Category Archives: publish and/or perish

Tell the White House: Make government-funded research open-access

by Yoder

As J.B.S. Haldane put it, “I think … that the public has a right to know what is going on inside the laboratories, for some of which it pays.” He was referring to the need for scientists to explain their work in popular media—which, amen, brother Jack!—but the point holds with regard to access to original scientific articles, too.

It doesn’t make much sense that U.S. citizens, whose taxes fund most of the basic science in this country, are then expected to pay upwards of $50 for a single PDF copy of a journal article presenting government-funded research results. The National Institutes of Health already requires that research it funds be archived online and accessible to the general public free of charge—why not expand that to all government-funded research? And hey, there’s a way to suggest exactly that out to the man in charge: a petition on WhiteHouse.gov.

We believe in the power of the Internet to foster innovation, research, and education. Requiring the published results of taxpayer-funded research to be posted on the Internet in human and machine readable form would provide access to patients and caregivers, students and their teachers, researchers, entrepreneurs, and other taxpayers who paid for the research. Expanding access would speed the research process and increase the return on our investment in scientific research.

The highly successful Public Access Policy of the National Institutes of Health proves that this can be done without disrupting the research process, and we urge President Obama to act now to implement open access policies for all federal agencies that fund scientific research.

It needs 25,000 virtual signatures within 30 days before it’ll get any meaningful attention, so sign this thing and then start badgering all your online “friends” about it, why don’t you? Especially the jerks who keep filling your update stream with branded product promotions and/or time-sucking adorable cat videos and/or news about how they’ve just spent real money for a virtual cow—post this directly on their “walls,” if those are even still a thing, with or without a witty and/or pleading comment appended.

I mean, it’s Monday morning; it’s not like you’re going to get do anything else for the benefit of humanity in the next minute or two, you slacker.

New papers from NiB contributors

by Yoder
White sands, New Mexico

White gypsum sands: officially an ecological opportunity

Evidently they’re not willing to toot their own horns, so I’ll do it on their behalf: Two of our contributors, Simone Des Roches and Chris Smith, have brand-new publications in print, and both papers are open access, available to anyone who wants to take a look.

Simone’s paper makes the case that the gypsum sands of White Sands, New Mexico, create an “ecological release” for lizards living there, since reduced predator density and diversity on the white dunes lets the lizards use a wider range of habitat types, and achieve higher population density.

First, we provide evidence for ecological opportunity by demonstrating reduced species richness and abundance of potential competitors and predators at White Sands relative to nearby dark soils habitats. Second, we characterize ecological release at White Sands by demonstrating density compensation in the three White Sands lizard species and expanded resource use in White Sands Sceloporus undulatus.

Chris’s paper tests the hypothesis that Joshua trees have expanded their range northward since the last glacial maximum, drawing together many different data sets to find the same signal of population expansion.

Using a database of >5000 GPS records for Joshua trees, and multi-locus DNA sequence data from the Joshua tree and four species of yucca moth, we combined paleaodistribution modeling with coalescent-based analyses of demographic and phylgeographic history. We extensively evaluated the power of our methods to infer past population size and distributional changes by evaluating the effect of different inference procedures on our results, comparing our palaeodistribution models to Pleistocene-aged packrat midden records, and simulating DNA sequence data under a variety of alternative demographic histories.