With the announcement of ESAs new News and Views Blog (http://www.esa.org/esablog/?p=13), academic ecologists will soon be asking themselves a number of important questions: How this will impact on the "ideas" and "forum" sections that have emerged in many journals in recent years?
Will this ESA Blog be a potential source for someone to mine 'new' ideas and work them up for an Oikos Forum submission? Gee, do you think that would be stealing? Probably. If it IS regarded as stealing someone else's ideas, is anyone going to care? Probably. If people ARE going to care, does this mean that the ESA Blog should/will become a 'citable' publication? Probably. If it DOES become a citable publication, how will a blog participant know that his/her blog is being cited? Will the ESA blog then be added eventually to Science Citation and other publication searching services? Probably - this would be easy to do, I presume. Will the published comments on your ideas from other blog participants serve as a peer-review process, thus making your blog a 'refereed' publication? Probably. Many are already arguing that this is a better model for peer review, and open access journals are already experimenting with it - e.g. PLoSone (http://www.plosone.org/). By comparison, the peer review process in established, traditional journals is antiquated, depressingly inefficient, and promotes plodding conservatism that stifles the release of creativity and the very progress of science itself (see the recent opinion piece by Adam Rogers at http://w\ww.wired.com/wired/archive/14.09/start.html?pg=3). Many people are just fed up, and are looking for more modern and efficient publication domains, especially ones that guard against the rampant elitism and old-boys networks that are promoted by reviewer anonymity and where exclusivity is practiced by imposing silly printed page limits in a modern world where no-one even reads from pages anymore but instead from pdf files, largely. Is the ESA Blog the answer? Probably. If we get this far with it, will ESA Blogs be considered a legitimate refereed publication to be included in one's professional CV? Probably, eventually. Data mining is already all the rage. Has a new era arrived? Is the next rage going to be 'idea mining'? Probably. Lonnie W. Aarssen Professor Dept. of Biology Queen's University Kingston, ON Canada, K7L 3N6 Campus Office: Room 4326, Biosciences Complex email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] web: http://biology.queensu.ca/%7Eaarssenl/ tel: 613-533-6133 fax: 613-533-6617
