We’ve just submitted a piece that brings together our broad ideas (some of which have been seen before), but, simultaneous to publication, we’ve also decided to put up a preprint. Why? Simply put, immediate access is one of our four pillars of the future of scholarly publication. Once you feel something is ready for public consumption, put it out there! We’ve been delighted to watch the evolution of PeerJ Preprints, so we’ve placed our piece there.

Byrnes et al. (2013) The four pillars of scholarly publishing: The future and a foundation. PeerJ PrePrints 1:e11 http://dx.doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.11

This immediate access to the piece goes hand in hand with another of our four pillars. Open Review. We want to know what you think. And now. We hope you give us feedback over at the preprint. Or, if you want to give us more detailed annotated comment, we’ve put it in a comment-open Google doc. Highlight something you disagree with. Argue with us. We welcome it! We’d ask that you put your name with the comment. We want a discussion, as discussion will improve this manuscript and help us shape our argument rather than just one-way commenting. This will also allow *you* to get full recognition for your comments, and we will include this in future acknowledgements.

So, enjoy the piece – our commentary is not a straight experiment-analysis-discussion piece, but rather part of a broader ecosystem of scholarly products that we feel are important to get out there. We look forward to hearing what you think of the piece!

It is our intention to keep this a regular section of the journal so please consider popping your ideas on how to improve the current scientific dissemination pipeline for our disciplines.

Our goal is to establish a baseline of your opinions on the current state of scholarly communication for our fields so as to highlight potential gaps and improvements.

Please, head on over and take the survey. We want your input. We’ll be using it both to write up a paper, and inform a few future projects from the group.

It won us $5K to develop the preprint/commentary project.

Thursday:

The Eco-Preprint-Commentary Project
– Ed presents what has been done (morning)
– Open discussion on the project

Afternoon, small groups
-designing a post-use survey for the preprint server
– devs continue work based on morning discussion

Friday
Morning
– plenary bringing survey and devs together, make sure goals are aligned

Afternoon small groups
– devs continue work based on morning discussion
– Strategize roll-out of project and assign roles

Saturday
– final presentation by developers
– Strategize roll-out and Science Online presentation
– Discuss future administration of project
– Discuss funding of future OpenPub efforts

This represents a great move – both for the responsiveness of ESA and as a signal that it’s time to move forward with building a preprint culture in Ecology to make us a faster, more nimble field of discipline. See some fantastic comments along these lines from IPhilippe Desjardins-Proulx

Chris and I will post here weekly or more frequently, so keep an eye out – either follow the RSS feed or have new entries emailed to you or do whatever it is you do to keep track of a blog. You are also welcome, nay, encouraged to post here as often as possible.

I’ll start with some introductory readings to get everyone on the same intellectual wavelength, and then next week we’ll begin the discussion in earnest with introductions, etc.

One thing to think about and discuss here. Right now this blog is private and only viewable to the working group members. As we go forward, though, we’d like to begin to open it up. Particularly as we begin posting things in here during the week of the working group, we thought it might be an excellent idea to open this blog up to the broader public for commentary, as the open science community is large and has some great opinions.

So, to discuss a) what do you think about opening the blog later and b) would you be interested in opening it now?

Also, for those new to wordpress, here’s a set of tutorials about how to use it.