Return to the Blogosphere

I'm back! Let's just say that a global circumnavigation, two months away from home, and a move in the middle, don't leave a lot of time for blogging. It was a fun and productive summer, but now it's time to settle back in for the fall.

For this re-inaugural post, I wanted to touch on a few highlights from the past few months, particularly in the world of open access and paleo research. I'll cover a variety of topics in more detail in future posts, hopefully.

Big Happenings at PLoS ONE

The online, freely accessible journal PLoS ONE hit a variety of important milestones this summer, including:

• For the first time, the journal received an official impact factor from Thompson-Reuters. The result: a respectable 4.351. Although this value certainly exceeds that for your typical paleontology journal (e.g., Paleobiology has an IF of 2.985, and JVP has an IF of 2.536), it is more properly compared to other general interest journals. For instance, Naturwissenschaften has an IF of 2.126 and Proceedings B an IF of 4.857. Thus, PLoS ONE is doing pretty well in the whole impact factor "game." Although impact factor has come under a lot of fire lately, we still face the reality that many scientists need to publish in journals that have an IF. Thus, the assignment of an official IF is a big step forward for the journal.
  
• PLoS ONE launched a new (and hopefully more user friendly) manuscript submission system. Read all about it here.
• PLoS launched a new blog network.
• Full disclosure: I am a section editor at PLoS ONE.

Happenings Around the Blogosphere

• The venerable ScienceBlogs had a major sea change, with a number of respected bloggers jumping ship. I'm still working on updating my personal blog feeds. But, don't forget that notables such as Tetrapod Zoology remain!
• WitmerLab launched a great new blog, chock full of goodies from all of the folks there.
• The spam filters at Blogger are horrible. I'm seriously considering transferring over to WordPress.
  

Research Happenings

• The long-awaited proceedings volume of the Tyrrell ceratopsian symposium is finally out. The first review, by Hans-Dieter Sues, is available here. Seriously, if you are a dinosaur enthusiast or researcher, you need to get a copy of this book (and no, I don't get royalties).
  
• The final unpublished chapter of my dissertation (on ceratopsian sinuses) is now officially in press - look for it to come out in JVP within the next few weeks!
• Another major paper should be out in two weeks. Stay tuned for details.
• I had my first publishing experience with PalArch's Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, with a paper on dinosaur skin from Utah. Brian Switek had a nice write-up of this over at Dinosaur Tracking. Hopefully I'll have a chance to blog more about this later - for now, I'll just say that you should consider the journal as a publishing venue! In the meantime, you can learn more about the journal in this two-part interview with editor Brian Beatty.
  
• And much more. . .too much to mention here, in fact!

That is all for now.

Interview: Brian Beatty, on PalArch (Part 1)

Regular readers of this blog probably know that I'm a big proponent of open access publishing. Today, I wanted to highlight another open access journal, PalArch's Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. So, I contacted its managing editor, Brian Beatty, for more details. In addition to his editorial and academic duties, Brian blogs over at The Aquatic Amniote (and, coincidentally or not, most of his research involves. . .aquatic amniotes!).

How did you get involved with PalArch?
Back in late 2004 I saw a message on the VRTPALEO listserver from Andre Veldmeijer, asking for volunteers for the editorial board of this new journal based in the Netherlands. I was a PhD student at KU at the time, and though I had a lot on my plate, I was eager to learn about editing and peer review, and contacted Andre. I only had a single peer-reviewed publication to my name then, but had lots of projects in progress, had just finished my MS at Howard University with Daryl Domning, and was eager to be done with being a student and wanted to just focus on getting work done. My undergrad advisor at the FLMNH, Dave Webb, always spoke about how peer review was perhaps more beneficial to the reviewer than the author, always keeping one up to date, and so when the opportunity to get involved on an editorial board came up, I jumped at it.

Ironically, when I introduced myself to Andre, I gave him some background, including mention of my recent advisor, Daryl Domning. Andre specializes in the archaeology of ancient Egypt, particularly the leatherwork and rope, and Daryl was one of the few other people that had dabbled in writing scientific papers describing unique knots that ancient Egyptians used. Andre excitedly asked me, "Do you mean, THE Daryl Domning?", and when I finally understood why he found that interesting, we had a laugh at the improbability of it.

Since then, I've tried my best to be a consistent help to the journal, and as time passed and Andre needed more and more help, I volunteered more and more of my time to it. He has always been respectful of my opinions about how journals should be managed, and it has been a great 5+ years of working together.

What kind of papers are you looking for?
PalArch's Journal of Vertebrate Palaeontology is interested in anything and everything related to vertebrate paleontology, including reviews and commentaries, but especially new information, including reports of new specimens of rare taxa that highlight new insights about it, faunal studies or contributions about the distribution of fossil taxa, paleopathology case reports, novel paleobiological methods, and even new taxon descriptions. We've been in contact with the ICZN for years about how to comply to the rules about publishing new species names, and because we deposit printed versions of the journal in clearly identified libraries, all names published in PalArch are legitimate. Though we would love to have more high-profile papers submitted, such as recent studies of hominids from Wallacea (Plas, 2007) and Flores (Heteren, 2008), I am eager to get more submissions in general, and hope to see a more prolific submission rate so we can fully realize the journal's potential.

What are the advantages of publishing with PalArch? What does PalArch offer that other journals might not?
The fundamental reason I got involved with PalArch was because of the journal's primary goal, which was to provide an avenue for publication of good science that might otherwise be too long, not popular or sexy enough, or controversial to make it into the restricted world of printed journals. The idea was simple, and yet at the time when I started I hadn't realized how few journals did that, I only knew I was frustrated by some.

PalArch is completely not-for-profit, volunteer run, and though we are all human and have our inevitable biases, we try to stay focused on the validity and quality of the science, not the popularity of it. There are no pages charges, and no limitations on length or color figures (similar to that of Palaeontologica Electronica). We try to get reviews done quickly, though we've had a longer than desired lag time in publication because we have a tendency to spend time helping authors that are not native english speakers with their editing and writing, which can often take longer than initially hoped for. I have been trying to get reviewers to be more rapid and responsible about reviews, though I think most editors would agree that that is easier said than done. So, one selling point is the time it should take - though reviewers slow things down, we really try to get things formatted and published online as soon as they are accepted, meaning that a publication could occur within less than a month, IF reviews go well and revisions are managed rapidly.

Tune in tomorrow, for Part 2 of the interview. Image credit for picture at top: Photo by Mo Hassan, proprietor of The Disillusioned Taxonomist. Another blog well worth checking out!