Over at Jabberwocky Ecology Morgan Ernest has a nice post on her confusion about what Ecosphere is supposed to be–Ecology, except with a different pricing/access model, or a PLoS ONE-type journal intended to serve as part of a “review cascade”? Like her, I think it should be the latter. In the post and comments, she also passes on the news (of which I wasn’t aware) that Don Strong and the ESA seem to be coming around to this view (which at one time Don did not hold). Click through for more discussion.
Dynamic Ecology
Multa novit vulpes
Thanks for pointing folks over our way Jeremy. You can definitely drive some pretty serious traffic these days!
I’m definitely on the same page as you and Morgan. I think that this is a great opportunity for ESA if they follow your and Morgan’s recommendations. Especially they make its as extreme as basically being able to be accepted immediately at Ecosphere if the only objections at Ecology are based on importance/impact.
“You can definitely drive some pretty serious traffic these days.”
Just pray I don’t ever decide to use my massive power for evil rather than good.
I still wonder, if we got 100 Ecologists (or more) to stop submitting to Ecology for a year, and just submit to Ecosphere, what would happen? (x-post)
As I noted in my post on filtering, incentives, and green beards a little while back, everybody has a strong incentive to use the same filters as everyone else when deciding what to read and where to submit. Which means that your “if we got 100 ecologists or more to stop submitting to Ecology for a year and just submit to Ecosphere” is a very big “if” indeed!
In this case I think that the OA movement has the potential to be one of those grouping filters that could allow this to happen, though, as I noted over at Jabberwocky, I think there are some impediments to motiving pro-OA folks to support ESA at the moment.
Hmm, not sure how favoring open-access journals solves any filtering problems in and of itself. But I guess I should read your comment over on JE to find out why you think it can.
Sorry, been trying to get from Portland to where my wife and son are for over 1.5 days now and I’m only as far as Dulles. Very grouchy. Please refrain from disagreeing with me for several days if you don’t want to risk me turn my minions against you.
Ugh. Good luck with getting home. It’s definitely always worse to be stranded when you’ve got a family to get back to. Drop me a line over on the Jabberwocky post when it’s safe to discuss things without accidentally unleashing the minion hoards and I’ll explain why I think Jarret’s plan has a chance (above and beyond the fact that he seems to have a knack for pulling off things that I wouldn’t have thought possible).
Shorter: it’s hard for me to get too interested in what would happen x-post when I don’t see any realistic way to get to that point.