Ideas About Ideas in Ecology and Evolution

A lot of electrons have been whizzed around the world discussing how scientific publishing will be changed by the internet. The move from having to massacre whole forests to produce journals like Forest Ecology and Management has changed the possibilities. We are presently exploring what can be done and what will work.
The latest experiment in this area is a new Open Access journal, called Ideas in Ecology and Evolution. The intention of the journal is to provide an outlet for discussion of new ideas, which will stimulate more research. It aims to provide quick publication and the opportunity for comment from other readers.

Ideas in Ecology and Evolution proposes to publish papers which adhere to the following five criteria (unless otherwise indicated, the quotes are taken from the introductory editorial):

(i) The paper must present a genuinely novel idea or commentary.
(ii) The new idea /commentary must be well-argued
and plausible.
(iii) The paper must demonstrate the potential for the new idea /commentary to impact significantly on the subject area or broader discipline.
(iv) The paper must clearly differentiate the idea or commentary from any previously published
similar ideas or commentaries.
(v) A new idea must be accompanied by a proposal
for testing the idea, even if it is completely
impractical with current technology. Testability
may be addressed directly, e.g. through empiricism, or in terms of the consilience of
inductions.

This sounds like an interesting project which, if successful, will provide some stimulating reading.
The journal has a couple of interesting innovations, which are described in the Editorial. I’m not so about these: they are certainly experimental, and may work better on paper than in reality, when human beings are involved.
The first innovation revolves around the financial model. Prospective authors will pay $400 when they submit. This will be used to pay $150 Canadian or USian) to two referees. If the paper is accepted, the author pays a further $300 for processing and publication.
This is a different system: you pay for refereeing, with no guarantee that the manuscript will be published. If you fail, its $400 down the drain. Make sure you get some nice referees! I can see a lot of people looking at this and deciding to submit to another journal, where they don’t have to pay for the privilege of submitting.
The referees get paid for their work, but there is a catch:

Referees for Ideas in Ecology and Evolution are not anonymous; they are paid – not just for their reviewing services, but importantly, they are paid to forfeit their anonymity. In other words, in the event that the paper is published, payment of referees secures their consent to reveal their identities – directly within the published paper – as having refereed the paper. Referee identity is also revealed to authors of rejected papers.

as well as a carrot:

In addition to this monetary incentive, referees also receive another incentive for giving up their anonymity and for providing a high quality review. If the paper is accepted for publication, each referee is entitled to publish his views on the paper as a companion article – peer reviewed by both the editors and the author; the author of the original paper is, in this case, required to provide a ‘review of the review’ as a concluding section within the original paper.

I wonder how well this will work. It should certainly stimulate the discussion, but of course only between the authors and reviewers¹. And I’m also not sure it will work as well as one may hope.
The review process is designed to be streamlined, and the review form is structured so that it is easy to fill in (pdf). The problem with this is that there it doesn’t encourage a “yes, but…” sort of comment. These can be the most useful referee comments: the ones which say where the argument is weak, or needs to be re-written. The journal actually discourages this: if you want to get your own comment published, you stop any significant changes being made (from the pipeline pdf):

If both the author and at least one referee indicate their wish to publish in (4) and (5), then the author may elect to invite the referee(s) to co-author the paper, … Alternatively, the author (or the referee) may elect not to collaborate, but in this case the author must provide a review of the referee’s responding article …; this author’s review (which may be supportive or may take the form of a rebuttal) must be incorporated as a concluding section under separate subtitle (‘Response to referees’) added to the end of the originally submitted manuscript. In this case, no revisions of content, to address the referee’s responding comments, are permitted in the author’s originally submitted text of the manuscript (except for referee corrections arising from routine errors or minor oversights – as judged by the editors).

So papers can’t be improved if the referee wants to write a commentary on it.
I’m also a bit concerned about the refereeing rules that link payment to non-anonymity. The usual argument for anonymity is that it allows referees to give honest criticism, knowing that it can’t be thrown straight back at them. I think this protection can be necessary, particularly for younger scientists: precisely the people who are more likely to need the money. Imagine, for a moment, you’re a budding student working on barnacle evolution and you are asked to review a paper by Prof. McGit, the Big Man of the field. If the paper is awful and you say it, you’ve just lost your career (because the name McGit was not chosen at random. And I have nothing against those with Scottish ancestry). So what to do? Either don’t review, and forfeit the money, or write something anodyne that isn’t critical, and save your career. Or just write nothing. The problem more generally is that it brings the political into reviewing, with an added financial twist.
OK, I’ve been critical here, but will any of my worries come to pass? I hope not, and some probably won’t. Possibly the journal will be a roaring success, although it will need more work selling it (so far there is only the editorial up: I hope they have some articles already going through the system, so we can see how it works, and what sorts of article they expect). Some of the ideas may not work, so hopefully the journal editors will learn and adapt and make the journal a success. I’ll admit to being somewhat sceptical about a lot of the developments in web based scientific publishing, but I still support them because I’m going to be wrong, and online publishing with Web2.0 is in its infancy, so there needs to be a lot of experimentation as we find out what works, and how it redefines scientific publishing.

¹ A blog-like structure, with comments enabled, would be really nice here: I think the software can do it, but the documentation isn’t terribly easy to work with.