Ecologists as rock stars? Oh how I wish it were so…

The annual meeting of the British Ecology Society last week was unusual in a couple of ways: it was held in France, as a joint meeting with Societé Française d’Écologie; and, for the first time since I started going in the late 1990s, I wasn’t there. Rather than throw an almighty sulk about the injustice of this, I followed #BESSfe on Twitter as best I could, and felt I got a reasonable flavour of the conference - minus the hangovers, as an added bonus. For the most part, the tweets complied to the standard model for an academic meeting, with nuggets of useful information and plugs for new papers interspersed with Christmas jumper selfies and tales of boozing and carousing. All good stuff. But one morning a flurry of missives appeared all claiming some kind of affinity between ecologists and rock stars. I’m not sure of the context of this, and I’m sure it made sense at the time, but from this side of la Manche (and for the purposes of the straw man I wish to construct…) it provided what our glorious leader might call a genuine Lots Of Love moment. Let me tell you something. Over the years I have become reasonably proficient at a number of things, ecology (I hope) being one. But there are only two activities at which I think I might have got close to being exceptional. The first of these - catching a tennis ball rebounded at terrifying velocity off a fiendishly uneven stone wall - has not proved as marketable as I hoped through the 1990s whilst putting in my Gladwellian 10,000 hours (although I occasionally still impress myself, at least, with an astonishing reflex catch when playing with the kids). The second is songwriting. Nothing would please me more than to believe that, despite the lack of recording contract and adoring fan base that I once dreamt of (OK, still do; of course I still do), I had somehow ended up in the rockstar career I craved. But I so haven’t. As one of my undergraduate project students told me the other day, “I found the data collection really repetitive and boring”. Rock’n’roll.

Don’t get me wrong: with the failure of all my early ambitions in sport, music, cowboying, spaceflight, and so on, I’m pretty content to have ended up in the job that I have. And I think it’s important to communicate to kids that scientific research is an acievable, creative, satisfying, and respected career option - a good aspiration, if you will, to rank alongside medicine, teaching, architecture, and so on. But let’s not rush to supplant ambitions of Jedi knighthood, world cup winning, or, you know, rock stardom, too soon.

However, the more I thought about this, the more I realised that the parallels between ecology and the music biz are actually pretty clear. To wit:

• Incomprehensible veneration for old white dudes who were brilliant in their youth but have done nothing of worth in four decades or more, and who are now more likely to embarrass than entrance;
• Obsession with scouring early and obscure work for an under-appreciated idea that could profitably be repackaged for a modern audience;
• Equal opportunity routes to stardom. Except for women. Helps to be white too;
• Cynical marketing of trivial ephemera frequently trumps genuine originality and talent;
• Constant fretting over who should pay for the whole enterprise, and how these costs should be fairly divided between talent, administrators, publishers;
• Purse strings and mainstream media coverage largely in the control of men who grew up in the 1970s and who are deeply suspicious of any innovations to have developed since then;
• A deep distrust of the ‘mainstream’ from those preferring more obscure work; and vice versa;
• A tradition of large gatherings once or twice a year, ostensibly to broaden one’s horizons and hear new stuff, but in reality an opportunity for intoxication whilst establishment figures rehash their greatest hits;
• A very strong likelihood that, rather than basking in adoration from an arena stage, you will spend your career performing to small, largely uninterested audiences in stuffy rooms with bad acoustics;
• The occasional feeling of something approaching transcendence, encouraging you to forgive the whole sorry business for all its faults and to struggle on for one more year…

Compiling this, it’s a thrill to realise that I have achieved everything I ever dreamed of, and I can put the guitars on ebay in the New Year…

Happy holidays!

A Case for Anonymous Open Review

I recently reviewed a manuscript for the pioneering journal PeerJ. This presented me with a quandary. PeerJ’s experiment in open reviewing is nicely outlined in their recent post, and includes two steps: reviewers can sign their reports, and authors can publish the review history alongside their accepted paper. My quandary was this: I love the second idea, and think it is an important step forward in opening up the peer review process; but I don’t like to sign my reviews. Not because I want to hide behind anonymity - clearly, writing this post shows that I’m not going to any great lengths to hide my identity from the authors of the PeerJ manuscript - but rather because I think remaining anonymous makes me, personally, a better reviewer. So, on this occasion - despite producing what I consider to be a ‘good’ review, in that it was both pretty thorough, and very positive - I declined to sign. To explain why, here’s some history.

It started with so-called ‘double blind’ review, whereby manuscripts are anonymised before being sent to review. Or rather, it started with an argument about double-blind review. A paper said it benefited female authors. We disputed the evidence, and, although I know I’m predisposed to come down on my side of the argument, I honestly cannot see how anyone else can fail to agree with us - just look at our figure!!! And anyway, at a practical level how can it help, when only reviewers are blinded but editors make all the key decisions?

But I digress…

Thinking about double-blind review in turn led me to think about what I’d prefer to see in peer review, and openness seemed the way forward. At that time, only the first of PeerJ’s options was available, and for a while I started to sign all my reviews.

Well, I say ‘all’, but I noticed a trend: I was reluctant to sign my most critical reviews. This seems like basic human nature - it’s evident still in PeerJ, where reviewers are far less likely to sign reviews recommending rejection (see fig 5 here) - but is perhaps worth exploring more closely.

My particular field is relatively small, and I often know the authors of the manuscripts I review, at least well enough to say ‘hello’ to at conferences, sometimes much better than that. I have never seen this as a conflict of interest - I provide honest reviews whoever the author, and I have absolutely panned the work of some senior authors of very high standing - as well as some quite good friends - whose work I usually respect. I am much more comfortable doing this anonymously, not because there is anything in my comments that I would not, if forced, say to the face of the lead author; but simply because I would rather not be placed in that situation.

Yes, it all comes down to avoiding socially awkward situations. I will do almost anything to avoid face-to-face awkwardness. I am not one of those people who delights in pointing out a fatal flaw in someone’s work in the Q&A after a talk. I will find a million euphemisms for ‘crap’ if asked to comment on a (hypothetical, of course!) colleague’s substandard work. Whether you see that as a good or a bad quality in me probably depends on your cultural upbringing, but the simple fact is that I find the option of anonymity very appealing.

And so, having come to the conclusion that I preferred to remain anonymous when writing critical reviews, I felt the only morally consistent position for me to take was not to sign any reviews. Sometimes this is difficult. If I write an especially insightful (read: long) review of a piece by someone I really admire, it’s definitely tempting to sign. But no. Joey doesn’t share food, and Tom doesn’t sign reviews. Frankly - and I’m not suggesting for a moment that this is true of everyone - I think this makes me a better reviewer.

The other reason given for signing reviews is that it enables you to gain appropriate credit for your reviewing activity. I don’t really buy this - what kind of credit are you expecting? And how much? Let’s face it, writing a review can be hard work, but it’s much less demanding than writing the damn paper in the first place. My worry is that chasing formal credit encourages early career researchers to spend too long on reviews. I reviewed for Science a while back, and treated it with due seriousness: my review was several pages long, and really thorough, I thought. The other review stated, essentially: “Nah, not a Science paper”. I’m not saying this second review is something to aspire to, but you do need to learn to apportion time appropriately, and if you think a manuscript has very little merit, you probably don’t need six pages to say so.

Also: from whom are you expecting this credit from reviewing? You can already easily summarise your reviewing activity on your CV; I’m simply not convinced that adding a doi for each review will drastically increase your employment prospects or standing in the community. Or at least, it’s not something I feel I need at this point. For those who want credit, and feel like a doi gives them that, then of course it’s great to have the option.

I wouldn’t want any of the above to suggest that I am in any way against openness in peer review, which has numerous benefits. I would be delighted to see my (anonymous) reviews appended to published papers. There is of course an editorial issue here - it’s probably more useful to publish an essay-style review, à la Peerage of Science, than a numbered list of typos; and my experience is that many reviews themselves are riddled with spelling and grammatical errors. Who will review the reviews?! But in principle, yes, let’s open up the process. Transfer of reviews between journals - another form of openness, adding memory to the review process - is becoming more common too, especially within publishing houses, which is great, and ought to help avoid the kind of situation I wrote about here.

My point is that open, civil, and constructive reviews can still be conducted under anonymity. For the sake us shrinking violets who value its protection, I hope the publishing pioneers at PeerJ and elsewhere retain it as an option.

About a Blog

In his early collection of miscellaneous writing Paperweight, Stephen Fry includes a column from The Listener called Absolutely Nothing At All, about… writing a column. He prefaces it in the book with the excuse, “Journalist friends tell me that columnists are allowed to write one column of this nature once in their lives.” On the assumption that bloggers get the same allowance, here we go…

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I’ve had this post largely worked out in my head for several weeks. It’s been sitting there with half a dozen others, gestating, waiting for me to have the time to sit down and type it out. But if you’ve been monitoring activity on this site over the last few months, you will have surmised that such moments, those quiet half hours to polish off something as relatively trivial as a blog post, are getting harder and harder to find. Only this morning I had to batten down the hatches against the brewing panic of several looming deadlines at work; whilst kids and garden, the occasional foray into the world of leisure activities, and obtaining sufficient sleep all take precedence at home. Of course, I’m not alone in feeling these external pressures, and yet other academics manage to blog with alarming frequency. Which has got me thinking a bit about the why of my blogging, but even more so about the how, and I thought I’d share some conclusions.

Even four years and more into this blogging experiment, ideas are not (yet) the limiting factor I thought they would inevitably become. Certainly I have enough to maintain a much more respectable posting frequency. They hit me from all sides - from reading or conducting new research (perhaps less often than I initially assumed); more often the process of being a working scientist, a person, and a dad. A while back I published a 'placeholder' post (so perhaps I’ve already used up my allowance? Come to think of it, I’m sure I’ve written about blogging before too… Oh well.) with a list of things I planned to write about. Several of those are still to be finished, and many others have formed since.

So ideas come, and fortunately, because the net of my memory has always been pretty fine-meshed, they tend to remain in its cod-end and are usually still there when I finally get around to hauling them on deck for closer examination. As the net ages, though, holes are more frequent, and I decided I need to back up to external memory. For tiddlers, little scraps of ideas, I set up a ‘blog ideas’ project in Things, a task management app from Cultured Code that I use for my general to-dos. Things syncs nicely between devices: I stick a one line memo into my ‘blog ideas’ project on my phone, and there it is on my desktop when I eventually sit down to write.

Then we come to writing itself, and the search for a nice word processing package, the modern version of the search for the perfect stationary, or the perfect desk position, in the writer’s list of procrastination activities. I have settled, for the blog anyway, on Scrivener from Literature & Latte. Scrivener is actually designed for writing big and complex projects, and lends itself very well to scientific papers (allowing nice split views of notes, manuscript sections, figures and analyses). But I’ve used it much less for that than I thought I would. Instead, just as in Things I have a ‘blog ideas’ project with a load of component documents filed under ‘ideas’ (where this is now), which Scrivener lets me view in various ways - I particularly like the corkboard. Then there’s a second set of documents under ‘final versions’ (to where this will move in due course). It works nicely for me, and is a logical way to transfer my ideas from Things to somewhere I can write them up.

Ah, writing them up. That’s where the process slows right down. The trivial explanation for that is I’m busy, and blogging is low priority - it’s important to me, but not as important as other facets of my life and career, and it seldom reaches the levels of urgency that demand immediate action. But, as mentioned above, plenty of academic bloggers, all of them as busy as me, manage to find that hour or two a week to sustain their output. So, whilst busy-ness and other priorities are important, for the main cause of slow output we have to confront the ‘why’ of my blog.

When I started to blog, it was an outlet for the frustrated writer in me; frustrated by having to conform to the norms of formal scientific discourse in most of my writing. I wanted to write differently, and I wanted to write well. Moreover, I wanted to use the blog to experiment, to learn to write better. I still try to keep to these original objectives. I want to write with precision: to use the correct word if I can (something that used to come more easily; now I find myself frequently fishing around at the bottom of that net, feeling the perfect term slip through my fingers…). I want to match tenses and styles, to write with clarity, to eliminate errors; in short, to avoid cliche. And just to throw this in, so it may haunt you too - Martin Amis wrote somewhere that you should never begin two consecutive paragraphs with the same word (three in a row is acceptable, if intentional). I cannot not notice that now, in my own writing and that of others.

Writing, then, is something I take reasonably seriously, something I work at. After writing a post, I put on my editor’s hat, and edit. I try to cut the fluff - ironically this post looks like ending up longer than the 800 or so words I usually aim for. I proof read and try to spot errors and imprecisions (doubtless some will remain in this piece; they always do…) One of the most used apps on my phone is a dictionary - I use a cheap one, Advanced English Dictionary from jDictionary, which has its quirks but is pretty comprehensive. I look up every word whose definition I doubt - and sometimes those I’m sure of, just in case.

I try, then, to publish reasonably polished posts. I’m much less interested in churning out ideas as soon as they occur to me - I use Twitter for that. (Though I do the proofing and dictionary thing there too. Yes, I know…) - although I often read posts of that nature, and find them interesting and useful. And don’t get me wrong, many academic bloggers seem able to write high quality posts with a frequency that I find humbling. I can only suppose they need rather less sleep than I do.

Well, that’s me. As I said at the outset, the ideas keep coming, and every so often one will get processed. In the meantime, thank you for your patience.