[Taxacom] Pre-submission peer-review and online import of specimen records from BOLD
Stephen Thorpe
stephen_thorpe at yahoo.co.nz
Tue Sep 22 19:27:14 CDT 2015
Robin, what is your address in Utopia??
I see a fair bit of "fecal material" dressed as lamb, and it sits unchallenged indefinitely.
Stephen
--------------------------------------------
On Wed, 23/9/15, Robin Leech <releech at telus.net> wrote:
Subject: RE: [Taxacom] Pre-submission peer-review and online import of specimen records from BOLD
To: "'Stephen Thorpe'" <stephen_thorpe at yahoo.co.nz>, "'Doug Yanega'" <dyanega at ucr.edu>
Cc: taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu
Received: Wednesday, 23 September, 2015, 12:22 PM
Stephen,
If you publish good stuff,
people will continue to use it, often after newer
works are published.
Usually
good works are built on, either later by the same author, or
by
other authors. As errors
or misinformation is found and uncovered, one
or more authors will
subsequently identify
the errors
or misinformation, and comment on
it for others. In the future, others will
follow the correction.
If you want an example of this, I can provide
it for you. In turn, you can
check on all
the details
yourself. We no longer labor
on the error. It was found, noted and
corrected.
As
the expression goes, Fecal material happens.
Robin
-----Original Message-----
From: Stephen Thorpe [mailto:stephen_thorpe at yahoo.co.nz]
Sent: September-22-15 6:02 PM
To: 'Doug Yanega'; Robin Leech
Cc: taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu
Subject: RE: [Taxacom] Pre-submission
peer-review and online import of
specimen
records from BOLD
Robin,
It is a tad unclear what point
you are trying to make, and if you are
agreeing or disagreeing with me (which,
incidentally, is exactly the sort of
thing
that a reviewer should address for manuscripts, i.e.
clarifying the
point that the author is
trying to make). Whatever your point, I would just
like to comment that, for me, the most
important thing is not to publish
what I
know so that others can know it as well (which is not to say
that
this isn't important), but rather
to prevent readers from being misled by
misinformation published by others,
particularly if it contradicts what I
might
tell them, and yet the misinformation is selling itself
as
authoritative on the basis of
"reputability" of institutions, equally
carefully "groomed" reputations of
authors, etc. Misinformation is worse
than
no information.
Cheers,
Stephen
--------------------------------------------
On Wed, 23/9/15, Robin Leech <releech at telus.net>
wrote:
Subject: RE:
[Taxacom] Pre-submission peer-review and online import of
specimen records from BOLD
To:
"'Stephen Thorpe'" <stephen_thorpe at yahoo.co.nz>,
"'Doug Yanega'"
<dyanega at ucr.edu>
Cc: taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu
Received: Wednesday, 23 September, 2015, 11:37
AM
Stephen,
Shortly after I had
finished
my PhD, and the thesis had been
accepted for publication,
I had finished and had published several short but
contributive papers in
a fairly short
period of time in several journals. To me, getting the
information out there was, and always is to
me, far more important than
the particular
journal I publish in.
At
that time, I was in Ottawa. At coffee one morning, an
older, estblished
taxonomist said to me,
in front of others,
"Robin, what are you
doing? Setting
yourself up as an expert? Everywhere I look I see
another new paper of yours."
I replied,
"Not at all. I am trying to put the information out
there so that others
know what I know, so
that they do not have to ask me for IDs. They can look
and ID things for themselves."
There was a moment while
he
and several of his buddies guffawed,
then I added,
"But,
on the other hand,
if you don't publish
much, everyone has to send material
to you for ID. In that case, you are seen
as the expert."
I
heard no more caustic comments from him -
ever. In fact, he became rather
pleasant after that.
Robin
-----Original Message-----
From: Taxacom
[mailto:taxacom-bounces at mailman.nhm.ku.edu]
On Behalf Of Stephen Thorpe
Sent:
September-22-15 4:03 PM
To: Doug Yanega
Cc: taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu
Subject: Re: [Taxacom] Pre-submission
peer-review and online import of specimen
records from BOLD
I
wouldn't take
too much notice of
Doug's sermon about Wikipedia. It works OK for very
simple stuff, but not for anything else.
It isn't only vandals and/or crackpots who
get blocked from editing. There
are many
"power games" going on behind the scenes.
Everybody wants to do
things their way,
and nobody likes anyone coming in and making
contributions on a significantly large scale.
Actually very little
taxonomy/biodiversity
related stuff gets done now at all on Wikipedia.
Doug's own contributions are really
loittle more than a drop in an ocean of
oceans! The reason why it comes up first in a
Google search has nothing
whatsoever to do
with the quality of content. It is unfortunate that the
very first thing a young person might find on
a topic could well be a load
of Wikipedia
rubbish.
Stephen
--------------------------------------------
On Wed, 23/9/15, Doug Yanega <dyanega at ucr.edu>
wrote:
Subject: Re:
[Taxacom] Pre-submission
peer-review and online import of specimen records
from BOLD
To:
Cc: "taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu"
<taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu>
Received: Wednesday, 23 September, 2015,
9:38 AM
On 9/22/15
12:50 PM,
Neal
Evenhuis
wrote:
>
No Doug, the
problem is
not the print
journals. They do what businesses do
>
-- they make money.
>
> The problem(s)
are
academic systems
that evaluate their professors on the
>
basis of the journals they publish in
(the
higher impact the
better). That
> has
resulted in the "Big Power
Publishers" to have
academics by
the
>
short-and-curlies
(actually more like racketeering) and can thus charge
> oodles of money to subscribe and
authors
are forced to shy
away from
> online
only/low impact
journals in order to get
high ranking,
rewards,
> evals, etc.
>
> Once the
evaluation
system for taxonomists
changes, taxonomists can feel
> free
to publish elsewhere
than high impact
print journals because
they
are
> no
longer
being held hostage by the current academic
evaluation
system.
I'm not trying to
be overly
contentious, as I do see your
point, but:
can anyone
offer any
statistics to back this
up? Specifically,
if you
ignore fossil taxa
entirely, just for the moment, what percentage
of all
cumulative taxonomic works,
worldwide, appear
in legitimately
"high
impact"
journals? My
impression is
that it is a very small
percentage;
in fact, for many of the
taxonomists I know (mostly working on
arthropods), if they stopped publishing
in
their present journals of
choice and
switched to, say, Zootaxa or
ZooKeys, their impact factor
would probably go UP
rather than down. I
honestly don't
think I've ever
heard of a taxonomist
(who did not work on
fossils) whose job
was
imperiled by the
low
impact factor of their
publications, as opposed to
how much grant
money they brought in, or
some
other less
arbitrary
criteria. As such,
while I have little doubt it exists, I have
to wonder
just how serious a force this
is
behind our
present
predicament.
Peter
Rauch
wrote:
> How does the
"peer", as in "peer
review", play in
this
>
still-vaguely-described "open
access" process ?
>
> What mechanism(s) would be
needed /
useful
to deal
with the presumably huge
> number
of
"reviews" of
also-presumably
still-not-published draft documents ?
>
> It's easy
enough
to say that poor quality reviews
can simply be ignored,
or
> can be
put to rest
handily by other,
more
competent reviewers. But, that
>
itself implies that there will be such
more competent
reviewers who will
> indeed have the time
and
patience to read, think about, and
comment on
> those incompetent
reviews.
>
> I
understand --I
think!?!-- the notion of
removing physical paper from the
>
final production
process, and I
understand
--I think-- the
notion of "open
>
access" to
information.
>
>
What I am asking about is what will be the
mechanisms to address the
> then-open
floodgates to
gratuitous(?) commentary on draft works
such
that a
>
"fair"
(and
authoritative / professional) handling of all that
input
is
>
possible ?
Open resources
like
Wikipedia deal with this
easily, and
admirably, and
routinely.
Any
Wikipedia article has one visible
manifestation, open to
editing, while
commentary goes on a
linked
"talk
page". The editing
history
is timestamped, and visible, and subject
to reversion to
previous versions if
necessary - as is the talk
page. There are
many
rules in place
regarding
proper editing procedures and especially
etiquette, and editors who cannot abide by
those rules (e.g., vandalism)
have their
edits
reverted, or
if they are persistent and
disruptive,
they can
be banned (short-term or
long-term), as
has happened to many
trolls
and crackpots who have
tried to set up shop on Wikipedia.
That
kind of behavior is spotted and
weeded
out very quickly, because there
are lots of
eyes
watching.
The floodgates on Wikipedia are
already open
- to the
entire world, in
fact - and yet it
functions quite well,
because it is
self-policing,
based on explicit policies. Transparency
and inclusivity go a long
way, and synergize
well. Articles on WP
increase in quality,
ratchet-like, over
time,
and setbacks are always
only
temporary. If you had a single public
review forum that
included
all of the
world's taxonomists, then it would
function wonderfully
well,
because nothing would slip through
the proverbial cracks, and if we
followed
the example
of
Wikipedia for editing policies, your
worst
fears
about gratuitous commentary would
not
be realized.
I suggest this
challenge for
those of you
who are skeptical: take a
moment right now to enter the name of a
higher-level taxon you know
very
well
(family or
higher) into Google. The odds are very good that
a
Wikipedia entry will be the top hit, or
at
least one of the top 5. Open
the
Wikipedia article,
and see how much of it is legitimately
inaccurate
(not
incomplete - that is
unavoidable - or
slightly out-of-date, I mean
actual
factual errors as in
"this is not
true
now and never has been
true"). It
should be pretty rare to find such errors,
and it would be
even rarer if
more taxonomists spent
more
time on
Wikipedia.
Self-policing is an
approach that can and does work, and works better
and better with increasing
community buy-in. I
maintain that the
same
would apply to
online
review of scientific
works.
Sincerely,
--
Doug Yanega
Dept. of Entomology
Entomology
Research Museum
Univ. of California,
Riverside, CA 92521-0314
skype:
dyanega
phone: (951)
827-4315 (disclaimer:
opinions are mine, not UCR's)
http://cache.ucr.edu/~heraty/yanega.html
"There are some enterprises
in which a careful disorderliness
is the
true
method" - Herman Melville,
Moby Dick,
Chap. 82
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