Uncommon Ground

Why you need to have a prior

2013-06-17T11:30:00Z

From xkcd.com. The title there? "Frequentists vs. Bayesians".

California condors as pests

2013-06-16T12:30:00Z

You read that right. Even though there was serious debate about whether it was worth it to try and prevent California condors from going extinct, they're now a pest in Bear Valley Springs, California.

Flocks of California condors have descended upon Bear Valley Springs. Residents, who are allowed to do little to chase them away, say the huge birds peck off roof shingles, damage air conditioners and leave porches coated in droppings. And although the majestic birds, with a wingspan of nine feet, are widely admired, the gated community of about 5,200 about 80 miles north of Los Angeles has seen enough of them.

"A lot of people used to think seeing a condor was amazing," local realtor Beth Hall told FoxNews.com. "After seeing the damage they have done, they have become less popular with people, myself included." (source)

If Google Maps is showing me the right Bear Valley Springs, there are two reasons why I'm really interested.

View Larger Map

First, I spent a lot of time in this area (when there were very few California condors alive). The only known localities of Clarkia tembloriensis subsp. calientensis are in the vicinity of Caliente, just a little north of Bear Springs. There were no California condors in the area when I was working there, but it's nice to imagine seeing one soaring overhead if I ever get back for a visit.

Second, when I was in graduate school there were so few California condors in existence that I remember serious debates among scientists and policy makers who cared deeply about preventing extinctions of endangered species about whether it was worth the time, effort, and money that was being spent to try to save them. It was a reasonable debate to have, and I have to confess that I leaned toward the "It's not worth it side", but it's nice to look back 30+ years later and think that even though the California condor is still endangered it's become a bit of a pest in one tiny piece of its former range.

Innovation in graduate education

2013-06-15T10:00:00Z

English: Logo of the National Science Foundation (NSF). For NSF logo information visit: http://www.nsf.gov/policies/logos.jsp (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Earlier this year the National Science Foundation announced a competition for graduate students in science, technology, engineering, or math. Here's a bit of the original announcement:

The Division of Graduate Education at the National Science Foundation challenges STEM graduate students across the nation to submit innovative ideas to prepare them for tomorrow's opportunities and challenges. Entries are solicited for ideas with the potential to improve graduate education and professional development. Ideas can be directed toward, for example, students, faculty, departments, institutions, professional societies, and/or federal agencies. Make your voice heard on STEM graduate education! (source)

Entries were due on April 15, so why am I mentioning this now? Because NSF announced the winners on Thursday. You can see a list of the winners and read their winning proposal at http://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/gradchallenge/winners.html.

Since I'm Vice Provost for Graduate Education and Dean of the Graduate School, I'm going to be studying these proposals carefully to see what ideas we might be able to adopt here. All of the ideas are great, but some of them are national-scale efforts that I'd be happy to be part of (or lead) from the University of Connecticut. It's just that we can't do them alone.

Here are the ones that have caught my eye that we might be able to do something about:

Obviously, we can't do all of these. But with NextGenerationCT coming on line, it's a perfect time for us to think expansively and creatively about graduate education, and you can bet I'll be doing it.¹

If you have ideas or suggestions about which of these projects would be most useful to UConn graduate students, please leave a comment -- especially if you're a UConn gradute student. I'd love to hear from you.

]]> ¹And I won't be doing it alone. UConn is in the midst of developing a new academic plan, and as part of that effort, I'm working with a small group of faculty to develop The Graduate School's academic plan. I'll share these ideas with the group the next time we get together.

An interesting incident - #dimensionsZA

2013-06-14T10:00:00Z

In yesterday's post I mentioned some of the physical challenges Nora and Jane overcame to collect all of the Protea punctata and P. venusta samples Nora needs for part of her dissertation research. To the left you see the Waboomsberg site, one of the places where I was actually able to help them. We sampled P. venusta starting at the top of the rocks just to the right of the saddle and collected our 20 samples between there and the bottom of the rocks just to the right of the cloud shadow. Other than the collecting we did later that day along the Swartberg Pass road, this was the easiest site from which Nora and Jane collected samples.¹

But that's not the incident I refer to. No, the incident I refer to happened before we even got to where we could start our sampling.

We rented a 4x4 through Drive South Africa. We picked up a sturdy Nissan Double Cab 4x4 from KEA Camper Rentals at Cape Town International at 8:00am on a Friday and left on the N2 for El Yolo One. We stopped at the Peregrine Farm Stall in Grabouw to pick up something for lunch along the way. We continued on the N2 to just past Swellendam, where we turned off on the R324. We stopped for lunch in Tradouw Pass a little after noon and continued on our way. We joined the R62 at Barrydale and headed toward Ladismith. Then it happened.

About 30km south of Ladismith we driving along at about 100kph when we heard a loud "bang" and the truck started to lurch left. My immediate thought was that we'd blown a tire. It didn't make sense, because we hadn't hit anything. But I hit the brakes and guided us to the shoulder.

That's when our wheel came bouncing by on the left, glanced off our left front fender, and knocked down a nearby highway sign, snapping the wooden supports as if they were toothpicks. We got out and went around to the front left side to see what had happened, since we were obviously leaning that way. The whole wheel was missing. We'd driven on the brake pad for the 100m or so that it took me to get us stopped.

Some motorcyclists who were passing by saw what had happened and stopped to ask if we were OK. I was still pretty dazed and trying to figure out what to do when one of them pointed out that we could use lug nuts from the spare on back to put a wheel back on. Well, it turns out that the lug nuts holding the spare on weren't the same size as those that held on the wheels. Although it probably would have been fine to put the original wheel back on, I decided to use the spare -- and steal lug nuts from the other wheel.

I couldn't get any off the right front wheel, so I took two (of six) from the right rear wheel and one from the left rear wheel. There were only three usable bolts on the right front wheel. One had been sheared off, and the threads on two more were damaged. Unfortunately, the three usable lugs were adjacent to one another, so the wheel wasn't evenly balanced in its connection to the brake pad.

So I turned on the emergency flashers, and drove slowly into Ladismith, about 30kph. Jane called ahead and found us a place to stay. KEA sent a replacement vehicle that night, and after that we had no problems at all. Jane and Nora seemed amazed at my skill in keeping the car under control, but honestly, all I did was to hit the brake and steer us to the left shoulder. I wasn't thinking about anything, just acting instinctively.
]]> ¹Well, that's not quite true. We were locked out of Blesberg on our first day. Since Swartberg Pass is only about 60km west of there, we drove to Swartberg Pass and collected Protea punctata at a site well down from the pass on the Oudtshoorn side from which the samples that Rachel analysed for her Molecular Ecology had been derived. We also collected seed families of Protea repens from near the top of the pass for Melis and some more Protea punctata samples from Teeberg.

Those sites were easy, but the conditions were awful. It rained heavily all day, and the wind was howling. You get a bit of a feel for how unpleasant it was in the photograph to the left. That's Nora trudging back up the hill (we were about 200m from the road) after we'd finished sampling at the first site on the Oudtshoorn side.

But the photo doesn't really do justice to how miserable the conditions were. The temperature was only about 4-5°C, the wind was blowing 50kph or more, and rain was falling very hard.

So the sites may not have been hard to get to in the sense that we basically drove right to them, but the conditions in which we were working (I was part of the team that day, not just the driver) were very, very unpleasant. In contrast, it was bright and sunny at Waboomsberg, although the wind did occasional threaten to knock us off a ledge when we were working.

Back from South Africa - #dimensionsZA

2013-06-13T10:00:00Z

Protea canaliculata at Teeberg in the Swartberg Pass, South Africa
Photograph by Kent Holsinger
Click on the image for a high-resolution image in a new window.

I left Capetown about 8:00pm last Thursday (2:00pm EDT), and I arrived back in Hartford just before 7:00pm EDT on Friday (1:00am Saturday in Capetown, 29 hours after I left). The flight was long, but uneventful.

My personal bag and, more importantly, the duffle with DNA samples arrived with me. The trip was a great success.

The focus of this trip was to collect samples in a hybrid zone between Protea punctata and Protea venusta at Blesberg and to collect additional samples of both species in areas of Swartberg Pass where they are not known to be hybridizing.

Nora will use the samples to unravel the dynamics of this hybrid zone. She left dataloggers in place at Blesberg to record temperature and humidity for the next year. She'll use the results from analysis of RAD SNPs (more on that in a moment) to develop a hybrid index, look at performance of individuals along the steep environmental gradient, and relate individual performance to traits. In addition, she collected seed for half-sib families which she'll use for paternity analysis to determine whether there are asymmetries in gene exchange and to identify the causes of any asymmetry she detects.

The hybrid zone is also of great interest for the Dimensions of Biodiversity project. Justin will use RAD sequencing to identify a large number of polymorphic SNPs. We'll use those SNPs as markers in a genome-wide association study to dissect the genetic basis of traits that distinguish these two very different species.

Protea venusta at Blesberg, ca. 20km east of Klaarstoom, South Africa
Photograph by Kent Holsinger
Click on the image for a high-resolution image in a new window.

Nora and Jane did remarkable work in getting all of the samples. Notice I said "Nora and Jane did remarkable work." I bagged out on a lot of it. I made it down the slope at Blesberg on the first day of work there. That's a Protea venusta in the foreground about 2/3 of the way to the bottom. What the photograph doesn't show is that the only way to where we were when I took it was down the cliffs in the background. We were about 200m below the top when I took the photo. The other thing the photo doesn't show is that it had rained heavily the day before so that the rocks and restios were slick.

On the first day of work at Blesberg, I know that I slowed things down, because I'm not as sure on my feet as Nora and Jane. On the second day, I started down again and was making progress slowly. But as I was clambering down a particularly steep pitch about 150m from the top my legs started to give out. It wasn't just that I was moving slowly. I was afraid that if I descended any further, I wasn't going to make it back to the top. I asked Nora and Jane to go on without me. I climbed back to the top by myself -- slowly -- and waited for them to return.

For the next two days I didn't even try to make the descent and help. I collected some samples of Protea montana and looked for more than the single individual of Protea pruinosa -- without success. But Nora and Jane made the trip quicker every day, even though the conditions got worse.

Nora (on the left) and Jane (on the right) heading down from the top of Blesberg on one of those days where I wimped out and stayed on top.
Photograph by Kent Holsinger
Click on the image for a high-resolution image in a new window.

At least it didn't snow while we -- they -- were working on Blesberg. A few days later we were working in Swartberg Pass. I made the (short) steep hike to Waboomsberg without a hitch. It was cold and windy, but the trail was dry. We quickly found the 20 individuals of Protea venusta we went for and returned to the pass. Then I even managed to remember where the Protea venusta population in the pass was better than Jane. I was pretty proud of myself about that.

The next day, we were planning a longer, 14km hike to Oliewensberg (7km each way), but we passed a policeman on our way up to the pass, and when we arrived at Teeberg, we decided to turn around. The road was covered with ice and snow. I'm sure our 4x4 would have made it, but we were 200m or so below the summit, and the hiking conditions would have been even worse.

We left Prince Albert the next morning making contingency plans, since we didn't think the snow would have melted and we didn't expect to be able to collect samples. To our surprise, the drive to the summit was pretty easy, so we started up the path. At first, the going wasn't bad, occasional patches of snow, but the trail was mostly bare, although it was a bit wet.

Once again it became clear that I was going to slow Nora and Jane down, but since we had plenty of time, and I was only slowing them down a little, we kept going. At about kilometer 3, though, things changed. The going got very steep, which would have been fine had the trail been clear. Unfortunately, it was covered in 10-15cm of heavy, wet snow. I was climbing through it -- very, very slowly. Nora and Jane waited for me at the top of an intermediate summit, and just before I got there, I looked at my watch. We'd come about 3.5km in an hour, and we had another 3.5km to go -- under worse conditions. This time I could have made it, but I was moving so slowly because of my unsteadiness, it would have taken us another couple of hours to get to where we needed to sample. And once I arrived, I wouldn't have been able to help. I told them to go on without me, and I went back to the summit and waited in the car.

In the end, Nora and Jane got a lot of really good samples. We even picked up several taxa for the trait-environment analysis in Dimensions that we hadn't sampled before. So it was a very successful trip. At the same time, I began to wonder about my future in South Africa during the flight home.

Nora needs someone dependable, i.e. someone other than me, to help her when she goes back next year. We've collected samples and trait data from all of the taxa it's reasonable to imagine we can get for our trait-environment analyses. Jane doesn't need me as a field assistant for her polymorphism work. I can't think of a good reason that anyone should spend good money to get me to South Africa next year.

I don't like thinking this, but I have to wonder whether 2013 may have been my swan song.

Looking forward

2013-06-12T10:00:00Z

In April, I gave the banquet address at the Centennial Celebration of the California Botanical Society. Tomorrow I'll share a brief report on my time in South Africa. Until then you're welcome to watch this presentation -- if you have 40 minutes to waste.

Off to Africa - #dimensionsZA

2013-05-19T10:00:00Z

I leave from Bradley International for Capetown a little after 4:00pm this afternoon. My student, Nora, will be traveling with me, and we will meet Jane, my former post-doc,¹ in Heathrow some time on Monday.²

We'll spend a few days in Capetown checking on things in the garden, meeting with collaborators, and taking care of a few last-minute logistics. On Friday, we'll exchange our rental car for a 4x4 and head off for El Yolo One, not too far from Klaarstroom. We'll be there until the following Friday, when we'll move to Acacia Cottage in Prince Albert. We'll return to Capetown on the following Wednesday, and I'll leave for Connecticut the following day. Nora and Jane will stay for another week to do some work in the garden.³

My Internet access will be limited (or non-existent), except while I'm in Capetown. I may make a post or two after we arrive and one when we get back to Capetown, but don't be surprised if you don't hear anything from me for the intervening two weeks. If for some reason you just can't live without updates,⁴ you can follow me on Twitter (@keholsinger) or search on the #dimensionsZA hashtag. I may be able to check in using my iPhone a bit more often.⁵

]]> ¹Now faculty member at Nicholls State University.
²The time is uncertain, because Nora and I have a long enough layover in London that we may head over to Kew Gardens while we're there.
³I really don't mean to abandon them, but (a) I have some deanly responsibilities I had to get back for and (b) they don't really need me.
⁴You should probably seek therapy.
⁵I'm reasonably sure that I'll check in a few times while we're in Prince Albert. I don't know if I'll have any cell phone coverage while we're at El Yolo.

Against impact factors

2013-05-18T12:00:00Z

I've argued before that impact factors are useless or worse and that altmetrics or, even better, textual analysis of articles is a much better way to judge the impact of a scientific work.

Impact factors provide one crude metric by which the "quality" of journals can be compared. When libraries are forced to make decisions about what journals they subscribe to, an impact factor is one way of judging how useful the content of a journal might be. Of course, if the library already subscribes to a journal, local usage statistics are vastly superior. So knowing a journal's impact factor is one datum a librarian might use in deciding whether to subscribe to a new journal. Of course, interest from library patrons is likely to be the overriding factor. So again, the usefulness of impact factors is limited. And they will become ever more limited as more and more of the scholarly literature becomes available under an open access license.

]]> The impact factor of a journal is even less useful in judging the quality of an individual scholar's work, since impact factors apply to whole journals, not individual papers. The chain of reasoning¹ is something like this:

Person A published a lot of papers in journals with a high impact factor.²
Journals with a high impact factor generally have a higher rate of rejection than those with a lower impact factor.
Papers that are accepted to journals that have a high rejection rate are more likely to be "important" and "influential" than those that are rejected.
Therefore, work appearing in a journal with a high impact factor is likely to be of high quality.
Therefore, Person A is doing a lot of high quality work.

The American Society for Cell Biology recently published the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment. I encourage you to read and sign the declaration at http://am.ascb.org/dora/.

¹To the extent there's any reasoning about it at all.
²One hopes that anyone using this logic recognizes that what counts as a high impact factor for work in parasitology is different from what counts as a high impact factor in economics.

Elementa - now accepting submissions

2013-05-16T12:00:00Z

Elementa is now accepting submissions. In case you don't remember, Elementa is a fully open access journal led by BioOne and Dartmouth in collaboration with the University of Colorado, the University of Michigan, the Georgia Institute of Technology, and the University of Washington.

Elementa publishes in six knowledge domains relevant to the science of the anthropocene: atmospheric science, ecology, sustainable engineering, earth and environmental science, ocean science, and sustainability transitions. If you work in one of those areas, I encourage you to become one of Elementa's first authors.

Head over to http://elementascience.org/submission/ and get started.

The 134th commencement at UConn

2013-05-13T10:00:00Z

We celebrated the 134th commencement at UConn over the weekend with ceremonies for every school and college¹In addition to reading the names of all doctoral degree recipients and shaking the hands of hundreds of masters candidates in the ceremony for The Graduate School, I had the honor of welcoming the Class of 2013 to the second ceremony of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

Here's what I had to say:

]]>
I am also smart enough to realize that you didn't come here to hear me speak, and I remember enough about my own commencement to know that you're not likely to remember anything I have to say longer than it takes me to walk back to my seat and sit down, so I promise to be brief.

But it's not often that I have such a large captive audience, and as I'm sure all of the members of the Class of 2013 can attest, no faculty member can resist the temptation to pontificate a bit - or maybe even more than a bit - when given the chance, so bear with me for a few minutes.

The novelist David Foster Wallace began his commencement remarks at Kenyon College a few years ago with a parable:

Two young fish are swimming along and pass a big old fish swimming the other way. "Morning boys," the big fish says. "How's the water?" The young fish swim on a bit when one turns to the other and asks sheepishly, "What's water?"

If we've done our job over the last few years, you've had that "What's water?" experience many times, whether in a philosophy class, a biology lab, or just a late-night bull session with some friends. When talking about the value of a liberal arts education we typically talk about how critical thinking skills and a commitment to life-long learning are vital to a healthy democracy - and that's true.

But as David Foster Wallace pointed what's most vital about your education here isn't your capacity to think. It's your enlarged capacity to choose what to think about, to notice the simple truths around you that are hidden in plain sight. How many times have you slapped yourself on the forehead after a lecture and said to yourself, "Wow! I never even imagined such things were possible." Whether it was a mind-bending result from quantum physics, a poem of ineffable beauty and grace, or a glimpse of the nobility (or horror) of an episode in human history, I hope you've had at least a few of those head-slapping "This is water" moments during your time here.

Remember and treasure those moments. They remind us that often finding the most important things is as simple (or as difficult) as finding a different way of looking at the world.

Your hard work and persistence brought you here - along with more than a few all-nighters and dozens of pizzas. But it didn't bring you here because this was your destination. It brought you here because this is a milestone along your journey. This ceremony is a commencement, a new beginning, an opening to new possibilities, the point from which you apply what you've learned to the challenges that lie ahead, whether those challenges lie first in additional study or in a job.

In less than a couple of hours you will walk out the doors of Gampel as the newest UConn alums. But you won't walk out those doors alone. You reached this milestone because friends, teachers, mentors, and family supported you along the way. Please take time to thank them, and especially your mothers and grandmothers, on this very special day.

When you walk out those doors you may no longer be UConn students, but you are now and will be

Huskies forever!

Thank you and congratulations!

¹Except the Schools of Medicine and Dental Medicine and the School of Law. Commencement for the Schools of Medicine and Dental Medicine will be held later today, and commencement for the School of Law will be held next Sunday.

The scientific consensus on climate change

2013-05-12T10:00:00Z

Global mean surface temperature difference from the average for 1880-2009 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The Global Change Institute at the University of Queensland invites you to participate in a survey. From the invitation:

This survey asks you to rate 10 scientific papers, estimating the level of consensus regarding the proposition that humans are causing global warming. The survey should take around 15 minutes. Your submission will be anonymous. To participate, please click the button below. Please only take the survey once.

This survey mirrors a paper, Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature, to be published soon in Environmental Research Letters, that analysed over 12,000 climate papers published between 1991 to 2011. The purpose of the survey is two-fold. Firstly, to replicate the experience of rating a random assortment of climate papers, gaining appreciation of the diversity of climate research available. Secondly, an invitation to this survey has been sent to a wide range of climate blogs in order to analyse ratings from a diverse range of participants.

The survey adheres to the guidelines for ethical review at the University of Queensland. You'll find the survey at http://survey.gci.uq.edu.au/survey.php?c=58TN3BFHYXYL.

]]> Yale Forum on Climate Change & the Media, took a quick look, and decided to post the link on my own.

400ppm and counting

2013-05-11T12:00:00Z

A couple of weeks ago, April 25 to be exact, I pointed out that we were closing in on 400ppm of CO₂ in the atmosphere. The reading then stood at 398.44ppm according to measurements released by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Yesterday, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced that CO2 levels passed 400ppm on May 9. From the NOAA announcement:

Before the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century, global average CO2 was about 280 ppm. During the last 800,000 years, CO2 fluctuated between about 180 ppm during ice ages and 280 ppm during interglacial warm periods. Today's rate of increase is more than 100 times faster than the increase that occurred when the last ice age ended.

The May 9 reading from Scripps was 399.73ppm. Here's their explanation for the tiny discrepancy:

NOAA has reported 400.03 for May 9, 2013, while Scripps has reported 399.73. The difference partly reflects different reporting periods. NOAA uses UTC, whereas Scripps uses local time in Hawaii to define the 24-hr reporting period. If Scripps were to use same reporting period as NOAA, we would report 400.08 for May 9. (source)

CO₂ levels have not been this high in the last 4 million years.

In the oceans, fossils mark the spread of tropical and subtropical marine life northward along the U.S. Eastern Seaboard. Both observations and models of the Pliocene Pacific Ocean show the existence of frequent, intense El Niño cycles--a climatic oscillation that today delivers heavy rainfall to the western U.S. causing both intense flooding but also increasing the river flows needed to sustain salmon runs. The absence of significant ocean upwelling in the warmest part of the Pliocene would have suppressed fisheries along the west coasts of the Americas, and deprived seabirds and marine mammals of food supplies. Reef corals suffered a major extinction during the peak of Pliocene warmth but reefs themselves did not disappear. (source)

The time for arguing about whether human beings are causing climate change because of our CO2 emissions is past. Debating whether our activities are changing the climate is like debating whether the world is flat. Let's spend our time arguing about how to respond to climate change, not whether it's happening.

Science funding in 2014

2013-05-01T14:00:00Z

The AIBS Public Policy Office just released an analysis of science funding in President Obama's budget request for fiscal year 2014, which starts on October 1. Here's the summary:

President Obama released a $3.8 trillion budget plan for fiscal year (FY) 2014 on 10 April 2013. According to the White House, the budgetproposal would reduce the federal deficit by increasing revenues and cutting spending. The proposal would replace sequestration, the $1.2 trillion in automatic spending cuts mandated by the Budget Control
Act.

Science is once again a priority in the President's budget request. The Administration proposed $142.8 billion for federalresearch and development (R&D), an increase of 1.3 percent over the 2012 level. Although defense R&D would be cut by 5.2 percent,
nondefense R&D would increase by 9.2 percent to $69.6 billion.

Nearly all science agencies and biological research programs would see increased funding in FY 2014. Notably, the National Science Foundation would receive an 8.4 percent increase. Other science programs slated for a budget increase include the National Institutes of Health,
Department of Energy Office of Science, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Department of Agriculture, and several Department of the Interior bureaus. Funding for Environmental Protection Agency science would be reduced.

Science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education programs would be consolidated across the federal government. More than 100 programs at 11 agencies are targeted for elimination or reorganization. Some programs would be moved to the Department of Education, National Science Foundation, or Smithsonian Institution.

The multi-agency U.S. Global Change Research Program would receive $2.7 billion, an increase of about six percent.

You can download a copy of the full report at http://www.aibs.org/public-policy/budget_report.html.

ClimateCommons

2013-04-30T15:00:00Z

An interesting new resource for keeping track of climate related news, ClimateCommons.

From the "About this map" page:

Climate Commons is a map-based interactive platform that contains layers of news and information on climate change in the US. It is designed to provide academics, policymakers, journalists, and the general public with the latest data and stories on the causes and impacts of, and responses to climate change across the country. The map combines the most recently available data on climate change indicators, such as temperature, precipitation, and emissions, with the latest, geo-tagged stories on climate change in the United States.

By providing users with the ability to compare recent data and media coverage on a local, regional, and national level, Climate Commons aims to inform Americans about the impacts of and responses to climate change in their own towns, regions and states. It also serves as a tool for better analyzing the perception and realities of climate change across the US.

PeerJ in the Chronicle Review

2013-04-29T12:30:00Z

Jason Hoyt (@jasonHoyt) is recognized as one of "Ten Tech Innovators 2013" in The Chronicle Review.Ironically, the article is probably behind a paywall.¹ Here's an excerpt.

A basic individual membership begins at $99 and entitles a researcher to publish one article a year in PeerJ. (The base price goes up a little if you wait to pay until you have an article accepted.) Membership doesn't guarantee publication; articles must make it through peer review, handled by a board of almost 800 academic editors who are established researchers in science and medicine.

THE INNOVATOR: Jason Hoyt, PeerJ

THE BIG IDEA: An open-access, peer-reviewed publishing platform offers a cheaper and faster alternative.

The advisory board includes five Nobel laureates, as Mr. Hoyt and PeerJ's co-founder and publisher, Peter Binfield, will happily tell you. As a start-up without the name recognition of, say, Nature, PeerJ counts on the reputations of its editors and reviewers to help persuade other scientists to give it a try. PeerJ authors and reviewers frustrated by the traditional closed-review approach can opt for open peer review, a feature that Mr. Binfield says has already proved popular.

If you can read the whole thing, please do. It's well worth your time.

]]> ¹I can't tell whether it's behind a paywall, because I'm on campus and we have an institutional subscription to the Chronicle.