The word “kiloauthors” is getting some traction. Wow.
I make a cameo in this article in Times Higher Education (which is affiliated with the Times newspaper in London, not New York) about journal articles authored by large numbers of people.
It’s been interesting to see the Matthew effect at work. Getting attention in one high profile venue lead to another, and another, and another. While I knew intellectually that these journalistic outlets are copying from influencing each other, it’s something else to see it in action with your own stuff.
And it’s been a little weird to see how this post in May has
rippled out past the usual confines of this blog’s limited readership, and how it compares to other stuff I’ve put out in the same time. Since March, I’ve had four data-driven papers (including one I thought might get some media attention), three book chapters,
helped edit a book, and what gets the most attention? A quick blog post.
And it’s already out of date! Yesterday, a new paper came out with another new crayfish that had appeared in the pet trade before it was formally recognized in a new paper.
I know I’ve posted quite a few crayfish species in this feature, but it’s impossible to resist such a beauty! Like most of the other species being described from the pet trade, this one is from the island of New Guinea in the Pacific.
The common name is the “orange tip crayfish,” but this didn’t factor into the scientific name.
Naming a species after a well-known person is hardly new, and it often raises eyebrows when the name is for someone who is reasonably well known. “Celebrity species names” sometimes gets some criticism due to its perception that it’s a bit of a publication relations attention getter, and not done with due deference and respect and blah blah blah.
It’s Cherax snowden, so named after Edward Snowden. This name may raise a few more eyebrows than usual, as Snowden is not universally loved, shall we say. The paper says this about the choice of the choice of name:
The new species is named after the American freedom fighter Edward Joseph Snowden. He is honored due to of his extraordinary achievements in defense of justice, and freedom.
I updated my little infographic:
Reference
Lukhaup C, Panteleit J, Schrimpf A. 2015. Cherax snowden, a new species of crayfish (Crustacea, Decapoda, Parastacidae) from the Kepala Burung (Vogelkop) Peninsula in Irian Jaya (West Papua), Indonesia. ZooKeys518: 1-14. http://dx.doi.org/10.3897/zookeys.518.6127
I got into a discussion over the weekend about taking laptops out of classrooms. There is a reasonable amount of evidence that laptops are not enablers of note-taking, and they generally harm student performance in traditional lecture settings. Counterpoints appeared in my timeline this morning. First:
I can’t handwrite w/o significant disabling pain. Having the only comp in class made my disability obvious.
If you’re teaching and think banning laptops will make students more successful, you’re just flat wrong. And ableist. Bad form.
When I asked if there was any published research showing that laptop use did not affect student learning, the answer was, “No.” The reply thread went straightto, “They’re adults, and it’s their problem if they can’t focus.”
There are a lot of issues at play here. First, you have the instructor’s responsibility to provide the best learning environment possible. If an instructor knows that laptop use has a negative effect on learning, she or he would negligent if I did not discourage their use. It would be like a high level professional coach not requiring an athlete to train or eat right.
That university students are adults does not remove that professional responsibility. “You’re on your own” and “Sink or swim” are rarely good teaching practices, regardless of a student’s age. The issue is about attention and memory formation, which has not very much to do with age. Similarly, distracted driving laws don’t allow people to talk on phones in cars after a certain age because, “They’re adults.”
There are reasons to make exceptions to rules, and a student who has difficulty using a pen absolutely should be one of them. That’s a perfectly reasonable accommodation to make. That an accommodation makes a physical limitation obvious to others may not be ideal, but may be unavoidable. That’s how compromises work.
This is where dialogue needs to happen. Telepathy still doesn’t work, and students need to let instructors know what their particular situation is. My particular institution has an office devoted to helping students and instructors reach a reasonable solution.
That some students may need exceptions to a rule is not necessarily a reason to abandon the rule at the outset. It depends on how many exceptions you might expect, and how critical the rule is to creating a good learning environment.
As with so many things, the reality is more complicated than, “Ban laptops: Y / N?”
When I was heavily involved in L5R, there were recurring arguments between players about the “better” way to play the game. Probably the most common was between players who would use whatever cards they thought would win, and players who were also concerned with the story, who often imposed limitations on what cards they would play: using only cards from a certain faction, using no “evil” cards, and so on.
Wizards of the Coast did research on what people enjoyed about role-playing games to feed into their relaunch of Dungeons & Dragons, and came to a similar conclusion: there are a lot of reasons people play a game.
It took me a while, but in L5R, I came to the conclusion that there is no right way to play the game. What gives one player enjoyment may not give another player enjoyment.
And that’s okay. You shouldn’t denigrate people who play a game differently than you do.
Arguments in science sometimes remind me of those gamer discussions. Some accusasions of, “You’re doing it wrong!” are more reflective of the critic’s priorities than a wide view of the multiple ways there are to do science.
We need to be very careful about criticising particular forms of scholarship as “better” than one another.
It’s weird to watch my new institution create stories about itself. It has to convince everyone that it is going to be a big deal, not just more of the same.
The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley (UTRGV) launches in just a little over a week, and it’s already trying to create its own creation myths. This headline in The Monitor local newspaper on the creation of UTRGV declares the forthcoming university to be:
(T)he first university created in 21st century
I think this myth is originating from incoming president Guy Bailey. I
recall him making that statement in a town hall, and I used something close to it here.
Except that, at best, UTRGV is the fourth university created in the twenty-first century, according to this list. In this century, before UTRGV, we have:
And that’s only the American universities. It wouldn’t surprise me if there were more universities founded since 2001 in that small place known as the “rest of the world.”
As a new university, it would do us good to show we value good scholarship by getting simple, verifiable facts right.
Is a CNS (Cell, Nature, or Science - ZF) paper in PhD that beneficial long-term? Other than securing (post-doc)?
What this question speaks to is the typical way of evaluating research by number of papers and where they are published. Increasingly, I think this is the wrong way to tackle the question.
I would like to see a lot more emphasis placed on the aftermath of publication. Publishing papers is great, but did other people find it useful? Did people talk about it? Did it make a dent in the field?
This may hard to show in the short term, but the question is specifically about the long-term benefits of a paper in Cell or Nature or Science. If you’re lucky enough to be given that prominent a platform, and you can’t show that things changed because of your paper, the paper will give you little benefit, career wise.
But there are obviously papers that light a fire under other people, who get to work expanding the results, using them, or drive people to try to prove you wrong. In the long term, that should be the benefit of publishing in those high profile venues, and that should be the thing that you are looking to demonstrate to hiring committees.
A great post by Matt Might on the difficulties of his tenure process is making the rounds on social media. Spoiler alert! There is a happy ending to his story – he got tenure. I wanted to highlight this bit:
I also started blogging a lot. Blogging, much like answering questions on Quora, doesn’t count for tenure at all, and in fact I was cautioned against doing it, since it was “a waste of time.”
But, blogging became a way to reach out to the world and to transmit technical knowledge, which is what academic publications are supposed to do – but don’t.
Before I knew it, my blog began attracting top-notch students to my lab.
Today, my lab is a team of talented grads, undergrads, postdocs and research scientists. I’m proud of each of them. I can’t imagine it would be that way without my “waste of time” blog.
That Matt is also at Harvard Med School might also have enhanced the effectiveness of his blog as recruitment tool. Many academics blog, but don’t necessarily have a run of students wanting to join the lab.
Continuing on:
And, perhaps my experience is a counter-example to the cynical yet sincere advice frequently given on how to get tenure.
The central theme in this “advice” is that anything that detracts from research – teaching, service, kids, health, etc. – is bad.
This resonates with me. As I noted last week, I’ve had so many good things happen because I “wasted time on the Internet.” Make no mistake, it took a long while, but I think it worked because I approached that time on the Internet with the goal of creating a professional footprint online. I approached it with the goal of trying to be available and helpful when I could be.
And it made me stronger. Blogging, for instance, honed my writing skills, and it gave me a background source of knowledge that paid off in a big way when I had two book chapters to write (this and this).
Of course, some of the stuff I did was pure procrastination and stopped me from getting other things done that I should have done. There are pros and cons, like everything else. I like to say, “Yes, it’s a waste of time... but it’s not a complete waste of time. The qualifier is important.”
I think the pressure on tenure-track faculty to keep focused on research is usually coming from a good place. Senior faculty want their faculty to succeed, and they’ve been around long enough to have seen that when there is a problem in the tenure process, it’s usually because someone’s research projects didn’t work out and fell short.
It is easy to see how “making sure you are making progress on research” becomes “do nothing but research.” The first is good advice; the latter is bad advice. If you only focus on creating academic research, you will have a very hard time accomplishing anything else. And most people are going to want to accomplish other things; and so will their institutions, eventually.
A construction project might go for a while before you see anything above ground level, because you have to put in the foundation first. Same with networking. Same with social media presence.
I’ve been very fortunate to have a lot of projects that I had worked on a long time ago come to fruition in a rapid succession the last few weeks, and the latest one is another book chapter: about decapod “evo-devo.”
The story of this chapter started when lead author Steffen Harzsch emailed completely out of the blue to ask if I could write a sidebar on a chapter he was writing. Steffen had helped me out in a big way some years ago when he helped me get my research colony of Marmorkrebs up and running.
I’ve done a few book chapters now, and the process is so long and so protracted and the payoff is so minimal that I swore off writing any more of those things.
But when someone thinks I can contribute and asks me directly to chip in, I want to help. Besides, I thought a sidebar wouldn’t be so bad. That’s practically a parenthetical aside. I wouldn’t really have to compile the hard, serious data for the chapter. Easy.
I had another leg up in the process. As with another book chapter, I benefited from many years of blogging about Marmorkrebs. Indeed, the Freshwater Crayfish chapter and this one were written close enough together that I tried to be conscious of what I had written in both so as not to repeat myself too much. I’m sure if anyone read through both closely, they would be able to see some similarities and figure out where my contributions to the Harzsch chapter are.
As it happened, the editor of the book didn’t want a sidebar. So a cocoon I thought might yield a butterfly turned into a bird instead. What I wrote got incorporated throughout the chapter, and Steffen was generous enough to list me as a co-author.
I should add that this chapter is part of a big six-volume series on invertebrate evo-devo that is quite comprehensive. If you are into invertebrate development, you are sure to find some chapters of interest to you, even if it isn’t the one I helped with!
Reference
Harzsch S, Krieger J, Faulkes Z. 2015. “Crustacea”: Decapoda – Astacida. In: A Wanninger (ed.), Evolutionary Developmental Biology of Invertebrates 4: Ecdysozoa II: Crustacea, pp. 101-151. Springer: New York. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-7091-1853-5_4
I mean, seriously, how often do heroes and villains in fiction get to gasp, “It’s Morse code!” and then decode it? Interstellar was one of the most recent and most annoying examples of this trope.
I’m looking for a place to publish one of my next manuscripts, and I’m considering which journal to send it to. One that I’m considering is unusual: it has a modest (less than $100), but non-refundable, submission fee.
Thinking about this fee was very much deterring me from submitting there. But, then I realized that lots of journals have article processing fees that are much steeper (over $1,000).
If an appropriate journal had an article processing fee that was less than $100, I’d probably jump at submitting there. I was more annoyed by the prospect of a submission fee than an article processing fee, even though both are going to cost.
The psychology is interesting. Psychologists Kahneman and Tversky got famous studying problems like this and how people evaluate different costs, and showed that people were far from the rational optimizers that economic theory often treated them as. And I am certainly not a rational optimizer. I am in academia, after all.
A submission fee has that dread of, “It could all be for nothing.” Rejection is common – I daresay the norm – in academic publishing. Even journals that review only for technical competence reject something like a third of papers, judging from PLOS ONE: it typically rejects about 30% of submissions. An article processing fee for accepted papers feels more like you’re getting something for your buck.
Plus, there’s the fact that a submission fee is just not the norm in academic publishing. Running contrary to expectation doesn’t help my willingness to shell out the fee.
Logically, journals that ask only for article processing fees are using those fees to subsidize the editorial costs for all the rejected papers. For some journals, a modest submission fee might be one way to bring down the costs of article processing fees, which remains a road block for many researchers, particularly those who want to publish in open access journals.
Plus, all of this does raise the question of why more journals’ costs aren’t in line with, say, PeerJ?
Photo by Ben Husmann on Flickr; used under a Creative Commons license.
I’ve been playing Splatoon recently (fun!), and was delighted to run across this character in the shops:
His name is Crusty Sean (get it?), and is the proprietor of Shrimp Kicks shoe store. I guess the though that since he was a decapod, he would have more feet and thus more need of shoes.
The game has a lot of other little nods to oceanic life, not least of which is that the leads are squid beings – hence their obsession with ink and use of camouflage.
I have decidedly mixed feelings about this. A big part of the mixed feelings comes from a couple of years back, when ESA spoke out against open access. At the time, someone from the society wrote:
This is perhaps a good example of the inherent conflict between the interests of those who believe research publications should make their content freely available to all and the reality that there are significant costs associated with publishing scholarly research journals.
I appreciate that there are costs in publishing that need to be covered. Heck, I can even see a case for charging for scientific research. I can understand that a scientific society might have not want to maintain the infrastructure needed to publish journals. As the Gavin’s blog post noted:
Somewhere in Ithaca there is a single computer running DOS(!) that
performs a critical part of the current journal publishing platform used
by ESA
Still, there are a couple of things that bug me about the Wiley deal, First, this is another example of the ongoing pattern of scientific publication becoming increasingly concentrated with a few publishers. I’ve said before I think a healthy publishing ecosystem, like a biological ecosystem, has lots of diversity. Second, this sounds like ESA sees publications as a revenue stream for them.
Gavin Simpson wrote:
The payment to ESA from Wiley in the 2015–16 budget is $1,350,357. ... (I)n 2016–17 the payment from Wiley will be $2,700,714(.) ... What is, I
think, indicative is that the senior ESA staff and academics were
clearly anticipating significant improvements in the “profit” generated
by the Society’s journals that can be directed towards activities the
Society does on behalf of its members and its support for ecology.
Again, I have mixed feelings about all this. I understand that scientific societies can do good work and need revenue. But it can also be the case that societies like that can become insular and self-perpetuating, more concerned about their own continued existence than serving others. I’m not saying ESA is at that point at all... just that societies could have incentives that are not in the general interest, or the interest of their field, but only in their interest.
So I am not sure that charging for publications is the way to go about raising revenue for a professional scientific society.
Thank you, Telegraph, for alerting us that we should be avoiding Oxford, England. Because apparently it is a war zone.
Oxford academics at war over dangers of the internet
This sounds serious! What prompted this?
An academic wrote an editorial in a peer-reviewed journal asking another academic for evidence supporting her claims.
Um.
Here’s a sampling of the brutality you can find in the editorial:
(W)e are concerned that Greenfield’s claims are not based on a fair scientific appraisal of the evidence, often confuse correlation for causation, give undue weight to anecdote and poor quality studies, and are misleading to parents and the public at large.
Um.
The person at the end of this “stinging attack” has reacted to this incredible assault by... saying she’s too busy to respond.
Um.
If that’s war, then that is the kind of war I can get behind. I wish all wars were fought on these terms. “We will launch our devastating salvo and subdue our enemy with shock and awe... if we can get it past reviewer number two.”
Look, academia is boring, and “Let’s have you and her fight” is a time-honoured way to inject some human interest and drama into otherwise dry proceedings. But to hype the language of scientific disagreement between a few scientists to the level of armed conflict between large groups of people using guns and drones and tanks and bombs is silly.
Asking someone to support their claims is not the same as pulling a gun on them.
Chris Chucholl, who had written an awesome paper on the trade in pet crayfish in Germany (Chucholl 2013) asked:
“Do you have any idea how Marmorkrebs compare to other crayfish?”
And I got to say something like, “I have just started a project to answer exactly that question.” That was pretty satisfying. I had just started this project days before, on New Year’s Day, 2013.
Now, this project ran for a full calendar year, which meant that I had all the data collected by New Year’s Day of 2014, so I should have been ready to write this paper and submit it to a journal. But, in what has become a recurring theme in this series of “stories behind the papers,” you may well ask, “Why did it take so long? Why is this paper only out today, 19 months after you were finished collecting the data?”
Friggin’ SICB again!
Because just when I had all of the data complete and in the can, I was prepping to run a parasite symposium with Kelly Weinersmith at SICB in Austin in a couple of days. After the symposium, I had to write up papers from the symposium. And that was the situation where what I thought was going to be one paper... turned into three papers.
Thanks to pressure from my co-editor Tadashi, I was also trying to nail down a chapter for the Freshwater Crayfish book around the same time.
I was going slightly mental with the amount of writing that was due at the start of 2014. I still want to rub my forehead just thinking about it. Then, the middle of 2014 had a lot of tough, unbloggable stuff that stopped me from writing up this paper. Then the fall semester arrived, and before you know it, it’s New Year’s Day again.
That made me think, “Okay, it’s been a year, stop being lazy and submit this thing.” I attacked the manuscript over Christmas break and submitted it in January, just before classes started.
I picked Knowledge and Management of Aquatic Ecosystems, because they had been publishing a lot of interesting research on crayfish. Plus, there were open access, had no article processing fees, and I hadn’t published there before.
I want to say “Thank you!” to the editors of this article, who were extremely patient with me. This piece had more than its usual share of last-minute changes. Probably the biggest one was that I added an entire new figure (Figure 2).
I created Figure 2 because I was working on poster of this paper for the #SciFund poster class. When making the poster, I tried a lot of different ways to make the poster visual, and tinkered with a graph. In the end, I thought the graph didn’t work on the poster, but it was a nice addition to the manuscript. While you can get all the information presented in Figure 2 from the tables in the paper, I thought it would be helpful to the reader to show it visually. The editors indulged me and let me add it in. They also didn’t complain about other changes I asked for. Thanks, guys.
I showed a lot of restraint in not changing the title, though. I went through a lot of different titles for this paper. I toyed a lot with some version of “zero to hero” to emphasize how Marmorkrebs had gone from “unknown to science” to “almost half the pet crayfish in North America.” But I kept balking, because I didn’t want to call a potentially invasive species a “hero.” And not very many other words rhyme with “zero.”
Making the #SciFund poster, I came up with a phrase to encapsulate the paper. I didn’t want to push my luck with another change, and I worried that it was too distracting. (Funny paper titles don’t always go down well.) So I just used it here as the title for this blog post.
And, as is the tradition while supplies last, because I have a paper out today, I get to break out the Canadian chocolate:
I’m kind of glad that it’s possible for a person to publish a paper by surfing the Internet for a year.
Musical interlude:
References
Chucholl C. 2013. Invaders for sale: trade and determinants of introduction of ornamental freshwater crayfish. Biological Invasions15(1): 125-141.http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10530-012-0273-2
Faulkes Z. 2013. How much is that crayfish in the window? Online monitoring of Marmorkrebs, Procambarus fallax f. virginalis (Hagen, 1870) in the North American pet trade. Freshwater Crayfish19(1): 39-44. http://dx.doi.org/10.5869/fc.2013.v19.039
Around lunchtime today, I got a phone call, from one Carol Klinger. I sort of missed her opening introduction of who she worked for, but her call to me was prompted by the recent Wall Street Journal article on the increase in the number of authors on scientific papers. We started chatting about that.
Carol asked, “Who came up with the term, ‘kiloauthor’?” “That was me!”
Before I know it, she’s asking me if I can do an interview (sure!), if I have an iPhone (no), if there’s a studio I can get to (wait, what? Who does she work for?), and before I know it I’m on the road to an iHeartMedia studio to record an interview for All Things Considered on National Public Radio.
I almost didn’t make it, because the studio was out of town in Weslaco. As luck would have it, I had walked into work and had to walk back to reach my car, then start driving to the studio, and of course there was a wreck on the road, so I was literally stopped on the highway while the clock was ticking.
We had some technical problems, so we ended up with me listening to the interview questions from Robert Seigel on the phone while I talked into a mic. Thanks to Nathan Cantu who helped set up the recording on short notice!
I just listened to the interview streaming live on WAMU on the Internet. You should be able to listed to audio or read a transcript on the All Things Considered website tomorrow. I’ll post a link when I get it.
Update: Wow, these guys are fast. The link to my interview is here.
One of the things that I was thinking about on the drive to the studio was that this little interview was only possible because of the years I spent wasting time on the Internet blogging and developing a social media presence. It’s like climbing up an ice cliff. Chip away at the ice with a pick. Pull yourself up. Shove your spiked boots into a crevice. It’s a hard and slow ascent.
But if it hadn’t been for that, there is no way that I would have been able to talk to Nature, New Scientist, The Wall Street Journal, and NPR (all of which has happened this year). Because let’s face it, it sure isn’t because these news organizations think, “Let’s call up a researcher from a university that we haven’t heard of in south Texas and ask them what they think.” Social media can act as a leveler, and can give voice to people who might not normally have one.
Now that I’ve been on NPR, I think I have finally secured my credential as an effete, wine-sipping, out-of-touch, ivory tower, liberal academic.
In a previous entry, I mentioned I have my name on two chapters in this book. The second one I worked on was with my regular collaborator, Paty Feria. This chapter tries to stitch all the papers we have worked on together into one cohesive piece.
Paty did much of the writing on this chapter. One thing I brought to the table was that I suggested we try to make the chapter a bit of a “how to” primer for people who had never done a species distribution model. We visualized that in a flowchart in Figure 2.1 (right).
I also suggested we compile every example in the literature of people using species distribution models for crayfish, which ended up being Table 2.1. We expanded it a little to include a freshwater prawn, since the conceptual problems of modeling the distribution is pretty for all the large freshwater crustaceans.
These charming little guys and gays are called hunchback amphipods, belonging to the family Cyproideidae. Yet another group of crustaceans I don’t know at all well. Except that some of them are darned photogenic.
I actually had a long chat with the author for this piece, arising from a post I wrote back in May about that fruit fly paper with over 1,000 authors. He was able to extract key points from our meandering conversation into something short and punchy and entertaining. I’m glad I was able to help.
The piece does a fine job of laying out the issue of authorship. It also has some funny stories about “honorary” authorships to a computer, an Afghan hound, and so on.
