Category: Publishing

PubMed Commons is a huge leap forward

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For me, PubMed Commons came out of nowhere.  I was aware of some innovations in publishing (check out journals like Cryosphere for examples of progress in academic publishing) but to have a huge group like PubMed involved in pro-actively pushing boundaries is a real game-changer. Here’s why it’s so important: academic publishing as it currently exists is broken. We have been using a model for publishing that is built around a century-old method for the dissemination of information.  This involves (i) the submission of articles to an editor, (ii) the selection of a small number (usually 2-3) of referees to review the paper and make sure it is adequate, and (iii) a judgement made by the editor and the referees as to whether or not the paper should be accepted.  At that point, the paper is either published (in which case it becomes a matter of record) or rejected (in which case it is never heard of unless published elsewhere).  What this means is that ENORMOUS amounts of scientific information is never seen, and that information that is released in given a sometimes-cursory review by a small number of people who may not be experts in the area.  The internet should already have changed that in a number of ways:Read More »

“Camouflage on the edge” – a new paper on concealing colouration

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In 2012, the US Government cancelled a $5 billion camouflage project under which it had already supplied uniforms to soldiers in Afghanistan.  The pattern of camouflage, called the “universal camouflage pattern” (UCP) was supposed to allow soldiers to blend in equally well in forests, deserts, and urban environments but had been deployed but never properly tested to ensure that it provided proper protection.  When this testing was finally carried out, it demonstrated that the camouflage performed poorly, and was actually putting soldiers at unnecessary risk.  It got so bad that US Army soldiers were trading their uniforms with locals so that they could wear something with appropriate colouration.  What this goes to show is how poorly we understand the mechanisms underlying camouflage, even while we spend enormous amounts of money attempting to exploit the phenomenon.  A new paper that my colleagues (based at Carleton University) and I published today in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters adds a key piece to the camouflage puzzle by illustrating for the first time the mechanism behind “disruptive colouration“.  The paper can be viewed for free at the journal homepage, as can all Biology Letters articles, until 30th November 2013 – go browse, it’s a fascinating journal with short, varied, interesting papers.

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Four reasons to publish during your PhD, and how to go about it

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A graduate student yesterday told me that they were despondent over not having published more during their PhD. I was just pleased that they were considering it at all, because the British PhD culture is still (to a certain extent) fixated on the production of a thesis (which nobody will read) rather than academic journal articles. I thought I would take a few minutes to lay out the reasons that I think you should be trying to publish whatever you can whenever you can:Read More »

The absurdity of research grant writing

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I have recently (and luckily) been successful in applying for grant funding. I’ll write more about the grant itself later, but I wanted to highlight something that I see as far more significant. Applying for research funding is absurd and I think I’ve come up with an analogy to drive this home.

Imagine that you are an athlete (more difficult for some of us than for others). You have decided to dedicate your life to your sport and have entered a competition to pit yourself against the best in the country. The trouble is that the sport is poorly defined. You turn up on the day prepared with a full gymnastics routine, but you know right now that the judges prefer figure skating. But gymnastics is your thing and you don’t really know anything about skating, plus you have spent two months preparing this gymnastics routine and you’d hate it all to be for nothing.

So you turn up and perform your routine. Only there are no judges watching and there is no audience to cheer you on. You perform in an empty hall with your footsteps echoing around the auditorium. You finish and there is no applause. You pack your things and leave for home.  Four months later you receive a letter with the results. The letter contains only five lines of mixed, non-specific comments: “too ambitious”, “not original enough”, “clearly capable”.  The letter goes on:

“We would like to congratulate you on your marks and it is our pleasure to inform you that you placed third overall in the competition”

You are elated – third place means that you get a medal and some prize money and that is precisely what you wanted – something to hang on your wall at home and something to help you keep making progress in the career that you love.  But you read on:

“Unfortunately due to budgeting issues, we have only been able to provide medals and prize money for the first and second placed contestants.  Better luck next year”

This is what grant applications are like.  We receive vague messages about funding priorities, we push applications through archaic and arcane peer review processes which are (often but not always) unhelpful in improving the submission, and the quality of the application is no guarantee of funding even if what you write is practically flawless.  A recent Nature paper (Herbert et al., 2013) suggested that Australian scientists spent around 500 years of working hours preparing grants to submit to a major Australian funding body.  Since only around 20% of those grants were accepted, Australia wasted 400 years of research effort.  Now, I don’t consider rejected grants to be a complete loss but there is no doubt in my mind that the grant submission process (along with the scientific publishing process) could be massively improved…

Reference:
Herbert, D.L., Barnett, A.G., and Graves, N. (2013) Funding: Australia’s grant system wastes time, Nature, 495: 314.

Gymnast photo: Rick McCharles

A nice review of the demands of open science

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The journal Psychological Inquiry has just made an issue on open access science open access.  I’ve flicked through a couple of articles and they look like a thoroughly interesting combination of pros, cons, and speculations.  In particular, the opening article states the needs of an open science movement very clearly in its abstract:

We call for six changes:

  1. full embrace of digital communication;
  2. open access to all published research;
  3. disentangling publication from evaluation;
  4. breaking the “one article, one journal” model with a grading system for evaluation and diversified dissemination outlets;
  5. publishing peer review; and
  6. allowing open, continuous peer review.

I think these six principles sum-up the needs of the research community quite well.  We are working in an out-of-date and horribly expensive system that is not benefitting scientists or those who use the science.  There has always been pushback against these kinds of measures (see the response in the same issue of Psychological Inquiry by the editor of a different journal), mostly along the lines of “it’s too hard” or “that won’t work”.  However, those sorts of arguments are undermined by a number of journals which are doing precisely these things extremely well.  I’ll mention Cryosphere as an example that I have had experience with.  A few small changes could go a very long way towards improving the system, and we cannot let the editors and publishers try to convince us that it cannot be done!

While we wait for the open access revolution, self-archive!

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I’ve just had a paper published on open access in ecology and evolution, so I thought I would let you know what it’s all about.  I wrote a few weeks ago about how you can often post more of a scientific paper online without violating copyright than you might think.  I went through a couple of journals in which I had published articles, and tried to work out what I could self-archive.  The answer was usually “quite a lot”!  Then someone in the comments popped up and mentioned the SHERPA-ROMEO website, which allows you to search for the name of the journal in which your paper has been published and then shows you the policy on self-archiving.  Well, being the data-lover that I am I decided to check out the rest of the journals in ecology and evolutionary biology (all 165 that were listed on Thomson Reuters Journal Citation Reports).  The results were pretty interesting…

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