PeerJ—What Does It Mean for Paleontology?

For those following open access issues, the arrival of PeerJ has been hotly anticipated (see this link round-up). We all knew Pete Binfield--someone with years of experience in academic publishing and, until recently, publisher of PLoS ONE--was associated with the project, so it wasn't likely to be a half-baked scheme. The big day of announcement finally arrived yesterday, and things look even more innovative than expected. So, what does this mean for us paleontologists?

First, a little background on PeerJ. It's a new journal, falling squarely in the online and open access (CC-BY) categories. Editorial criteria are similar to those for PLoS ONE (scientific and methodological soundness count; perceived impact or splashiness don't). All of this is pretty typical; but the rest ain't.

Innovation
One of the most common fears of open access publishing is that it can cost a lot of money for authors, a particularly big concern in an underfunded field like paleontology. Free open access journals (like Palaeontologia Electronica) and fee waivers (as for PLoS ONE) can fill the gaps, but most mandatory open access fees are otherwise unaffordable for the typical paleontology lab budget (assuming there is a budget for the lab). PeerJ attempts to fill in this gap, while paying for the costs of open access. Things get pretty interesting as a result.

The conventional open access model is to pay per publication; once a paper is accepted, you pay the $2,000 or $1,350 or whatever to subsidize production costs. PeerJ front-loads this in a unique way; each author pays a one-time membership fee, which is then good for life! Depending on what category of membership you buy, you then can publish one, two, or an unlimited number of publications yearly. These lifetime membership fees are quite reasonable, too. They start at $99, and culminate at $259 (fees go up slightly after September 1). Fee waivers are available for those in developing countries.

So what's the catch? Members are expected to review one paper yearly (either as a full-blown peer reviewer, or as a post-publication commenter). Additionally, each author on a paper (up to the twelfth author) must be a member. How does that translate financially? Let's say I want to publish a paper, and have three co-authors. Assuming each of us is only publishing in PeerJ once a year, that translates to $99 per person. With four total authors, the cost is $396. If one of my co-authors and I later publish another paper, the cost for that one is $0. Same cost for the third paper. That's three open access articles for $132 each. This is definitely an encouragement to continue publishing with PeerJ.

Other good things
PeerJ is pretty savvy, and has covered its electronic bases (see their FAQ). The journal will be edited by an independent academic editorial board, an author's membership category doesn't factor into decisions, and content is archived via CLOCKSS. The journal has plans to get an impact factor (which will take three years) and to get indexed in the major services. These are all carefully thought-out, and within (or exceeding) professional standards for publishing.

As another incentive, PeerJ offers a preprint service (free if you only post one a year). Physicists have arXiv, where they can post unpublished manuscripts for community commentary. However, there isn't really such a central repository for the biosciences (especially since the demise of Nature Precedings). Thus, PeerJ is filling a community need (even if we paleontologists don't yet realize the advantages of preprints).

What's needed now?
This journal is surely within the realm of interest for paleontologists, and those of us who support open access publishing will follow it pretty closely. Because the journal has yet to officially launch, some details are still hazy. In order to be of maximum use to paleontologists, I hope to see the following things (in roughly ascending order of difficulty):

• Clear guidelines for nomenclatural acts. These should follow recommendations from the ICZN and ensure that any new species erected within PeerJ are valid.
• A clearly designed, paleontology-specific ethics policy. Standards should be in line with those used by organizations such as the Paleontological Society and Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, and ideally would mandate that all specimens discussed in PeerJ are reposited in appropriate institutions. The last thing the journal needs is to be filled with papers on illegal Chinese specimens or thinly-veiled advertisements for fossils on the commercial market.
• A strong editorial board with a respected paleontologist (or paleontologists). In order to get community buy-in, we need to see that the person who handles our manuscripts is qualified, trustworthy, and fair. Paleontologists are also rather skittish; we won't publish in a new venue unless someone else tests the waters first (judging by the pattern in PLoS ONE).
• Strong impact factor and community perception. We all hate impact factors (or at least say we do, right before hitting the submit button on that article for Nature which we know will be rejected but hey we have to try anyhow just in case), but it's sadly a reality for those who want to get jobs and grants. Early-career scientists are likely to be a little wary of submitting their very top stuff to PeerJ, at least until the journal is a little more established. It sucks for the researchers and for the journal, but that's just the way it is. PLoS ONE faced a similar hurdle (and still does, to some degree), and only time can defeat it. Positive word-of-mouth will also help immensely.

Given the experience of the staff at PeerJ with academic publishing, I have all confidence that these issues will be addressed when the formal editorial guidelines are announced. Open access is changing the way paleontologists do business; whether directly or by influencing other publishers, PeerJ will surely push that change a little more in the right direction.

Self-archival: a good start, but not the full solution

We all want our work to be discovered, read and cited. There is little doubt that closed access systems hamper this - a paywall to an article is a hefty obstacle, and we all encounter them at least occasionally no matter how extensive our library access is. From an author's perspective, freely-available PDFs of their work are a major boost.

In recent discussions on Twitter and in the blogosphere, I've chatted with Mike Taylor, Ross Mounce, and others about self-archival as one of many mechanisms to bring about open access. Mike's recent blog post at SV-POW! summarizes much of the discussion to date, and I thank him for helping me to crystalize my thoughts on the topic.

For those who are not familiar with the term, self-archival refers to placing a freely-downloadable copy of a publication (or other work) on one's personal (or departmental, or whatever) web page. In this post, I want to discuss the pros and cons of such an approach.

Pros

• The PDF is freely available to anyone who wants to see it. No paywalls. No hassle.
• Once picked up by search engines, your posting may be the first one web users find - even above the "official" journal page!
• If users browse your website with the PDF, it means that they might discover closely-related work. This can be a big plus for getting the word out about your research program. 

Cautions

• A personal archive is probably not a permanent archive. Barring special arrangements, your personal or institutional web page is not likely to last substantively beyond your lifetime. Free hosting services such as WordPress may not be around in 20 years (remember Geocities?), so it may be worthwhile to pay for hosting. And make sure your descendents pay for hosting, or that your departmental web administrator doesn't delete your page 15 years after you retire. I have little faith that the PDFs I post on my own web page will be around 200 years from now, at least at that website. That sure would stink for that researcher in 2212, who wants to read all about ceratopsian sinuses.
• Author-hosted archives are not independent. There is nothing to prevent someone from removing embarrassing details or adding fraudulent information to their publications, and little that a casual reader can do to detect such fraud. The great majority of academic authors are honest - it's that tiny minority we have to watch out for. An independent archive, hosted by an institution, library, or publisher, provides a firewall protecting the literature from the authors.
• As article-level metrics gain prominence, author-hosted PDFs may skew some statistics. For instance, let's say I publish a paper in PLoS ONE, and also post a copy of the PDF to my site. Because PLoS ONE records and posts view and download statistics for its own site, any downloads or views from my site are not recorded there. Thus, the statistics are spread across several venues. This is not a major issue in my opinion, but some people may care.
• Under the terms of publication, a publisher may not allow you to post a PDF of your paper. Or, they may only allow you to post a pre-review copy. Or a post-review, unformatted copy. Things get complicated quickly, especially for those concerned about following the letter of the law.

The Up-Shot
If you are active researcher, you should be posting whatever PDFs of your own work that you (legally) can.  If you don't, you're missing out on innumerable opportunities to publicize your work and interact with colleagues. However, personal archiving is not enough to ensure permanence. For the long-term, a bigger solution is needed. Institutional archives, journal archives, society archives, whatever. The ultimate answer may take some time to sort itself out.

How Big Commercial Publishers Can Help Themselves

Big commercial publishers - especially Elsevier - have been getting a lot of flack lately. There's the usual background noise about high costs of institutional subscriptions and individual PDFs for non-subscribers, and now we have concerns over SOPA, PIPA, RWA and the burgeoning Elsevier boycott. I think it's fair to say that the argument has been dominated most strongly by the publishers' critics. Nonetheless, there is invariably someone who pipes up in comment threads (or in posts at sites like The Scholarly Kitchen) in defense of the publishers.

Pro-commercial publisher arguments almost always include the term "added value" or something similar. In other words, the big publishers add something beyond the raw manuscript and figures that are provided by the authors. I think very few people will dispute this claim, at least at its face*. The publishers:

• facilitate peer review by paying for a manuscript handling system (either licensing a commercial product or installing an open source product on servers they pay for) [note that this is not the same as doing the peer review, which is done by volunteer referees and unpaid or minimally-paid editors]
  
• do some copy editing
• format the manuscripts into a pretty PDF and web page
• provide a veneer of respectability with well-known journal "brands"
• distribute the journals to libraries and interested readers, via subscriptions, web hosting, and proprietary search engines
• and other miscellaneous things

[*To forestall the inevitable comments, yes, some of these "services" are of dubious value to many users]

Look, I appreciate the fact that all of this costs money. Somebody needs to be paid to do the formatting into the appropriate medium (whether web page or PDF), technical staff need to make sure the authors submit the files in the right format, it costs money to run a server, programmers don't come cheap, and all of the various functions of a business/journal aren't free (office space, salaries for necessary employees, etc.).

But does it really cost so much that publishers have to charge $37.95 for a single PDF file, or $392 for a personal subscription to a journal?

Maybe the answer is yes (forgetting the 30%+ profits for many major publishers). Maybe it does cost a lot of money to produce an article. Fine. Just do a better job of convincing me that it's worth it. Particularly when some of the most labor-intensive tasks (typesetting and peer review) are provided for free by the authors and their colleagues.

Many large publishers have an established list of things they do that cost money. They've done a decent job of publicizing these talking points, judging by the facts that they show up so often in comment feeds and that I was able to assemble the bullet points above virtually from memory.

However, publishers have performed miserably at convincing us that $37.95 is a reasonable price for a PDF download. Elsevier and company could deflect much criticism if they were to be more honest and transparent about the costs behind a journal article. How much time/money actually goes into formatting? How much does it really cost to serve a file to the internet, over multiple years? What is the honest per-article cost for the manuscript submission system? How many people actually buy articles? Instead we're stuck with the broken record of "oh, this stuff costs money, OA advocates just think it all happens for free. . ."

Finally, here's my most pressing question: If economies of scale apply to publishing, why are the largest publishers providing some of the most expensive services? (in terms of solo journal subscription rates, individual PDF downloads, and open access fees) Wow, would I love the answer to that one!

Post script: It seems that many folks are having similar thoughts. Check out Björn Brembs' round-up here.

PLoS ONE 2011 - Final Round-Up

Back before the new year, I reviewed all 17 of the new fossil taxa that were published in PLoS ONE during 2011. Here, I look at the general trends for paleontology in the journal, both last year and over its entire history.

Topics and Biases

Paleontological Topics in PLoS ONE, 2011

The chart above shows the general topics covered by PLoS ONE papers in paleontology during 2011 (for those of you adding the numbers, a handful were counted in two categories). Just as for new taxa, there is a major skew towards archosaurs. Much as I love dinosaurs, we really need to get a broader diversity of taxonomic coverage. Part of this is probably the result of different cultures of publishing among different groups of specialists - dinosaur workers are comfortable with PLoS ONE, whereas trilobite workers aren't. We need some pioneers in invertebrate paleontology, paleoicthyology, and elsewhere.

The Big Picture
By my count, there were around 65 paleontology-related articles published in PLoS ONE last year (2011). This is up from 39 articles in 2010, and reflects a continuing increase since PLoS ONE was founded in 2006.

Trends in Number of Paleontology Papers at PLoS ONE

Compare this count of 65 for PLoS ONE with 95 papers in Journal of Paleontology and 120 papers in Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology during 2011. PLoS ONE is still smaller than some "conventional" journals, but I think it is safe to say that it may overtake these alternatives in annual volume within the next year or two. Whether or not this is a good thing for PLoS ONE and paleontology is another question - if the quality of the papers submitted to the journal as well as the editing process can be maintained (or improved where necessary), perhaps yes.

Many paleontologists clearly are warming up to the idea of PLoS ONE. It is tough to know what factors are behind this - whether it's availability of high-resolution color figures, cost-effective outlets for lengthy papers, frustration with "conventional" journals, the impact factor, broader acceptance of open access, or something else altogether. Other paleontology journals - and paleontological societies that publish their own journals - would be wise to see what they can do to match or improve upon the attractive points of PLoS ONE. As much as I love PLoS ONE, the last thing I want is a publishing monoculture. Unless others journals adapt, though, this may be the result.

The oldest Eucalyptus in the world - from South America! Modified after Gandalfo et al., 2011

[note: although I am a volunteer editor at the journal, this post reflects only my personal opinions]

New Fossil Species of 2011 - A PLoS ONE Retrospective

What do sauropods, primates, crabs, cats, and crocodiles have in common? They're all animals in the fossil record that had new species named in PLoS ONE this year!

Chela (claw) of Geograpsus severnsi, from Paulay & Starmer, 2011

As 2011 winds down, I'm going to devote two posts to some navel-gazing at paleontology in the online, open access journal PLoS ONE. PLoS ONE really has been a ground-breaking publication, partly responsible for spawning the term "megajournal" as well as inspiring clones from the very publishers who invested some effort over the past few years in downplaying the worth of the PLoS ONE publishing model.

[Note before we continue: Although I do have an "official" volunteer role as one of the academic and section editors for the journal, any opinions in this post are entirely my own.]

Skull of Arenysuchus gascabadiolorum, from Puértolas et al., 2011

In any case, let's start our 2011 retrospective with a look at some of the new taxonomy that appeared this year. 17 new species of extinct organism were named on the "pages" of PLoS ONE this year, but these were not by any means distributed evenly across the tree of life.

Five out of 17 were mammals, only one was a non-vertebrate (a lonely, recently extinct land crab from Hawaii), and three - THREE!!! - were sauropodomorph dinosaurs. What kind of crazy world is this where sauropodomorph taxa outnumber crocodylimorphs, and arthropods? Dinosaurs as a whole did quite well, with seven new non-avian dinosaurs gracing the HTML code of PLoS ONE.

New Fossil Taxa Named in PLoS ONE - 2011
Arenysuchus gascabadiolorum (crocodyliform)
Boutakioutichnium atlasicus (theropod footprint)
Gaudeamus aslius (rodent)
Gaudeamus hylaeus (rodent)
Geograpsus severnsi (crab)
Kawichthys moodiei (chondrichthyan)
Khoratpithecus ayeyarwadyensis (primate)
Leonerasaurus taquetrensis (sauropodomorph)
Leyesaurus marayensis (sauropodomorph)
Linhevenator tani (troodontid)
Lycophocyon hutchisoni (carnivoramorph mammal)
Panthera zdanskyi (felid)
Paravipus didactyloides (theropod footprint)
Pissarrachampsa sera (crocodyliform)
Talos sampsoni (troodontid)
Tapuiasaurus macedoi (sauropod)
Tonsala buchanani (bird)

In 2012, I would love to see the following trends:

• An expansion in the number of new taxa published in PLoS ONE (assuming that high scientific standards are maintained - no junk taxa, please).
• Greater diversity in the taxonomic groups represented. Archosaurs are cool and all, but where are the plants? Where are the brachiopods? This will probably just take time, and perhaps a pioneer in each field of study to raise awareness of the journal. I first seriously considered publishing in PLoS ONE because a high-profile dinosaur worker published there, and I suspect other folks in other fields have similar thoughts.
• More authors taking advantage of the format of PLoS ONE when submitting their new taxonomy. With few or no practical limits on figures (color, size, number) and text, every new description could potentially (and should, with few exceptions) get the monographic treatment. I am happy to say that most authors did just this, but there is always room for improvement!

Skull of Tapuiasaurus macedoi, from Zaher et al., 2011

In the next post: PLoS ONE is now a major force in paleontological publishing. What were the overall trends in 2011? What might the future bring?

Should we review for any old journal?

It's no secret that academic publishers are able to cut expenses by getting free content, free review, and often free editorial expertise from the scientific community. Web hosting, copy editing, and printing costs remain, of course, so publishers cover these expenses by charging for the content - often by charging subscription and article access fees (directly or indirectly) to the very same researchers who provide their expertise for free. When some commercial publishers are generating impressive profits in spite of the bad economy, many researchers are rightfully perturbed. How should we, as a research community, respond?

Mike Taylor, writing at SV-POW! and Times Higher Education, argues that (among other strategies) scientists should refuse to review manuscripts submitted to non-open publications. To his credit, he has put his money where his mouth is (no surprise to those who know how solid Mike's character is). If done by enough people, this will surely have the desired effect of slowing down the cogs of the big non-open access journals (and making open access [OA] a more appealing alternative). But, what is the collateral damage? Is it worth it? Who would even receive the message?

I argue that, unless carefully constructed, such reviewing boycotts may never be noticed by some of the concerned parties. A typical journal editor will think "oh, Reviewer 1 refused to review. . .on to Reviewer 2." Even if the refusal to review is accompanied by a note explaining the reasoning behind the refusal, only the editor will ever see it (and potentially the publishing admins - who have little vested interest in changing the status quo).

Second, when the pool of qualified reviewers is small to begin with, this could have the consequence of letting some really bad stuff slip into publication. I've reviewed enough papers and read enough literature to know that unless I flag some manuscripts, nobody else will. (Richard has a similar sentiment in his comments at SV-POW!). Despite the schadenfreude of seeing non-OA journals become associated with increasingly substandard work, it would also mean that we're left with a mess to clean up (particularly in the case of "new" species). Profits are reported quarterly, but we have to deal with crummy taxonomy forever.

Third, the journals are not the ones hurt most directly by review boycotts; it is the authors. The journal will almost always find someone else to review the paper (with a delay as these reviewers are recruited); and if not, the manuscript will be returned for lack of qualified reviewers (with a delay as the paper is prepared for submission elsewhere). Rightly or wrongly, publications are a primary currency of academia. If getting that publication delayed means my friend or colleague doesn't get a job, or a grant, or tenure, I have hurt them, not just the profits of the journal.

There are some constructive alternatives, fortunately - given a choice, I would say #2 and #3 have the most utility and best balance intended and unintended consequences.

1) Refuse to review the paper, but fully explain why in a letter submitted directly and separately to the editor, journal, and authors. This way everyone gets the message - not just a select few.

2) Review the paper, but include a message with the review (perhaps both in the review text and in a direct letter to the authors) on the shame of the work being locked behind a paywall. Make the authors think twice about whether or not the intended audience will ever see the paper.

3) Submit your own work to open access journals, cite work in open access journals, and encourage your colleagues to do the same.

I sympathize with the sentiment that we academics shouldn't be propping up the questionable practices of some publishers, but we also need to avoid shooting ourselves (and our colleagues) in the foot as a result.

Update: Mike Taylor has posted a response to this post at SV-POW!

Paleontology Journals - Cheers and Jeers

In my previous post, I introduced a compilation of data concerning various journals relevant to paleontologists. The data, which are freely available in Google Spreadsheet, Excel and HTML form, detail costs to readers, costs to authors, and more. In this post, I want to outline my personal opinions on the journals that I surveyed. Which have good policies for authors and readers, and which need some work? The answers may surprise you; they certainly surprised me. Some of the best-known journals in the field are not necessarily the best for those who need to use them.

A disclaimer: The opinions presented here are my own and do not represent any organization with which I am associated. Any critical comments are directed at the publishing practices of the journals, not the quality of the science or the efforts of the volunteer editors, authors, and reviewers. If I have made an error in compiling a journal information, I will happily correct it upon notification and verification. I have published in, and in some cases will continue to publish in, some of the journals of which I am critical. Although I personally would like to publish only in open access, non-profit journals, the realities of a career in science make that difficult at times.

Cheers to:

• Journals that promote open access. Even with a delay, open access allows an increased readership (and hopefully increased citation) of articles. Although critics of OA often imply that scientific papers are just too complex for the lay public to understand, in a field like paleontology the lay public is a major consumer of our primary literature. So, cheers to journals like PLoS ONE, Palaeontologia Electronica, and Proceedings B, who practice and promote open access. Even some commercially-published journals (e.g., The Anatomical Record) deserve special mention for their OA efforts.
• Journals with reasonable download fees. Although every journal would be free and open access in an ideal world, it does cost money to run a publication. I salute those journals of various sizes and business models that keep their per-article download charges at $15 or less; this includes Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences, Journal of Paleontology, Paleobiology, PNAS, and Science. Here's your next challenge, journals: lower the price to $5. I would predict that this is the tipping point in the balance between price and convenience for many readers of the paleontology literature.
  

Jeers to:

• Journals that charge ridiculous fees for per-article downloads. I'm especially looking at you, Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. $41 for a PDF of a one page taxonomic note?! Not even Cretaceous Research, owned and published by the oft-maligned Elsevier, charges that much ($37.95). Somehow or another, Journal of Paleontology only charges $12 per article. I realize that different journals have different goals and revenue streams, but it is absolutely unseemly that a society journal like JVP charges that much for its articles. One wonders how many potential purchases (and thus society revenue) are lost in the face of the fee.
• Journals that only allow authors to publish the pre-peer reviewed version of a manuscript. Journal of Morphology and The Anatomical Record get this dubious honor. I can understand asking authors to delay posting the unformatted manuscript or to refrain from posting the published PDF (to allow the journal to recoup some revenue), but it makes no sense to prevent entirely the authors from posting the peer-reviewed, unformatted version. Given the sometimes substantial changes introduced during peer review (which is done by volunteers, and nearly always coordinated by volunteer editors), posting of an unreviewed manuscript has too much potential for making the author as well as the journal look bad. The Journal of Morphology is a particularly egregious offender. I feel a little bad listing The Anatomical Record in this category, because they do have default OA after one year.
• Journals that lock supplementary information behind paywalls. Erecting paywalls for supplementary information may, in some cases, keep the data out of sight of legal readers. Someone who has only a paper reprint or PDF of the printed work legally obtained from the author, or a hard copy in the journal library, cannot access supplementary data. Keep in mind that most journals only minimally format the data, if at all, for publication, so there is no real value added by the publisher beyond posting it on the server. Prime offenders in this category include Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences, Historical Biology, and Cretaceous Research.
  

Top contenders in various categories:

• Most reader friendly. Criteria: Cost of download, time to OA. Top picks: Acta Palaeontologica Polonica, Palaeontologia Electronica, PLoS ONE, PalArch's JVP. Runners up: PNAS, Science.
• Least reader friendly. Criteria: cost of download, availability of supplementary information, availability of open access and/or author versions. Bottom picks: Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, Historical Biology, Cretaceous Research.
• Most author friendly. Criteria: OA fee and/or fee waiver, maintenance of author rights, impact factor. Top picks: Acta Palaeontologica Polonica, Palaeontologia Electronica. Good bets: PLoS ONE, PalArch's JVP.
• Best all-around journals: These journals balance needs of the author and reader, using the criteria above. In this case, Acta Palaeontologica Polonica and Palaeontologia Electronica are at the top of the list.
• Best Glamour Magazine: Science, by a long-shot. With the high impact factor that authors crave, and the low download fee and eventual open access that readers love, this journal has the entire package. PNAS is a very close runner-up.

*I would note that PaleoBios may be making some additional changes to propel themselves into the "best all-around journal" category; details will be added when available.
**I would also note that by "readers", I am referring to all possible readers, not just those with society memberships or at institutions with well-stocked electronic libraries.

So Now What?
Vote with your manuscript submissions. Submit only to journals whose policies benefit you. Encourage journals with non-friendly policies to change them. Although it may be tough to change strictly for-profit journals, we may be able to make a difference with society publications. Speak up. Blog about it. Talk to your colleagues. Ask the hard questions of the people who make the decisions. Make a noise at the annual meetings. Let's even the publishing playing field!

Update: Heinrich Mallison posted a nice response to the selection of Palaeontologia Electronica as one of the "best all-around journals" for paleontology, over at their official blog.

What are your thoughts? Weigh in with your own nominations for best/worst, or any additional opinions, in the comment section!

Paleontology Journals - Policies, Costs, and Accessibility

When preparing to submit a paper for publication, journal choice is critical. Numerous factors play into the decision (distribution, audience, accessibility, and cost, just to name a few), as has been outlined in wonderful detail elsewhere. As I advance in my own research career, publisher behavior has become more important to me. Does the publisher of the journal to which I am submitting my manuscript conduct its business in a manner consistent with my own personal ethics? Who will have access to my research, and how much will it cost them? This is a tough question to sort out, and in reality there are no perfect players. However, in order to make this decision just a little easier, I assembled data about a number of journals relevant to my own research program.

The full data are posted on a freely-accessible Google spreadsheet, and this post explains each of the categories I recorded. Although I have a personal bias towards open access, I have attempted to present the data in the spreadsheet without commentary. Every person will have his or her own opinion about which factors matter most to him or her. In a follow-up post, I will provide my own opinions on which journals are "best". For now, please make up your own mind.

Categories

• Title: self explanatory
• Publisher / Distributor: This category indicates which organization distributes the journal; this may be the same as the sponsor of the journal, or the work may be contracted to an outside organization.
• Publisher Status: Is the publisher a non-profit or for-profit entity? Some non-profit organizations publish their journals with a for-profit publisher, and some journals are purely non-profit or for-profit.
• Sponsor: As alluded to above, some journals are ultimately coordinated by a scientific society. I understand that some scientific societies receive a portion of the profits from the for-profit publishers, so a journal published by a for-profit entity may not always be a net loss for scientific funding. However, I would caution that no data are available on what percentage of revenue actually reverts to societies.
• OA (Open Access) Default: Some journals automatically post all articles as open access (either immediately or with a delay; indicated as "Yes" on the spreadsheet). Others have open access options only if the authors pay an extra fee (indicated as "No" on the spreadsheet).
• Time to OA: Some OA journals (e.g., PNAS) have closed access for a set period of time (usually one year), and then automatically open the archives.
• OA Fee & OA Fee Waiver: Most journals, even those that are not entirely OA, require a fee for open access. The fee varies from free (e.g., Acta Palaeontologica Polonica) to $3,250 (Historical Biology). In some cases (e.g., PLoS ONE) a fee waiver is available. For delayed OA journals (e.g., PNAS), the fee allows immediate OA posting of the article, rather than free OA after a set amount of time.
  
• Download Fee: Delayed OA or non-OA journals require that non-subscribers (or those who do not have institutional access) pay a per-article charge. Within paleontology-focused journals, the cheapest is Journal of Paleontology ($12), and the most expensive are Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology and Historical Biology ($41).
• Free Supplementary Data: Increasingly, authors rely on supplementary data to publish and disseminate the measurements, cladistic tables, etc., supporting their papers. Most journals allow non-subscribers to access supplementary data; others (e.g., JVP and Cretaceous Research) require purchase of the entire article (even if the user already has obtained a legal copy as a physical reprint or PDF from the author).
• IF: The "Impact Factor", the most "standard" (if opaque) form of which is calculated by Thomson Reuters, is a measure of the extent to which the articles within a journal are cited. Although this metric is often criticized, it is still an important consideration for many authors, and is thus included here.
• Primarily Paleo?: In assembling this list, not all of the included journals are strictly paleontology-focused (e.g., Proceedings B, Nature). However, because they frequently include paleontology content, I felt it useful to include them.
• Author Rights: Publishers vary greatly in the rights that are left in the hands of the authors. Although copyright issues are certainly important (i.e., whether the copyright remains with the author, or is transferred to a commercial publisher or professional society), here I focused on what the authors are allowed to do with their own work in the context of a personal (or institutional) web page. In some cases, the authors may post the final published PDF; in others, the authors may only post the unformatted text. In the most restrictive case (as mandated by the journal Geology), authors are not allowed to post any version of the article.

All information was drawn from the official web pages for the various journals; any errors are unintentional but possible, due either to my own misinterpretation or updated journal policies. If you find any mistakes, please let me know, and I will do my best to correct them. This list is not intended to be exhaustive by any means; instead, it focuses on the journals of most personal interest.

See the Data:
To view the spreadsheet, you can see the freely-available Google Spreadsheet, or an Excel spreadsheet, or this web page.

Coming up: Which journals do I think deserve applause for their policies?

Nedoceratops - Random Thoughts

The last two posts here have focused on my most recently published paper, fully describing the skull of the horned dinosaur known as Nedoceratops hatcheri and critiquing the hypothesis that it, along with Torosaurus latus, is simply an older individual of what we call Triceratops. Because I've already talked about the science of the paper, and some collegial interactions, I'm going to spend this final post in the series talking about a few odds-and-ends that just didn't fit anywhere else. Most of these are little windows into the process behind the paper - from writing to review to revision. And we'll start with. . .

Open Source Composition

I'm proud to say that every single step of the authoring process for my paper happened in open source software. I wrote the manuscript in OpenOffice.org Writer, formatted most of the references in Zotero, did initial image editing (contrast adjustment and background removal) in GIMP, assembled the figures in Inkscape, and submitted the manuscript through the journal website on the browser Firefox, all of which were running on various releases of Ubuntu. Score one for open source software (and open access publishing)!

On Organizing the Paper

I'm under no illusion that everyone (?anyone?) will agree with my conclusion that Nedoceratops is a valid taxon. In fact, I'm quite accepting of the possibility that I may be wrong. But even if this is the case, I still want my paper to be useful. So, I made my best effort to separate data from interpretation in the description section of the paper. Of course, I couldn't be completely successful on this point - after all, I had to compare Nedoceratops with Triceratops and Torosaurus (the most likely candidates for synonymy) - but I like to think that I mostly achieved my goal. If nothing else, I have pretty pictures. And. . .

Speaking of Pictures

My figures went through some pretty drastic changes during the evolution of this paper. In the first round of reviews, it was pointed out that in the text I kept referring to various structures illustrated in the figures, but only a ceratopsian geek could figure out what I was talking about.

For example, we have this lovely sentence:

The narial strut is inclined rostrally towards the dorsal end of the element, and enough original bone surface is preserved to indicate that a posterior internarial flange did not project from the caudal surface of this structure (Figure 4).

My original Figure 4 looked like this:

The photo is relatively pretty, but only a die-hard ceratopsian nerd could locate the narial strut or know where to look for a posterior internarial flange if such a thing even existed in this animal. So, for my next iteration I added some labeling:

Of course, all of the abbreviations are explained in the caption (not shown here). "ns" refers to the narial strut I was talking about above. Finally, the editor mentioned that I should do a better job of indicating the "cpf" (canal at the edge of the premaxillary fossa). It wasn't just at the tip of the arrow, but over a somewhat broader area. Thus, that brings us to version 3:

This, with the extra arrows showing the position of the canal, was the version that appeared in the paper.

If I learned anything from this experience, it was about the importance of good labeling and interpretive drawings for non-expert readers. Most of the labeled interpretive drawings alongside photographs (with the exception of parts B and D in Figure 1) were added at the direct request of the editor. Looking at the end product, this addition was a major improvement to the paper. Of course, I must also admit that having relatively unlimited space in an online journal allows this luxury!

Editorial Ethics

It's probably not a surprise to many of you that I am a volunteer academic editor at PLoS ONE. And those of you who have been paying attention probably noticed that the Nedoceratops paper was just published in that very same journal. This sounds pretty problematic on the face of it.

Thankfully, PLoS ONE has pretty strict editorial controls when one of their own editors submits a paper (in addition to a competing interests policy that covers this and similar situations). My experience as a submitting author was exactly the same as for any other author. Once the "submit" button was pressed, I had to wait just like everyone else. I couldn't control which editors handled it, who reviewed it, or even have a sneak peek at the reviews on-line. In other words, the system functioned exactly as it should.

My authorial feet were held to the fire by Leon Claessens, the handling editor for my submission. Leon, in my opinion, did a very professional job and didn't let me get away with anything (even sending the manuscript back to me a second time for a few last corrections and improvements). The reviewers - Michael Ryan and Peter Dodson - also did their jobs (in my opinion). And, as mentioned in my last post, comments by John Scannella and Jack Horner offered additional constructive feedback.

One thing I really like about PLoS ONE is that my competing interest - as an editor at the journal - is stated up-front in the paper. Although it's somewhat scary seeing it there, I think such notices are certainly appropriate.

Final Thoughts

It's nice to finally have this paper out there - these ideas have been floating around in my head for awhile, and I've always had a secret desire to be the person to describe Nedoceratops. I'm relatively pleased with the final product (of course, there are always one or two typos that slip through, and why couldn't some of the figures in the PDF have been bigger?), and look forward to the discussion that this paper generates. Thank you to all who helped out (see the acknowledgments for a comprehensive list)!

A Flood of Paleo Articles in PLoS ONE

It has been pretty incredible to see the rise of PLoS ONE as a major outlet for articles on paleontology, and it has been equally incredible to ride along as an editor for that journal. The past few months have seen many scientifically important and interesting papers wend their way into publication. I haven't had a lot of time for blogging lately, but wanted to take this opportunity to highlight the latest paleo-themed research in PLoS ONE. The following list is in reverse chronological order (newest to oldest), covering work published in the last three months.

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Slater GJ, Figueirido B, Louis L, Yang P, Van Valkenburgh B (2010) Biomechanical Consequences of Rapid Evolution in the Polar Bear Lineage. PLoS ONE 5(11): e13870. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0013870
Summary: The authors present and interpret finite element modeling results for polar bears and brown bears, showing that the skulls of polar bears are generally weaker than those of their close cousins. Furthermore, these differences probably accumulated rather rapidly.

Xu X, Wang K, Zhao X, Sullivan C, Chen S (2010) A New Leptoceratopsid (Ornithischia: Ceratopsia) from the Upper Cretaceous of Shandong, China and Its Implications for Neoceratopsian Evolution. PLoS ONE 5(11): e13835. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0013835
Summary: Zhuchengceratops inexpectus is introduced; this small horned dinosaur is actually among the largest of its kind, the "leptoceratopsids." Interestingly, it showed up in a big bonebed in eastern China, along with truly giant horned dinosaurs and duck-billed dinosaurs.

Longrich NR, Horner JR, Erickson GM, Currie PJ (2010) Cannibalism in Tyrannosaurus rex. PLoS ONE 5(10): e13419. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0013419
Summary: Bones of Tyrannosaurus with T. rex tooth marks are described; the implications are pretty self-evident (see the title of the paper, if you're still trying to figure this out). This paper received considerable media attention; Brian Switek has one nice write-up at Dinosaur Tracking.

Cisneros JC, Gomes Cabral U, de Beer F, Damiani R, Costa Fortier D (2010) Spondarthritis in the Triassic. PLoS ONE 5(10): e13425. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0013425
Summary: Suffering from what is described as the earliest known example of arthritis, an early archosaur had a pretty rough time with some fused vertebrae. Diagnoses of disease in fossil organisms can be pretty controversial; I shall be interested to see how this particular case study plays out.

Smith ND (2010) Phylogenetic Analysis of Pelecaniformes (Aves) Based on Osteological Data: Implications for Waterbird Phylogeny and Fossil Calibration Studies. PLoS ONE 5(10): e13354. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0013354
Summary: Here, the relationships of pelecaniform birds (including pelicans, cormorants, boobies, and more) is addressed in great detail. The group is not found to be monophyletic, and the unstable nature of the position of several key taxa means that ornithologists will be talking about this question for some time.

Han J, Kubota S, Uchida H-o, Stanley GD Jr, Yao X, et al. (2010) Tiny Sea Anemone from the Lower Cambrian of China. PLoS ONE 5(10): e13276. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0013276
Summary: What the title says. The authors suggest that their new animal, called Eolympia pediculata, is a stem member of the group including corals and sea anemones. The image at right shows the authors' reconstruction of Eolympia.

Peterson JE, Lenczewski ME, Scherer RP (2010) Influence of Microbial Biofilms on the Preservation of Primary Soft Tissue in Fossil and Extant Archosaurs. PLoS ONE 5(10): e13334. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0013334
Summary: This article presents experimental support for the idea that microbial biofilms form a protective layer that allows preservation of deeper soft tissue structures in dinosaur bones and other fossils-to-be. Read more about the research here. Interestingly, the article by Peterson et al. disagrees with an earlier paper published in PLoS ONE (written by Kaye et al.), stating that any alleged soft tissue preserved in fossils is a microbial film alone. Thus, the bacterial biofilms exist - but they're not the only biogenic structure in these bones!

Holliday CM, Ridgely RC, Sedlmayr JC, Witmer LM (2010) Cartilaginous Epiphyses in Extant Archosaurs and Their Implications for Reconstructing Limb Function in Dinosaurs. PLoS ONE 5(9): e13120. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0013120
Summary: Things aren't as they appear; the big dinosaur bones that we see in museums today were probably much longer in life, supplemented by giant cartilaginous caps. Lead author Casey Holliday presents more information here, and Mike Taylor at SV-POW also has stuff to say about the topic.

Oxnard C, Obendorf PJ, Kefford BJ (2010) Post-Cranial Skeletons of Hypothyroid Cretins Show a Similar Anatomical Mosaic as Homo floresiensis. PLoS ONE 5(9): e13018. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0013018
Summary: Yet another round in the discussion about the "hobbits" of Flores, Indonesia. I get the sense that Oxnard et al. are very much in the minority opinion, but I also get the sense that this debate is going to drag on for awhile more.

Rando JC, Alcover JA, Illera JC (2010) Disentangling Ancient Interactions: A New Extinct Passerine Provides Insights on Character Displacement among Extinct and Extant Island Finches. PLoS ONE 5(9): e12956. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0012956
Summary: A recently extinct finch, Carduelis aurelioi, is named and compared with its fellow prehistoric finches (some of which are still alive today). Evidence is presented to suggest that the effects of ancient competition between the species still reverberate today. The image at left shows a life restoration of the new species, as imagined by A. Bonner.

O'Rourke CT, Hall MI, Pitlik T, Fernández-Juricic E (2010) Hawk Eyes I: Diurnal Raptors Differ in Visual Fields and Degree of Eye Movement. PLoS ONE 5(9): e12802. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0012802
Summary: It's not strictly paleontology, but the methods here present actual experimental validation of the true visual fields for extant birds of prey. It would be interesting to compare the visual fields as calculated from the osteology alone with the experimental results - and then see what this means for similar calculations performed for extinct dinosaurs.

Sampson SD, Loewen MA, Farke AA, Roberts EM, Forster CA, et al. (2010) New Horned Dinosaurs from Utah Provide Evidence for Intracontinental Dinosaur Endemism. PLoS ONE 5(9): e12292. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0012292
Summary: Utahceratops gettyi and Kosmoceratops richardsoni, two new horned dinosaurs, are named, and their implications for Late Cretaceous biogeography in North America are discussed. This paper, on which I was a co-author, received a substantial amount of media attention. See my blog post on the subject as a starting point for more information.

Kraatz BP, Meng J, Weksler M, Li C (2010) Evolutionary Patterns in the Dentition of Duplicidentata (Mammalia) and a Novel Trend in the Molarization of Premolars. PLoS ONE 5(9): e12838. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0012838
Summary: Here, the authors propose new ways to interpret the anatomy and evolution of rabbit teeth, based on some previously undescribed fossils.

Noto CR, Grossman A (2010) Broad-Scale Patterns of Late Jurassic Dinosaur Paleoecology. PLoS ONE 5(9): e12553. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0012553
Summary: The Jurassic was an age of giants. The structure of some old, old ecosystems is reconstructed by classifying and comparing the ecomorphotypes of a number of dinosaurs from this time.

Degrange FJ, Tambussi CP, Moreno K, Witmer LM, Wroe S (2010) Mechanical Analysis of Feeding Behavior in the Extinct “Terror Bird” Andalgalornis steulleti (Gruiformes: Phorusrhacidae). PLoS ONE 5(8): e11856. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0011856
Summary: Terror birds are pretty much what the name says - imagine something the size of "Big Bird" from Sesame Street, preying on Mr. Snuffleupagus. This article, which also received broad media coverage (see the Witmer Lab blog as a starting point), finds that the skulls of these big birds were quite strong in the up-and-down direction, but not so strong from side-to-side.

Lindgren J, Caldwell MW, Konishi T, Chiappe LM (2010) Convergent Evolution in Aquatic Tetrapods: Insights from an Exceptional Fossil Mosasaur. PLoS ONE 5(8): e11998. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0011998
Summary: A spectacularly-preserved ancient sea reptile shows skin impressions, bronchial tubes, possible skin coloration, and even potential traces of some internal organs. Feathered dinosaurs may get all of the attention, but the specimen described here rivals them in "wow" factor!

Image from Lindgren et al. 2010

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Some parting thoughts:

• In my (biased) opinion, most of these papers are presenting some pretty solid science (or at the very least, stimulating science). Now that PLoS ONE has an impact factor (and thus presumably more people interested in submitting to the journal), I hope that the quality of the submitted work is maintained.
• There is a pretty major skew towards papers on vertebrates - 15 out of 16 (94 percent) of those mentioned above primarily concern things with backbones . Six out of the 16 papers mentioned above (38 percent) are about non-avian dinosaurs. Let's get some more variety, folks!
• Some interesting work on functional morphology and other aspects of evolutionary biology (only a handful of which are sampled above) has been appearing lately. I strongly recommend subscribing to content alerts (start the process here) or regularly browsing the journal's website, in order to keep up on the latest and greatest work that might be relevant to you.
  
• I look forward to more stimulating papers appearing in the near future. And if you haven't submitted something to PLoS ONE yet, please consider doing so!

Full disclosure: I am a section editor at PLoS ONE.

Have You Accepted the Paleo Project Challenge?

A little over three weeks ago, Dave Hone and I kicked off the 2010 Paleo Project Challenge. Basically, it is an opportunity to finish off those nagging projects (whether they be manuscripts, artwork, blog posts, fossils to prep, or whatever) by the end of the year, or else face public shame. Lazy individuals that we are, we know that unless we make a public commitment to finish some projects, they will never get done!

So far, a number of individuals have accepted the challenge. It's not too late to join in - just post in the comments section. Remember. . .the goal is to finish the project by December 31. Everyone is watching!

Participants in the Paleo Project Challenge
Brian Beatty - paper on meningeal ossification in cetaceans
Andrea Cau - describe new theropod remains from north Africa
Andy Farke - finish paper for ODP; finish paper on ceratopsian anatomy
Nick Gardner - paper piggybacked with one of Casey's
Casey Holliday - either a new croc species description or paper related to frontoparietal fossae
Dave Hone - the necks paper
Heinrich Mallison - finish Plateosaurus CAE paper; sauropod rearing paper; sauropodomorph rapid locomotion paper
Jordan Mallon - Anchiceratops manuscript
Anthony Maltese - sharks scavenging on mosasaur paper; Niobrara ammonite paper
Patty Ralrick - paper on subfossil mass mortality site
Manabu Sakamoto - finish Pachyrhinosaurus drawing; finish and submit theropod bite force paper
Mike Taylor - finally finish the Archbishop sauropod description
Bruce Woolatt - 1/10 scale Quetzalcoatlus northropi flesh restoration
Anonymous - find job; paper for Paleobiology; prep alligator fossil
Jay - finish sauropod description

The 2010 Paleo Project Challenge

Everyone has an unfinished project. Most of us have at least a half dozen. Those partly finished manuscripts, paintings, data sets, and preparation projects. Oh, we started out with good intentions. Maybe we even poured a productive week into it. But then, the honeymoon glow faded. Something else got in the way. The field season, or teaching duties, or another more pressing project, or a grant deadline, or just plain old life circumstances, interrupted us.

Luckily, all of that work doesn't have to go to waste. Why not finish up that project? What are you waiting for? Heck, what am I waiting for?

Regular readers of this blog may remember that Dave Hone and I instituted the "Paleo Paper Challenge" (PPC) last year, in an effort to shame all of us into cleaning our (figurative) research plate. We had pretty remarkable success - although not everyone (including ourselves) were able to finish everything we wanted to, most folks made some major progress. Some papers even made it into publication, in venues like Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology and PLoS ONE. Not too shabby.

Not wanting to rest on our laurels, it's time to kick things off for 2010. This year, Dave and I want to pursue a "bigger tent" approach. Why limit the PPC to just academic research? Let's open it up to all paleo enthusiasts! Preparators, artists, researchers, bloggers. . .after all, paleontology does not survive on publication alone. Thus, we are happy to kick off:

The Paleo Project Challenge
Do you have a paper that just needs the finishing touches before it heads off to publication? Is there some half-prepped fossil sitting in a cabinet in the lab? Have you started and finished a big blog post half a dozen times, but never pulled the trigger? Is that masterpiece rendering of a live Tylosaurus still sitting on the easel? Stop sitting around, and finish it!

Here are the rules:
1) Indicate your willingness to participate in the Paleo Project Challenge (PPC) in the blog comment section. You should at a minimum indicate the category it falls under (paper, blog, art, or whatever), and the project (if you can - we totally understand the need for secrecy in some cases!).
2) Do the work! You have until December 31, 2010. Remember, we're all watching.
3) Once you're done, celebrate!

You can read more about it from Dave's perspective here. Now, let's get to work!

My Commitments
1) Write up the ODP results.
2) Finish a long-running paper on ceratopsian anatomy.

What are you going to do? Chime in below in the comments section!

Crossing the Finish Line for the Dissertation

Well, it's done.

All of the chapters of my dissertation have been published as papers in peer-reviewed journals.

It's been two years and four months since I submitted the final draft of my dissertation to my university, and wow, is it ever nice to finally lay the thing to rest. As a bit of a celebration, I wanted to pontificate share some musings on the whole process, and offer some hope for those who might be working on their dissertation right now. So, how did this all come to fruition? What did I do right (in my opinion), and what might I have done differently?

Start Early
Basically, I knew from the get-go that I didn't want to write one of those perpetually unpublished dissertations. You all know the ones I'm talking about. That really ground-breaking, highly citable, novel piece of research that's been sitting around completely unpublished since the person got his or her Ph.D. back in 1976. I can't really blame them - maybe they dropped out of the field. Maybe they decided research wasn't their thing. Maybe bigger and better projects happened along. These are all legitimate reasons (life happens!), but it doesn't make an unpublished dissertation any less annoying. As anyone in the field knows, journals (and reviewers) sometimes look askance at a reference listed as "unpublished thesis" or "unpublished dissertation."

So, I made a mental commitment early on to strive to get my dissertation published as quickly as possible. This was key in achieving the eventual goal.

Get Your Committee On Board
My dissertation committee wanted to see my stuff published, too. In fact, they specifically requested that I frame each of my dissertation chapters as discrete, publishable units. This was good advice. The days of creating a book-length narrative, which is retroactively turned into publishable manuscripts, are over. If you have the dissertation chapters framed as discrete, submission-ready papers, you can save a lot of time! This is a much more common practice than it used to be, which is a good thing (in my opinion).

So, before I had even finished writing the dissertation chapters, I had decided what journals I was going to submit to. Then, I formatted all of the figures, text, and references appropriately. This saved a ton of time in the end!

Git 'er Done
Once the dissertation is written, the congratulations received, and the diploma framed, the real work begins. Get those chapters submitted for publication. Take a week to rest on your laurels, and then get back to work. Every day you procrastinate is another opportunity to completely forget about submitting the papers for peer review. In fact, maybe even consider submitting some chapters before you graduate, if you can.

In the end, though, the only way I managed to get this done as quickly as I did (not that two years is that quick!) was to guilt-trip myself into doing it. Maybe that's what will work for you, too. And as I tell many people - don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Your work will never be perfect. There are always more data. There's always another specimen to measure. But at some point, you just have to call it "good enough."

Submit that paper. Because chances are, there's someone else out there who wants--perhaps even needs--to cite you. And I'm sure they would much rather cite a peer-reviewed paper than an unpublished (if excellent) dissertation or thesis. And for every day delayed, there's just another little way in which you have to revise the manuscript before submission. Science marches on, with or without us.

Regrets?
Not many, on my part. All in all, I'm happy with how my dissertation chapters have turned out. I might have had a few more figures in the ceratopsian one. Maybe a slightly longer discussion in the goat head FEM one. Perhaps I might have pushed to get the ZJLS paper published a little sooner. Oh well. They're done, they're published, and I can clear my plate for new projects.

Speaking of clearing plates, isn't it about time to relaunch the Paleo Paper Challenge?

Interview: P. David Polly on Palaeontologia Electronica

This blog has been hosting a sporadic series interviewing the editors from various open access journals for paleontologists. This time around, I am very pleased to highlight Palaeontologia Electronica (PE for short). PE has a special place in my heart for two reasons. First, it was the earliest open access paleo journal around (that I know of). It began publication in 1998, before "open access" was even a part of the scientific vocabulary! Second, one of my first peer reviewed publications graced the pages of the journal, back in 2004.

PE's executive editor, P. David Polly, was kind enough to answer a few questions. As is only fair, he has asked me to remind readers that any opinions stated here are his alone, and do not necessarily represent official views of the journal.

How did you get involved with PE?
I got involved with PE in 1996, just after its inception and before the first issue was published. As I recall, the idea of an electronic journal of paleontology had been the idea of Norman MacLeod, Tim Patterson, and William Riedel in 1995, who then enthused the group of people who made up the first editorial board. Mark Purnell, my co-executive editor, Peter Roopnarine, the special issue editor, and Jennifer Rumford, our production editor, were all part of that group. So there are four of us who have been with PE for more than 14 years.

Given your long history with PE, have there been any particular surprises for you in how the journal has developed?
The main surprise was how hard it was to get people to publish with PE in the early days. Younger scientists were the ones most attracted by the idea, but they were also the ones to whom "impact factors" were the most important. The journal wasn't indexed by Thomson-Reuters until a few years ago and has only had an official "impact factor" since 2007. Before then we often struggled to get enough submissions to fill an issue, but since then the number of papers that come in is similar (or greater) than many other paleo journals.

Within the growing ecosystem of open access journals, what makes PE unique?
PE is unique in that it is completely sponsored by professional societies so that neither readers nor authors have to pay. Many so-called "open access" journals allow readers to have free access, but charge authors a steep fee. In my opinion, that funding model is even worse than high subscription fees for readers because funds for publication are not equally distributed among fields (paleo as a field has far few funds available for publication costs than does, say, medicine), nor are they equally distributed among researchers, institutions, or countries within a field. Publication is a fundamental part of science, or any academic discipline for that matter-- it's imperative that reserachers be able to publish their work and that others be able to read it.

In my mind, it is an obligation for anyone involved in a professional academic field to donate their time to reviewing papers, serving on editorial boards, paying dues to professional societies, and working for those societies to help facilitate and subsidize scientific publication. Sadly it is becoming increasingly difficult to get people to review papers, serve as editors, or otherwise commit time to these activities, which increasingly leaves academic publishing in the hands of corporate publishers, much to the detriment of fields like paleontology. No service that is offered by corporate publishing houses couldn't be offered by the academic community. The goal of PE is to publish quality science at the least possible cost, without taking a profit, and to reach the greatest possible audience.

What advice would you give to authors interested in submitting their research to the journal?
Format their papers correctly and, regardless of whether you submit to PE or another journal, to be willing to review at least five papers for every one you publish.

Are there any myths about PE that you'd like to see busted?
The main myth about PE that should be busted is that publication is instant. Once papers are accepted to PE, they come out in the next issue, which is faster than most journals, but the process of review and revision happens at the same speed as for any other paper. The thing that slows papers down the most is finding reviewers. I probably have two or three people decline to review for every one who says yes.... it can sometimes take a couple of months to find two suitable reviews for a paper. But once reviews have been found, revisions have been made, and proper formatting done, the papers come out quickly in PE.

Thank you, David!

Tony Martin Interview, Part 2

Yesterday, I ran the first part of this two-part interview with Anthony (Tony) Martin, senior author on a new paper in PLoS ONE. The research details a rare trace fossil (figured below) left behind by a bottom-feeding fish over 50 million years ago. Yesterday's questions focused on the science - in the final installment, we'll learn more about the publishing process. (Full disclosure: I am an editor for PLoS ONE, and was the editor who handled this manuscript.)

Why did you choose PLoS ONE as a venue for the manuscript?
All three of us really liked the fact that by publishing in PLoS ONE we could better share our research with both our colleagues and the general public. All too often I’ve published papers that were read by maybe two or three dozen of my colleagues (if I’m lucky), rather than a broader audience that might also find the work really interesting. I’ve also published in journals with “pay walls” erected to prevent non-subscribers from seeing articles. I know this really frustrates some science bloggers who want to write about the original research instead of just relying on press releases or news articles. So I am becoming more enamored with making sure all science enthusiasts have free access to original research results. PLoS ONE also has published some top-notch paleontological articles in the past few years, so it’s become a high-profile place to publish, while also permitting laypeople to learn from our science.

We also thought this research made for an interesting “fish story” combined with a “detective story,” sort of Sherlock Holmes-meets-fishing-meets-paleontology-meets-spatial analysis. The study also has some visually interesting elements, which through publishing in an electronic journal we could better share through our new (and very cool) application of the Deep Zoom™ software (link here). Now anyone with an Internet connection can check out the same trace fossil analyzed in the study through the pan-and-zoom function of the software.

Was there anything about the PLoS ONE process (good or bad) that surprised you?
Not really. One of my coauthors, Gonzalo [Vazquez-Prokopec] had previously published in one of the PLoS journals and said it was a straightforward process, with timely peer review and good, thorough feedback from the reviewers and editors. I’m pleased to say that our experience was the same, and it encourages me to consider PLoS ONE for future contributions.

Which of the Green River fish would have tasted best?
I would have loved to try Priscacara liops, either pan-fried or steamed with ginger, garlic, scallions, and soy. I’m not so sure that Notogoneus osculus [the focus of the current paper] would have been nearly as tasty, especially considering that we’re even more certain now it was a bottom feeder.

A big thank you to Tony, for taking the time for this interview. Don't forget to check out the paper, if you haven't already!

Reference

Martin, A., Vazquez-Prokopec, G., & Page, M. (2010). First known feeding trace of the Eocene bottom-dwelling fish Notogoneus osculus and its paleontological significance PLoS ONE, 5 (5) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0010420

Image credits: Image of the ichnofossil modified from the original paper at PLoS ONE.