I really enjoyed the recent Collins et al. piece on the future of open access and publishing within ESA – ESA and Scientific Publishing—Past, Present, and Pathways to the Future. At the end of the piece, there is a call for feedback on all of this, and it is something that we all well should ponder – and consider responding to.

Thanks to Scott et al. for being open with Ecologists, and giving us a forum to send them our thoughts. I’m excited about this dialogue!

Invitation for input

We invite you to contribute your ideas about ESA’s publishing and other initiatives. What issues do you believe need to be on the table? What are your concerns and hopes for the changing dynamics of sharing scientific research results? In what ways do you think ESA can best continue to serve the community?

Current ESA programs that benefit from the Society’s existing business model include its policy activities, such as bringing ecological information to policymakers through briefings, meetings, and letters, keeping members informed of relevant policy issues, broadly sharing ecology through press releases, podcasts, blog posts, and other social media, supporting young ecologists, ecology education and diversification of the discipline, and providing workshops and science conferences to address ecological and environmental issues.

What do you see as ESA’s most important role? What areas do you see as less important and why? Do you have specific suggestions for other models that ESA could explore that would enable it to continue supporting existing programs that members value? What would be the best possible outcome for the ecological community in the face of changing publication modes and information sharing?
Please send comments to pubsfeedback@esa.org

There’s a great writeup at Nature entitled Geneticists eye the potential of arXiv.

With ESA coming up next week, who is going to be there? We should start buttonholing EICs and folk to ask about the possibility of our project being compatible with their journals.

Over at his blog, Ethan White has a good recap of the whole ESA not accepting manuscripts that are on arXiv or other preprint servers. Worth checking out for the full story. ESA has now changed their policy to state:

“Likewise, if a manuscript is posted in a citable public archive outside the author’s home institution, then we consider the paper to be self-published and ineligible for submission to ESA journals.”

UPDATE in 8/2012 – From talking to several members of the ESA publications committee, it looks like this will change. A formal vote is needed, and will happen soon – so stay tuned!