Tag Archives: Open Science

Transparent Peer Review at Methods in Ecology and Evolution

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©Matt Clark

We’re starting a new initiative to make our peer review process more open and visible. If you submit a manuscript to Methods in Ecology and Evolution from today onwards, you’ll be able to choose to make the review process transparent.

But what does that actually mean? How will the process work? And why are we doing it?

Keep reading to find out!

How Does Transparent Peer Review Work?

When you submit a manuscript to Methods in Ecology and Evolution, you’ll be asked if you’d like to be part of our transparent peer review model (every manuscript will be included by default, but you can opt out). If you choose to stay with the transparent peer review model and your manuscript is published, the peer reviewers’ reports, your responses, and the editors’ decisions will be published alongside your final article. You can see an example of how this might look here. Continue reading →

Towards a More Reproducible Ecology

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The following post has been provided by Dr Nick Isaac.

Nick is organising the OpenData and Reproducibility Workshop at Charles Darwin House, London on 21 April 2015 (more information below). He is also an Associate Editor for Methods in Ecology and Evolution.

Macro_finalThe open science movement has been a major force for change in how research is conducted and communicated. Reproducibility lies at the heart of the open science agenda. It’s a broad topic, covering how data are shared, interpreted and reported.

Reproducibility has been advanced by a coalition of publishers (who have been embarrassed by a series of high-profile retractions), funding agencies keen that data should be re-useable after the life of a grant, and young researchers taking a more collaborative attitude than previous generations.

There is now a vast range of tools and platforms to help scientists share data and other materials (e.g. Dryad, Github, Figshare) and to create efficient and reproducible workflows (e.g. Sweave, Markdown, Git and, of course, R). There’s even a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) in Reproducible Research, run out of Johns Hopkins University.

Ecology has lagged behind wet-lab biology and other disciplines in the adoption of reproducibility concepts and there are few examples of ecological studies that are truly reproducible. To address this, we’re running a one-day workshop at Charles Darwin House, London on Tuesday 21 April entitled OpenData & Reproducibility Workshop: the Good Scientist in the Open Science era. Continue reading →

Publishing science in the online age

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While our Editor-in-Chief will be chairing a session on methods in ecology and evolution at the BES Annual Meeting 2011, our Journal Coordinator is running a lunchtime workshop on publishing science in the online age. Journalist and blogger Ed Yong, Open Science advocate Ross Mounce, and BES journal editors Marc Cadotte and David Gibson, will all be talking about the various ways in which online communication has the potential to revolutionise the scientific landscape, presenting fantastic opportunities for efficient collaboration, lively discussion, and novel dissemination – followed by questions and debate.

You can read the presentation abstracts on the workshop blog, and track the event on Twitter with #BESdigital. The workshop will be from 13.30 to 14.50 on Tuesday the 13th – just after the session on methods in ecology and evolution – in Lecture Theatre 9 of the Hicks building, so come along and join in!