(via, appropriately enough, @gvwilson and @TEDxWaterloo on Twitter)

I view the Oikos blog as a place where the Oikos editors can try to do the sort of wonderful armchair ecology that John [Lawton] used to do in his ‘View From the Park’ column. I say ‘try’ because I doubt any of us could live up to John’s high standard (I’m sure I don’t!). I’m going to try to do posts that will be thought-provoking for students in particular. Oikos used to be the place to go with interesting, provocative ideas that were well worth publishing even if they were a bit off the wall or not totally correct. It’s our hope (well, my hope anyway) that this blog will become one way for Oikos to reclaim that niche.

I think they’re doing a pretty good job of accomplishing their goal, so go check out recent posts on the importance of hand waving and synthesizing ecology, and then think about subscribing to keep up on the new provocative things they’re up to.

Evangelists for Open Science should focus on promoting new, post-publication prestige metrics that will properly incentivize scientists to focus on the utility of their work, which will allow them to start worrying less about publishing in the right journals.

Thanks to Carl Boettiger for pointing me to the post. It’s definitely worth reading in its entirety.

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*A blog I’d never heard of before, but I subscribed to it’s RSS feed before I’d even finished the entire post.

**As far as biologists go. And, yes, when I say “insanely nerdy” I do mean it as a complement.

***For those interested in slightly more detail it’s a social application wrapped around the popular distributed version control system named Git. Kind of like Sourceforge on steroids.

I have seen a lot of discussion of how the web is going to revolutionize publishing, but to quote one of my favorite movies “Talking ain’t doing.” Cell Press is actually doing.

I’d strongly encourage you to check out their blog post and video and then go play around with one of the articles in the new format. This is really exciting stuff.

My personal favorite relates to how they intend to, and to some degree succeed in, conducting peer review. Their original plan was for completely open peer review, where the identities of the reviewers would not only be known to the authors, but actually formally attached to the manuscript if it was published. I think that this is an excellent idea. A great deal of harm has been done to the scientific process due to the anonymity of reviewers. If someone decides that they “don’t like” a paper (or the person writing the paper), they can simply proceed to shoot it down based on poorly reasoned arguments with practically no responsibility for doing so. On the flip side, if someone likes the message of a paper even if that paper contains obvious technical flaws, they can write a glowing review without concern that their support for the paper will reflect badly on them. This system places the reviewer in a situation where they are actually responsible for the content of their review, thus forcing them to attempt to provide a balanced and honest assessment of the manuscript. This also conveniently addresses the common argument that, because they want to avoid retaliation by angry authors, reviewers will be hesitant to be appropriately critical if their identities are not kept secret.

Of course this represents an additional burden on the reviewers because they are no longer agreeing to simply throw together an evaluation that’s probably, sort of, mostly, accurate and kind of well justified; they are putting together a carefully reasoned opinion that they are being asked to stand behind. In order to compensate reviewers for this effort IEE originally planned to pay reviewers for their efforts ($150 Canadian). This, unfortunately, is where their brilliant plan failed. In order to finance this payment authors would be required to pay a submission fee, irregardless of whether their manuscript was published or not. This was apparently a bit much to ask of the average author and the journal has been forced to change its policy on paying for reviews. However, the plan for open review is still in place and I for one want to applaud Aarssen and IEE for thinking seriously about ways to actually improve the state of the scientific publication system.

There are a number of other interesting ideas in the editorials and I would encourage you to take the time to read them both. As with the articles the journal hopes to publish, there are things in these two editorials that are controversial, including some that I disagree with fairly strongly†, but there is no doubt that this is some of the most creative thinking about the scientific publishing process that has been done in a long time.

†e.g., Please don’t send me an email every time you publish a paper just to let me know that it’s been published. That will very quickly lead to all of your email getting added to my spam filter because if everyone who publishes work in my general areas of research sends me an email every time they publish a paper, well… read the last paragraph of this post and then use your imagination.