Paying to publish: what's in it for me?

‘I have no strong opinions on the matter’ is perhaps not the most compelling opening to a blog, but it describes my prevailing attitude to one of the perpetual talking points among publishing scientists: Open Access or not? In fact, I might more appropriately describe my position as ‘agnostic’, given the often evangelical tone adopted by some advocates of Open Acces publication. This agnosticism is most apparent when I have my ‘reader’ hat on. Of course I like to be able to access all of the papers I want to read without leaving my office chair. And I pretty much can. Clearly, it helps to be part of a large and well-resourced University; but on the rare occasions that the library can’t help, and a few minutes online don’t find a solution, it’s pretty easy simply to email authors and ask for a pdf. I find this updated version of the old reprint request postcards to be very effective. So, open access or not, I can generally read what I need to do my job, and seldom notice whether or not a particular paper is OA.

As an author, the situation is slightly more complicated – or, at least, it the division between the two publishing models is more obvious, because I have to pay to publish in an OA journal (typically on the order of $1000+ per paper). The principal benefit is the ability to reach more readers but, as described above, many (even most) of the people who are going to want to read my work, will probably be able to get hold of it anyway (definitely, in fact, if they think to email me). I may gain in casual readers, which is lovely – for instance, it gives me a warm, fuzzy feeling to see on PLoS ONE’s website that the paper I blogged about last week has been viewed >2000 times! – but let’s be brutally pragmatic here: the bottom line is citations, and citations will generally come from those people who can access the paper regardless.

Staunch OA adherents may argue too that it is simply an ethical decision to publish the results of publically funded research somewhere that anyone can read them. I have a certain amount of sympathy for this view (and I certainly think more data should be freely available), but I don’t think it’s a particularly strong argument. The lay audience for most scientific papers is tiny (hell, the academic audience for most is small enough!), not all subscription-based publishers are evil (including many learned societies), and, as I said above, with a little persistance it is almost always possible to get hold of a copy of most published work.

I suppose what I am arguing is that, as an author, my choice of publication is not primarily motivated by its chosen publication model (i.e., OA or subscription). So if I’m going to pay to publish, I’m going to start to expect personal benefits in terms of the aspects of publishing that matter most to me, such as speed (of decisions, and decision-to-publication), and general ease of submission / production.

There is an analogy here with higher education in the UK. When I was an undergraduate, I received a government grant to go to university. It was paltry, of course; but my education was at least free, so we accepted what we got from academics and very, very rarely complained about anything. Since students started to pay fees, it has been noticable that they have become much more demanding, and they expect a certain minimum level of service from academics. (Quite rightly; although some demands are also quite rightly dismissed: ‘can you rearrange the tutorial please Dr Webb, I can’t make Mondays’, etc.)

If authors are routinely paying to publish, I suspect they will increasingly begin to question where exactly their $1000+ are going each time. Little demands from journals will become more of an annoyance. Things like formatting references precisely in accordance with a journal’s style (see comments in Martin Fenner’s blog on Endnote) or fiddling with the format of figures (I spend a lot of time creating appropriate statistical graphics for my work. I have less interest in converting PDFs to 600dpi TIFFs or 9cm wide JPEGs or whatever). Tardy reviews and editorial decisions will no longer be tolerated. The very best standards of typesetting will be expected.

My suspician is that subscription-based publications will coexist with OA journals for years to come. My (altruistic) hope is that the success of the OA movement has made the entire scientific community more aware of the obigation to communicate research findings as freely as possible to the appropriate audience – regardless of where we happen to publish a particular piece of work. My (selfish) hope is that paying to publish in some journals will make the publication process everywhere more and more of an easy ride for us poor authors!

Marine biodiversity hits the headlines

This week, the Census of Marine Life has finally published its definitive answer to the question, how many marine species are there? (The definitive answer being, lots more than we thought, and many more than we’ve described.) Clinging to the coat tails of this mini media storm, my paper on the global distribution of recorded marine biodiversity has also finally snuck out. I’m not a habitual press releaser, but we decided to stick one out for this paper for a couple of reasons. First, I just think it’s cool. We plotted the position in the water column of around 7 million records of marine organisms stored within the Ocean Biogeographic Information System. What this shows is that, unsurprisingly, the shallow seas surrounding the continents are better sampled (by orders of magnitude) than the deep oceans. But by considering the relationship between the depth at which each sample was taken, and the depth of the ocean at that point, we were able to gain a more nuanced picture: those records that we do have from the deep seas tend to come either from the surface, or from the sea bed, leaving the ‘big blue bit in the middle’ – the almost inconceivably vast deep pelagic ocean – virtually unexplored.

Webb_fig2.tiff
The distribution of global recorded marine biodiversity. The figure represents the water column, with the x axis proportional to the area of the ocean at different depths (y axis).

I was also keen to produce the press release because, for a variety of (largely political) reasons, we sent this work to PLoS ONE. Now dear old PLoS ONE has its pros and cons (I plan to write more about these soon), but the simple fact that it publishes so much every week means that I was worried that our paper would simply disappear without a little push from us.

Now, because of the clutch of CoML papers, the media are clearly primed and ready to pursue marine biodiversity stories. As a consequence, our press release got a good reception, and I’ve been approached by everyone from the Guardian to Fox News, and I’ve even done an interview on BBC Radio Sheffield. All of which is great, and I do of course enjoy seeing my name in print.

The flip side is that my name has become associated with CoML – fine by me, and my work was indeed linked with the Census, albeit only loosely. But it means that the questions I’m being asked are things like, How do you go about counting all the species in the sea? As well as things about the gulf oil spill and so on, some distance from my area of expertise. My feeling is that I ought to engage with these questions, and I can probably give as well-informed an answer as almost anyone. But my work is data analytical, and I’m not a hands-on marine biologist, and I just cannot shake the fear of saying something foolish.

Still, there’s something depressingly appropriate about stories of the parlous state of marine biodiversity becoming tomorrow’s fish and chip wrappers…

Seeing through the sea

Two recent trips to the coast, one for pleasure and one for work, have led me to ruminate on some of the peculiar issues that make marine ecology both especially intriguing and particularly tricky to study. One of the striking features of the marine habitat is the unignorable third dimension. Studying terrestrial organisms, especially at the kinds of biogeographic scales that interest me, we can confidently talk in terms of areas – the range size of any given species will typically be quoted as a geographical extent, in km2. Even the most aerial of birds – swifts, say, or the great albatrosses – are tied to terra firma for breeding purposes. In the sea, it is different. For some marine species, especially those closely associated with the sea bed, we can perhaps take the same approach. But for others, that multitude of pelagic organisms inhabiting the water column – well, many of them undertake extensive vertical migrations every day, without ever in their lives experiencing the hard certainty of rock, sand or silt. Their environment extends in all directions, and their ranges should surely be quantified as volumes.

Conceptually, that can be difficult to grasp, particularly if you have grown accustomed to seeing species ranges, and other patterns of biodiversity, represented on flat maps. But for me, visualising an ecological problem is very often a great help, if not an essential prerequiste, to solving it. So in Wales, gazing out to sea, I practised the following thought experiment: imagine if you could see through the sea, as if it were air.

View of Ramsey Island, Pembrokeshire. Imagine if, instead of blue, the sea were see through; imagine seeing the sandy plain and its inhabitants, rather than the mirrored sky.

Extending from the base of the cliffs, then, would be a vast sandy expanse, fringed in places with dense patches of large algae, but otherwise devoid of visible plantlife. But this plain would not be lifeless. Closer inspection would reveal plentiful signs of busy animal existences. It is riddled with the burrows of countless worms and molluscs. More obvious, through your binoculars you will see the larger epibenthic predators and scavengers – the crabs, urchins and sea stars. From time to time, a flatfish may reveal itself, lifting from the sea bed and rippling this way or that.

But drawing most attention will be the swimmers. Darting around the base of the rocks are wrasse and other reef fish; further out, pollock, or perhaps haddock or cod, would be hunting on the plain; and above them, the more flittish flocks of sandeels and mackerel, shimmering like starlings coming in to roost.

And you would see in their entirity the chases of air-breathing predators. The diving gannets, usually curtailed at the sea surface, could be followed right into the shoals of fish several metres below; you could see their misses and, when they succeed, watch them swallowing their grabbed fish on their ascent. Auks would swim deeper among the sandeels like fierce sheepdogs, puffins stuffing their comic bills with fish after fish.

You would be hoping, of course, for something larger: to see the ballet of grey seals at play, or possibly even porpoise or basking sharks, lording it over this shallow plain like the great beasts of the savannah.

People would feature too, of course. In shallow coastal Pembrokeshire, you’d see more evidence of leisure than of industry, although the occasional lobster pot would announce itself with its bright balloon hanging high above. But visit the more productive seas and you would witness carnage of a kind unthinkable on land. Imagine ploughing a field, with a vast net attached to the plough such that everything in your path is collected: the grubs and worms in the soil, the attendant gulls, the fleeing hares and pheasants. That’s beam trawling.

Or imagine casting an immense mist net to enclose those roosting starlings; or suspending kilometers of baited hooks across the Straits of Gibraltar during the autumn raptor migration; or harpooning buffalo; or dynamiting rabbit warrens; or poisoning tropical forest canopies and catching whatever falls out; or… Well, any means you can conceive of to catch and kill animals in commercial quantities has probably been attempted in the sea. If it is effective, it probably still goes on.

Of course, seeing a problem does not automatically mean it would be fixed, but I wonder what marine conservation would be like if every human impact on marine ecosystems were as visible as the Gulf oil spill. Certainly, we would be better placed to understand the state of the marine environment, and the effects of conservation measures, if we had a photographic record of historical habitats and the superabundance of large animals in the recent past. Perhaps it’s my job, as a marine ecologist, to try to assemble such pictures, using the scaps of evidence that we have been able to obtain by fumbling in the dark.