You have to be honest about your papers. I am happy with my latest paper, for several reasons.
- It’s probably the longest I’ve ever collected data for a paper (five years).
- Part of it was crowdfunded.
- Part of it was first published in a tweet.
- It’s open access.
But I admit this paper is a little scrappy.
My newest sand crab paper continues a project that started because an REU student, Jessica Murph, wanted to do a field project. Jessica collected about a year’s worth of data from the field. I continued for a second year because I didn’t think it would be publishable with only one year of data. It took a long time (don’t get me started), but we got that paper published (Murph and Faulkes 2013).
But even after two years of data gave us a paper, I just kept going out to the field every month. I didn’t have any super strong reason to do so. I needed sand crabs for other projects (like Joseph and Faulkes 2014), but I didn’t need to keep records of size and sex and number per transect of animals I was bringing back to the lab. But I did anyway.
One cool thing that happened while I did so was that I found a new species for the area – Lepidopa websteri – in 2012. That turned into a little paper of its own (Faulkes 2014). But a couple of years later, I found another specimen of this species. And then a third. While range extensions are an accepted thing in describing the distribution of a species, confirmations saying, “Yes, it’s still here” are not enough to publish a paper. Even when they are notoriously hard beasties to find.
Later, I found an orange sand crab. I’d co-authored a paper (Nasir and Faulkes 2011) saying that they were all grey or white, so that was a neat little wrinkle on the colour story. I found a second orange one when I was curating Real Scientists, and tweeted that out. Thus, a tweet was the first official “publication” of a new colour morph for Lepidopa benedicti! But I only had a couple of individuals, which was, again, not enough to publish a paper.
I did have a few ideas percolating in the back of my mind. I was interested in comparing the local sand crab population with the Atlantic population, and ran a successful crowdfunding campaign in 2012 to do so. (If you weren’t around for my crowdfunding campaigns, those were a lot of fun.)
I collected sand crabs in Florida, but the number of animals I found (three) was – again – not enough to hold up a paper on its own.
Are you seeing a pattern here yet?
Meanwhile, the basic data was slowly piling up and I was getting a sharper and sharper picture of what this population of sand crabs locally was doing month in, month out. Things that I thought were bad luck when I started (like, not finding any animals for months at a time) turned out to be part of a pretty predictable pattern. But that wasn’t a new finding; it was just a refinement of a pattern I’d published in the first paper (Murph and Faulkes 2013). An incremental improvement in understanding seasonal abundance was probably not enough for a paper.
The one finding that was genuinely new, and that made me think another paper was viable, was figuring out the reproductive cycle of the sand crabs. In the first two years of data (Murph and Faulkes 2013), we had no evidence of these animals reproducing at my field site at all. Now I know that while reproductive females are hard to find, they are there, I know when they appear (summer). And I know when the little ones appear (September / October).
That’s why I say this paper is a little scrappy. It includes a lot of fiddly bits and bobs that would not be enough to stand as independent papers. But I wanted to get them in the scientific record somehow. So I used one finding, the annual reproductive cycle, as a sort of tentpole to hold up a few others.
After experimenting with posting a preprint that contained a lot of these data, I settled down to the job of trying to find a real home for all this. I like to try to get papers in different journals, and I had been eyeing the Journal of Coastal Research. Some senior biology faculty at UTPA (Frank Judd and Bob Lonard) had published there multiple times. It was even more on my radar after attending the 2013 national conference of the ASPBA on South Padre Island.
The submission date on the paper says received 8 July 2016, but I hit “submit” in March. It was only through a haphazard “Hey, I wonder what’s the deal with my paper?” that I thought to log in to the journal’s manuscript review system, when I learned what was going on. The editor wanted me to fix a things in the manuscript to bring it in line with the journal’s formatting rules before it went out for review. But the submission system never generated an email to me from the editor saying, “Fix these.” Great. There’s a few months wasted.
But I do want to give the journal credit for things they did well. First, they did very intense copyediting, for which I am always grateful. There are always typos and errors and things that need fixing, and I never find them all on my own. And they drive me mad afterwards.
Second, Journal of Coastal Research is not known as an open access journal. There is no mention of open access publishing options in their (extensive) instructions to authors. But I asked about it during the copyediting and production stage, and was delighted to find that they did have an open access option. And the article processing fee was quite competitive.
I am glad to tell you the story of this sand crab paper, for I have another one to tell you about when it drops... tomorrow!
References
Faulkes Z. 2014. A new southern record for a sand crab, Lepidopa websteri Benedict, 1903 (Decapoda, Albuneidae). Crustaceana 87(7): 881-885. https://doi.org/10.1163/15685403-00003326
Faulkes Z. 2017. The phenology of sand crabs, Lepidopa benedicti (Decapoda: Albuneidae). Journal of Coastal Research 33(5): 1095-1101. https://doi.org/10.2112/JCOASTRES-D-16-00125.1
Joseph M, Faulkes Z. 2014. Nematodes infect, but do not manipulate digging by, sand crabs, Lepidopa benedicti. Integrative and Comparative Biology 54(2): 101-107. https://doi.org/10.1093/icb/icu064
Murph JH, Faulkes Z. 2013. Abundance and size of sand crabs, Lepidopa benedicti (Decapoda: Albuneidae), in South Texas. The Southwestern Naturalist 58(4): 431-434. https://doi.org/10.1894/0038-4909-58.4.431
Nasir U, Faulkes Z. 2011. Color polymorphism of sand crabs, Lepidopa benedicti (Decapoda, Albuneidae). Journal of Crustacean Biology 31(2): 240-245. https://doi.org/10.1651/10-3356.1
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External links
Are two years’ data better than one?
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