Uncommon Ground

What Vincent van Gogh might have done were he alive now.

Starry Night (interactive animation) from Petros Vrellis on Vimeo.

Hat tip: John Maeda (@johnmaeda)

That's the screenshot of my reply to a review request from Theoretical Population Biology. It was a little uncomfortable for me to make that reply because (a) my co-author and I sent off revisions for an invited paper that will appear in a special issue¹ of TPB and (b) one of the editors was my major professor at Stanford and I shared an office with another of the editors for a year or two as a post-doc.

But as you can see, I shook off my discomfort and made a statement.

Nearly 5000 scientists have now signed the pledge.

Writing in the Boston Globe, Gareth Cook summarizes things this way:

Elsevier has settled on a business strategy of exploitation, aligning itself against the interests of the scientific community. Most of the intellectual work that goes into Elsevier's journals is provided for free, by scientists whose salaries are largely paid for by taxpayers. Then Elsevier charges exorbitant rates for its journals, with many titles running in the thousands of dollars a year. This sharply curtails the sharing of results - the fuel of scientific discovery - and makes it prohibitively expensive for the public to read what appears in its pages. Yet for Elsevier, this looks like success: In 2010 Elsevier reported revenues of about $3.2 billion, of which a whopping 36 percent were profit.

I pointed out the Strunk & White rap video in late December. I remember reading E.B. White's essay about his teacher when I was in high school. And I still remember how excited I was when I found a paperback copy of Strunk & White in my college bookstore.

A couple of days ago I added a new Strunk & White book to my collection. I don't have the illustrated edition, and I don't have the most recent addition, although I do have a hardcover copy of the 3rd edition as well as my old paperback from college. My new Strunk & White isn't an edition of Strunk & White, it's a Kindle book about Strunk & White.

The book is Stylized: A Slightly Obsessive History of Strunk & White's Elements of Style. I haven't started reading it yet, but given my peculiar obsession with commas and style, I am looking forward to it.

"I hate the guts of English grammar," E. B White once famously proclaimed. Yet Strunk & White's The Elements of Style is among the most important and timeless books on writing. With its enduring legacy and cultish following, it has inspired countless derivatives and homages, from a magnificent edition illustrated by Maira Kalman to a rap. The book has become a legend in its own right, its story part of our modern creative mythology -- but, like a good fairy tale, it brims with more curious, unlikely, even whimsical details than a mere plot summary might suggest. Those are exactly what Mark Garvey, a 20-year publishing veteran and self-professed extreme Elements of Style enthusiast, explores in Stylized: A Slightly Obsessive History of Strunk & White's The Elements of Style. (Maria Popova)

Michael Eisen:

I want to challenge the key assumption - made by nearly everyone - that choosing not to publish your work in the highest impact factor journal you can convince to accept it is tantamount to career suicide. It is ubiquitously repeated by everyone from the most successful senior scientists to first year graduate students. And, judging by their publishing practices, most of them must believe it to be true. But I don't think it is.

If that seems like heresy, it's because it is heretical. Michael put it more strongly than I would have but I mostly agree.

Since I mostly agree, there's no point in repeating his arguments in favor of that heretical position. I'll focus on a shade of emphasis where we disagree.

In my new position am part of the team that reviews cases for promotion, tenure, and reappointment across all schools and colleges at the University of Connecticut (other than those at the Health Center). A few years ago, I served on the Faculty Review Board, a group of faculty that provides advice to the Provost on promotion, tenure, and reappointment cases where there might be a negative decision.

In those contexts, I've had to judge the credentials of economists, poets, political scientists, artists, sociologists, and philosophers, not to mention the credentials of those in natural science fields well beyond biology. I can't pretend to judge the scholarly qualifications of candidates based on direct reading of publications (for fields where publication is relevant), except in a few fields close to my own research, or the creative contributions of those involved in literature, the visual arts, or performance. I can only judge based on the assessments of experts in those fields and some sense of the quality of the venues in which a  work has appeared.

I know, for example, that it is much more significant for a musician to have presented a solo performance with the New York Philharmonic in its regular concert season than for a musician to have performed the same work with the high school orchestra in my hometown. And it is a much more significant achievement for an evolutionary biologist when she publishes her work in Evolution than when it appears in the Journal of Northeastern Connecticut Evolutionary Biologists.¹

So how have I used that kind of assessment of journal quality in judging promotion and tenure cases? By seeing whether the quality of scholarship suggested by the venues in which it appears is consistent with the evaluations of external evaluators who are expert in the field. It's not, "Oh, this gal has a paper in Evolution. She gets tenure." It's "Oh, this gal has a paper in Evolution. That's a demanding journal, getting a paper or two in there suggests that she is doing very good work, and that's consistent with the high praise that external reviewers are heaping on her. She's someone we want to keep around."²

So on that, Michael and I agree. Choosing not to publish your work in the highest impact factor journal you can convince to accept it is not tantamount to career suicide.

The shade of emphasis on which we disagree is this: You do want to publish your work in high quality journals.³

I've emphasized here the purely practical impact that will have on your prospects for promotion and tenure, but there's an even more basic reason. Your work isn't done until it's communicated. And it's much easier to reach a wide audience of receptive readers when your work appears in high-quality journals than when it appears in obscure journals -- even, I'm afraid, if those obscure journals are open access.⁴

By Tom Spears, The Ottawa Citizen. You owe it to yourself to read the whole thing.

Ernest Small's research colleagues at Agriculture Canada had a mystery. Peering at the cellular innards of a clover plant, they wondered why nothing was behaving the way clover should.

They asked Small, a veteran scientist at the Central Experimental Farm, for help.

It didn't take him long to pinpoint the problem. Their clover was an alfalfa.

Read more: http://www.ottawacitizen.com/technology/Taxing+times+taxonomy/6028252/story.html#ixzz1lFjvqWTF


Hat tip: Sandra Knapp (@SandyKnapp)

Just three South East Asian countries support more than 70 percent of the planet's biological diversity.  A substantial part of the region's human population (and often the poorest part of the population) depends directly on these biodiversity resources to provide food, medicine, shelter, clothing and other needs.  Already in the Philippines we are seeing the impact of poor environmental management on coral reefs - threatening the livelihoods of fishermen and undermining the potential for tourism development. (source)

You're probably thinking to yourself, "Yet another pronouncement by yet another environmentalist about how important biodiversity is." Of course, if you read this blog regularly, that's probably not what you're thinking. You know me well enough to know that if it were just another pronouncement by just another environmentalist, I wouldn't bother to highlight the quote so prominently. Instead, you're wondering "What's his angle here? Who said it this time?"

Stephen Lillie, the British Ambassador to the Philippines.

He wrote that in the context of reporting on a recent meeting involving senior officials from the Philippines, Brunei, Indonesia, and Malaysia "organised by the British Embassy and the ASEAN Center for Biodiversity or ACB (which is based in Los Banos near Manila), the meeting was intended to highlight the importance of correctly valuing biodiversity in a country's economic planning, and how failing to account for the value of ecosystems and biodiversity loss risks wrong choices and decisions."

It is gratifying to see senior government officials take the economic value of biodiversity seriously. As Robert Kennedy put it more than 40 years ago, our

Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage.  It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them.  It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl.  It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities.  It counts Whitman's rifle and Speck's knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children.  Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play.  It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials.  It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.  And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.

USDA Hardiness Zone Map. Click on the image for an interactive version.

Last week the U.S. Department of Agriculture unveiled a new plant hardiness map. The last one was released over two decades ago -- in 1990. Some of the changes reflect new methods for interpolating data between weather stations. But

Compared to the 1990 version, zone boundaries in this edition of the map have shifted in many areas. The new map is generally one 5-degree Fahrenheit half-zone warmer than the previous map throughout much of the United States. This is mostly a result of using temperature data from a longer and more recent time period; the new map uses data measured at weather stations during the 30-year period 1976-2005. In contrast, the 1990 map was based on temperature data from only a 13-year period of 1974-1986. (from the USDA announcement)

Plants know that the climate is changing. Minimum winter temperatures over most of the U.S. are 5 degrees warmer now than they were two decades ago. The earth is getting warmer, and this is just a little more evidence of that.

Remember that Elsevier boycott I mentioned yesterday? Well, I'm afraid that I'm likely to have one more paper appear in an Elsevier-published journal. About a year ago a collaborator and I were invited to submit a paper to a special issue of Theoretical Population Biology. If you'd asked me at the time, I could have told you it was published by Elsevier, but somehow it just didn't register.

Last night I was reviewing the final draft of the paper as revised in response to comments from reviewers. Then it hit me. This paper will appear in Theoretical Population Biology several months after I signed the boycott pledge. All I can say is that I'm embarrassed. I won't be submitting any new papers to TPB. Sorry Mark & Tulja.

Tim Gowers posted a blog entry a little over a week ago entitled "Elsevier -- my part in its downfall". Here's the nugget of what he had to say, but you should go read the whole thing if you are a publishing academic.

I am not only going to refuse to have anything to do with Elsevier journals from now on, but I am saying so publicly. I am by no means the first person to do this, but the more of us there are, the more socially acceptable it becomes, and that is my main reason for writing this post.

Lest you dismiss Tim Gowers as a crank, he's a Fellow of the Royal Society and he received the Fields medal in 1998 for work in functional analysis and combinatorics. He is just one of 1671 scholars who have signed an online pledge neither to submit papers to Elsevier journals, nor to edit Elsevier journals, nor to review papers for Elsevier journals. I made the number 1672 this morning. As Tim Worstall summarized the situation on Forbes.com

Academic publishing is a very good game indeed if you can manage to get into it. As the publisher the work is created at the expense of others, for free to you. There are no advances, no royalties, to pay. The editing, the checking, the decisions about whether to publish, these are all also done for free to you. And the market, that's every college libarary in the world and they're very price insensitive indeed.

I invite everyone who reads this blog to add their name to the list at The Cost of Knowledge. It's time to take a stand.

The Dimensions of Biodiversity project that Carl Schlichting, Cindi Jones, John Silander, Andrew Latimer, Justin Borevitz, and I are working on is featured in a recent Discovery article on the NSF website. Here are the first couple of paragraphs of the article:

Climate change is on your porch and in your backyard and living room--anywhere you bedeck with flowering plants.

Global warming affects favorite flowers of garden and vase. This is true of plants around the world, including the proteas and the pelargoniums native to South Africa.

Head over to the NSF site if you'd like to read the whole thing.

Related articles

• Post-doc available (darwin.eeb.uconn.edu)