Fixing certainly matters. I’d like to think that iNatters will involve themselves in regeneration of native systems. “Knowing” is important, but it doesn’t automatically translate into “making better”.
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We need to fix our damaged ecosystems. We desperately need to fix them. We need to fix them right, though, and to do that we need to know what’s in them and what the organisms we’re bringing in to fix them are. Knowing isn’t enough, but it’s essential. Unfortunately, figuring out how to identify many organisms takes years of experience. So does figuring out how to grow adequate quantities of certain native plants or how to apply them to damaged ecosystems so they will survive and compete well. Therefore, some of us will have to specialize in identification, some in growing plants, some in managing them once they’ve been planted out. And that’s OK.
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Yeah, the point of peer review isn’t necessarily to find people who are experts on the specific subject of the article, but rather to find people who can provide feedback and potentially help the author improve it – this might include suggestions about the methodology or additional literature or aspects that might have been overlooked in the analysis.
A number of years ago I was involved in producing several special issues of an environmental humanities journal, which included finding reviewers for the articles. While we were able to draw on the networks of the research institute I was working at, the principles would surely work even for someone not in academia (particularly since in this case it is only about suggesting names – they don’t actually have to agree to review).
Basically we tried to find people who could speak to different aspects of the article – for example, for an article on silkworm domestication in China written by scholar who is a biologist by training, I believe we approached someone who had done work on human relations with other domesticated species for the first reviewer, and a historian of China who had studied silk production for the second. The idea was that this would help address potential shortcomings in the piece (i.e., because the author was limited to literature available in English, we wanted someone familiar with Chinese sources who could point out sources or perspectives he might not have been aware of).
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I like this kind of papers, so I checked it out…
The right citation is: Wheeler, W.M., 1970. The Dry-Rot of Our Academic Biology. BioScience 20, 1008–1013. https://doi.org/10.2307/1295444 .
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So the 1970 paper in BioScience was reprinted from the original publication in Science. Here’s the original citation. Both are available as pdfs from jstor through GoogleScholar.
Wheeler, William Morton. “The dry-rot of our academic biology.” Science 57, no. 1464 (1923): 61-71.
Also, for what it’s worth, Wheeler died in 1937
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I read it here:
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well, having being written 100 years ago, it was even more prophetic.
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It may be utopia and overly naive, but I believe that a series of open, not for profit scientific journal run entirely by citizen scientists is completely possible to create. Peer review is one issue, but there are plenty of highly knowledgeable people outside academia and perhaps even retired professionals would be interested.
Honestly, it would be something I would be very happy to work on, if there are other people willing to join in the project. (seriously, if anyone is interested, message me!)
The main issue that I see is that a lot of information is not easily accessible. The amount of paywalls and the insane prices are criminal. Would you rather buy a house, or read two papers in two different journals? lol
A mentor of mine many years ago when I was still in academia said that you publish mainly for yourself and not for the handful of fellow researchers who might take interest in your work. That sounds about right. Unless you’re publishing real groundbreaking science, your publications are not going to get that widely read or cited. Maybe you yourself will cite your own work in subsequent publications more than anyone else.
I worked most of my career for state and federal agencies, not in academia, and they provided me the resources I needed to publish if I wanted to. There was no “publish or perish” requirement as in some university positions. So publishing was a more enjoyable no-pressure part of my various jobs.
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Setting up and running/editing a journal, even just an open online journal, is a pretty big job even for someone who is retired. It’s certainly doable, but there’s probably more to it than you or I imagine. (I can only comment based on what I’ve seen and not actually being involved.) But I could envision a journal based on iNat records … basically an extension of the data posted in the database. Maybe “Journal of iNaturalist” ;-)
That said, here is an example of an online open-source journal that is relatively free from a lot of the work that major journals require and I wish there were more of them like this out there (I’ve published a couple of things in it):
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What do you want its scope to be? There are numerous such journals in Britain and I’m sure Britain isn’t unique in this respect. There are dozens of county natural history societies which publish an annual journal, and many taxonomically specialised journals such as Dipterists Digest, The Coleopterist and Latissimus (the last covers world water beetles). But most of the papers are not the standard format of abstract, introduction, methods, results and discussion. They are more likely to be a couple of pages describing observations less formally.
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One of my subjects at university was classical philology and my professors made no secret of the fact that for many topics within this field, you would be writing for an audience of less than a dozen people and quite possibly only one or two people besides yourself.
Now obviously nobody studies classical Greek because they expect the insights of their research will have any meaningful practical relevance or reach a wide public, while many scientists probably at least hope that their work will have a positive impact, but in daily practice the difference between the disciplines is probably not so great: most of the work one is doing will be small, focused studies that lead to an incremental increase in knowledge, not huge obvious breakthroughs. This is not about being “born too late” to make major discoveries; science has always worked this way. Often what appear to be groundbreaking insights in retrospect today were the result of a long, gradual process. (See e.g. Kuhn’s The Nature of Scientific Revolutions)
Agree. In Germany a fairly large portion of the relevant studies of things like range extensions or new finds or biodiversity surveys of a particular site are published in journals run by botanical and entomological societies or nature organizations. Many of them are basically a labor of love, clearly not concerned with profitability, and open to contributions by laypeople (@eyekosaeder might be interested in Pollichia, which is perhaps the broadest in scope of such projects that I am aware of).
And because one of our librarians just sent out some info material for our researchers, a short public service announcement about the importance of vetting journals/publishers before you submit material. Predatory publishers – fraudulent or unethical journals that try to trick authors into publishing with them – are becoming increasingly common and are not always easy to recognize, particularly if one lacks experience publishing in academia. Our librarian recommends using the website thinkchecksubmit.org to evaluate whether a publisher is likely to be legitimate or not.
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Yes, so-called predatory journals are now very common and you can publish almost anything in one of them. The Beall’s List used to track them but there are other entities that do so now. Many are journals with titles very similar to reputable journals. Some researchers use them frequently but I wonder what that looks like on their curriculum vitae when they’re seeking an academic position, given the level of peer review is virtually nonexistent. I was a junior author on one paper that was published in a journal that was considered borderline “predatory.” Once they had my email they never left me alone with solicitations to submit papers or attend conferences, many in scientific fields far beyond my own. It’s a strange and shady world for academic types.
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