Great news! ESA has changed their journal policy to now accept submissions that are on arXiv or other preprint servers. The news was tweeted by Scott Collins, ESA President.
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
This is by Rebecca at F1000.
http://the-scientist.com/2012/08/28/opinion-transparency-in-science-publishing/
I like their public “status” markers as a scaffold for folks to accept pre-print and open review.
Any thoughts?
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!
Here is the SHERPA/RoMERO database on journal pre-print and archiving policies. Just enter a journal, and it gives you what their policy is listed as. However, it lists many journals as allowing pre-print archiving which we now see are not allowing it based on comments from their editors or societies (e.g., Ecology Letters or Evolution).
Ian Mulvany, head of technology for eLifeSciences, blogs using Github. He writes about separating the costs of production from the discussion about open access:
http://partiallyattended.com/2012/07/12/the-cost-of-production/
NOTE: I just spoke with Ian, and he would be happy to be in the loop on our project. He said that the Stanford Highwire service is porting over to Drupal.
How can we include him in our discussions (if the group wants to do so)?
Aimee Morrison has a good rant on her most recent experience with a high impact journal: