Ecolog:
I hope this is a fresh shot of grease in the creaky machinery of publication
and dissemination at worst, and the beginning of a transition to a
transformation of what I will call, until a more accurate or useful term
comes along, "intellectual vigor," at best.
Good luck, Chris! VERY gutsy!
WT
----- Original Message -----
From: "Chris Lortie" <[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Thursday, September 13, 2012 1:25 PM
Subject: [ECOLOG-L] new form of journal for ecology
Synopsis
New journal for ecological research that will help us avoid repetition,
accelerate, and
document supported hypotheses. Free for undergraduates, graduate students,
and
postdoc. Think of this as a home for your riskiest research, undergraduate
theses, and
unpublished thesis chapters - for now. Rapid, editor-only review for
technical correctness.
Here is the front end site I built for discussion using wordpress:
http://www.immediatescience.org
and here is the back-end OJS site for the tools:
http://library.queensu.ca/ojs/index.php/ISE/index
Rationale
Why bother with journals or big publishers (and their profits)? Self
publish. If you did this
yourself on your own website or blog, that would be great. However, if we
all did that,
google might find it all, but it would be in different formats and would be
messy. So, if you
have cool stuff you want to get out now, immediately, use this journal. We
have been
thinking about this for a long time. I have several PhD experiments that I
never published
(but did the stats on and wrote up), have several trial projects never
published, and have
had about 10 honor's thesis students write up that I just don't have time to
turn into a
paper and then fight with peer-review for months on end. I was also
thinking that an
analogy for this idea (standardized self-publishing) would be datasets that
are sitting
around in paper notebooks or in file cabinets. This is not useful to anyone
except those
that collected the data. However, if I take the time to sit and enter it,
at least it has utility
to me and my students. So, let's do the same for all our work. Then, it can
become be an
inspiration for others and a nice way for all of us to share our results -
immediately.
The format of current standard academic papers works - with an easy format
to see and
use. It is a pdf with introduction, methods, results, and a discussion. It
has a journal
name, volume, and page numbers with neighboring work by others that is
similar. So,
Queen's University has sponsored a new journal model using the Open Journal
System.
This is a journal because we the community say it is and put our work there.
The papers
look great and are valid because others can use the material. If some are
great, they will
rise to the top of the web. If not, well, what happens to most papers
anyway? My
colleagues and I will check them all for technical correctness. Each will
also get a DOI.
PlosOne is awesome but expensive and still peer-reviewed. The f1000 model
of publish
anything online is another option (but you have to pay, and it is a money
making
endeavor), and it is not a paper anyway - just an online post. So, let's
provide our
discipline with very limited, 'editor-reviewed' publications - only for
technical correctness.
I have made up a checklist for editors (that will be transparent to the
authors), but basically
this is a journal where authors can publish honor's thesis papers, those
middle chapters of
graduate theses, or papers you want out right now - or papers that don't
support the
dominant hypothesis or are confirmatory in nature (good luck publishing
those any where
now even if it is tested in a unique system). Put them here. Every paper
has an issue, page
number, and DOI attached to it. It is free to undergraduate honor's
students, graduate
students, and postdoctoral fellows and only $50 per paper for everyone else.
Always open
access.
The main goal is to accelerate discovery in ecology and evolutionary biology
(EEB), and we
see at least two ways to do this - (1) avoid repetition of experiments that
others have
probably already done but never published and (2) publish findings more
quickly and let
download rates and post-publication open online review sort out the best or
most useful
ones.
It is called Immediate Science Ecology (ISE). There are two kinds of paper,
experimental
and review articles. The author must also identify when submitting whether
the paper in
each of these two categories is Discovery (preliminary or exploratory
study),
Documentation (confirmatory study or refutation of previous studies), or
Development (a
standard study similar to mainstream journals but novel and communicated
immediately
here). The job of the editor is to use the checklist to ensure the paper is
appropriate
(adequate data, methods clear, well written, etc.), and if not, it is
returned immediately
indicating which category is not satisfied. This is very, very limited
review as we want stuff
out online within 10 days. Queen's U is paying for a part-time copyeditor
to edit the minor
details and format as a standard paper just like IEE
(http://library.queensu.ca/ojs/index.php/IEE/index). I am paying for the
DOI registration
fees.
So, let's try it. We are calling it Immediate Science Ecology (Ecology and
Evol Biol for now)
or ISE pronounced 'eyes'. Submit your work, and let's accelerate discover,
discussion, and
inquiry in EEB. We hope that by offering and using a model that is between
'no review' and
'full review' we can push the publishing industry to catch up and adapt to
the open, online
world. Folks can still use regular peer-reviewed journals for their bread
and butter papers
necessary for merit-based evaluations, however.. having a paper downloaded a
few
hundred times is also a good statistic (or having a few experts post reviews
alongside it).
Other disciplines have a variety of review models accepted as standard, yet
in EEB, we
generally only recognize peer-reviewed articles as valid science. Time for
a change and
another venue for discovery - including this process.
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