per Division solicitation (DEB or IOS).” I suspect from the wording that it is 2 total – regardless of how many different panels you want to submit to. Does anyone have more info on this?

NSF has highlighted the following as part of their motivation:

1) focus on transformative science. In their FAQ, NSF specifically highlights that they expect that the Preproposals panel will focus on how interesting and important the research is since obviously preproposal methods will be limited.

2) higher funding rate for full proposals. Also in the FAQ, NSF is aiming at a 25-35% funding rate for full proposals. For the youngsters, funding rates at least for the panel I tend to submit to have been in the range of 8-10%, so this will be a substantial improvement. However, this means that the rejection rates for the preproposals will be high.

The next year or two as we transition to the new process are going to be rocky. Some of my colleagues think these changes are akin to the 4 horsemen of the apocalypse running across the scientific landscape.  I think there are some critical issues with respect to currently untenured faculty, and funding gaps for projects that were planning on having 2 submissions before funding runs out. But, assuming that we are able to get feedback on rejected full proposals in time to write revised preproposals for the next round, I’m actually cautiously optimistic that there will eventually be some benefits to this system. I’ve read some of the concerns on other blogs and I would recommend that our readers go check them out. One of the reasons I am cautiously optimistic is that the old system was broken and some of those concerns were unofficially being built into the old system anyway*****. The truth is that our funding world has changed and we all (NSF, scientists, and university tenure committees) need to figure out how to make our current reality work. NSF is trying to adjust, scientists are being forced to adjust, and I think those of us with tenure need to make sure our universities are also adjusting so that the young people coming up through the new reality don’t get screwed****** because the system has changed on them and we haven’t adjusted our expectations*******.

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* DEB (Division of Environmental Biology) and IOS (Division of Integrated Organismal Systems) are divisions at NSF and cover pretty much everything from organismal physiology to ecosystem ecology. Incidentally, MCB (Division of Molecular and Cellular Biosciences) is/has also adopted the new system.

**Panel, n. 1) a program (in the generic sense, not the computer sense) to which unsolicited proposals on a certain research area (e.g., Population and Community Ecology, Ecosystems, etc) could be submitted twice a year. 2) a group of scientists invited to NSF to provide funding recommendations on proposals submitted to that panel.

***Full proposal: This involves a 1 page Project Summary, 15 page Project Description, Budget and Budget Justification, 2-page CV for each PI and co-PI, Lists of current and pending funding for each PI and co-PI, Data Management Plan, Cited Literature, and Postdoc mentoring plan (if you are going to fund a postdoc).

**** There are exceptions to this: CAREER, OPUS, RCN, LTER (i.e., pretty much anything with its own acronym except LTREB).

***** For example, proposals were being held by NSF until after the next deadline unless you specifically bugged your program director for it and then sometimes is was released with very little time before the deadline. I suspect it was only a matter of time before they refused to release them at all before the next deadline. The fact that it’s a deadline (i.e., late submissions rejected) and not a target date (i.e., acceptance or rejection of late submissions at the discretion of the program director) was also a relative recent change and indicative of where things were heading.

****** New system or old system, the fact is that 8% (or whatever the new number will be – though it’s hard to imagine it’ll be a LOT better) is horrid and frankly a lack of successful NSF funding is NOT indicative of quality or long-term prospects when percentages are that low. We need to make sure that productive people who have not landed the ‘gold standard’ grant are not being flushed out of the system.

******* This one’s just because I find the long string of astrixes (astrices?) funny.

Next week is the annual meeting of the Ecological Society of America. If you’ve ever been to ESA, then you know it’s….big, often between 3000-5000 ecologists (which I thought was big until I heard about some of the biomedical conferences which have the attendance of a small city). It seems like most of those people are giving talks or posters. Obviously it’s impossible to see everything, and frankly with talks spread out across 20-odd different rooms which are usually spread out across the far corners of the convention center plus various hotels, it’s probably not possible to see even a fraction of the things you’re interested in. If you try to do the ESA blitzkrieg (and most young graduate students will try at least once), you are guaranteeing an overwhelming, lonely, and futile experience. So, how do you navigate this beast and keep your sanity? I have two recommendations:

1)      Pick a strategy. Some years I choose to focus on a specific concept or research area to learn a lot about a breaking area of ecology in a short period of time (like the year a majority of what I saw had the word ‘metacommunity’ in the title). Some years I choose breadth because I want to have a better feeling for where the field in general is going or to look for interesting new ideas (one year I saw talks that spanned from theory to empirical and from physiology to ecosystems – ah that was a fun year). The point is, decide what you want to get out of ESA before you go because once you get there, there’s a lot going on.

2)       Find a conference buddy (or buddies). You can’t see everything, but if you coordinate with a friend then you can hear about twice as much as you can see. It helps with processing talks and keeping them from just blending together. It also has the added benefit of giving you someone to talk to regularly and keeping you from feeling like just another faceless cog in the giant ESA machine.  Ethan and I often use this strategy, especially when there is more than one really interesting talk at the same time. Then we get together afterwards and swap stories. Just a piece of advice: make sure your conference buddy either has a good memory or takes good notes. I’m not pointing fingers or anything, but there’s nothing more frustrating than giving a detailed rendition of the talk you saw, asking about the talk they saw that you really want to know about, and getting, “It was really good. Uh, my notes here say they did something with a neutral model and the results were really compelling. The paper’s coming out soon. “