ESA Now Accepts Preprints from ariXiv and the like

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

ESA Changes Pre-print Policy to Exclude arXiv and Other Repositories

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!

Database of Pre-print policies

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).

A couple of relevant blog posts

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:

http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2012/07/11/scholarly-publishing-broken-guerrilla-self-publishing/