Studying biodiversity is inherently interesting - at least to me - but too much biodiversity can bog you down when it comes time to reconstruct a phylogeny or produce a taxonomic revision. You simply cannot collect, identify, and sequence 1000 species in any reasonable amount of time (e.g., over the course of a 3-year NSF grant or in the 7 pre-tenure years at most academic institutions). Revisionary systematics, by its very nature, tends to produce large, tome-like publications, some of which take years to compile, refine and format. This creates an entirely different sort of pressure for researchers working within an academic "publish or perish" context. Not only do you need solid, preferably published, preliminary data to serve as a proof of concept for grant proposals, if you only publish one or two large papers per year you may not meet the standards for tenure at most institutions. To compound matters, taxonomic revisions tend to be the work of one or two authors working in almost total isolation. Long author lines with dozens of collaborators are virtually unknown in taxonomy. There is little culture of collaboration in modern taxonomy and this must change if the speed and breadth of species descriptions is to increase in the coming years.
The genomics revolution, with well-designed pipelines capable of generating and analyzing amazing amounts of data, has revolutionized how we think about data of all sorts. Big data initiatives, such as UC Berkeley's BIDS Program, are now common in science and pipelines for cybertaxonomy (e.g., Miller et al. 2012) are now helping ease the bottleneck surrounding revisionary work. Several authors have proposed a cultural change with how taxonomic publications are created and in how intellectual credit is awarded within academia. Several have promoted the notion of "quantum contributions" as a potential mechanism for increasing the rate of biodiversity discovery (Maddison et al. 2012; Riedel et al. 2013). A number of web-based journals (Zootaxa, Zookeys, Biodiversity Data Journal) and data hosting sites (Figshare) are making it possible to provide easy, open access to taxonomic data while attributing the contributions of various authors.
While I'm not prepared to entirely switch to a quantum approach to all my publications, I do feel strongly that open access to all research output is critical in increasing the rate of biodiversity discovery. I have begun to use Figshare in three distinct ways. First, I've posted bits of published data (figures, data matrices, etc.) in an effort to make older information that might be behind paywalls more generally available. Second, I've posted projects that were conducted in my lab and are likely useful to someone but never quite got published on their own. Most notable among these are a study on the population genetics of Drosophila suzukii, an invasive drosophilid that has become a pest in cane fruits and other crops (Ort and O'Grady 2013), and a coevolutionary study of some Neotropical batflies (Diptera: Streblidae) and their hosts (Bennett et al. 2014). Finally, when someone requests unpublished information from me, rather than simply emailing it to them, I have been posting it so it is more widely available. Two recent examples of this are my collection records (Ku and O'Grady 2013) and a large donation of Bill Heed's repleta group stocks deposited in the AMNH's Monell Cryo Collection (O'Grady 2014).
I plan on continuing to post these types of contributions to Figshare and will be monitoring how much use they actually get. It's been about a year since I started doing this and I have over 800 views - but no citations yet.
The genomics revolution, with well-designed pipelines capable of generating and analyzing amazing amounts of data, has revolutionized how we think about data of all sorts. Big data initiatives, such as UC Berkeley's BIDS Program, are now common in science and pipelines for cybertaxonomy (e.g., Miller et al. 2012) are now helping ease the bottleneck surrounding revisionary work. Several authors have proposed a cultural change with how taxonomic publications are created and in how intellectual credit is awarded within academia. Several have promoted the notion of "quantum contributions" as a potential mechanism for increasing the rate of biodiversity discovery (Maddison et al. 2012; Riedel et al. 2013). A number of web-based journals (Zootaxa, Zookeys, Biodiversity Data Journal) and data hosting sites (Figshare) are making it possible to provide easy, open access to taxonomic data while attributing the contributions of various authors.
While I'm not prepared to entirely switch to a quantum approach to all my publications, I do feel strongly that open access to all research output is critical in increasing the rate of biodiversity discovery. I have begun to use Figshare in three distinct ways. First, I've posted bits of published data (figures, data matrices, etc.) in an effort to make older information that might be behind paywalls more generally available. Second, I've posted projects that were conducted in my lab and are likely useful to someone but never quite got published on their own. Most notable among these are a study on the population genetics of Drosophila suzukii, an invasive drosophilid that has become a pest in cane fruits and other crops (Ort and O'Grady 2013), and a coevolutionary study of some Neotropical batflies (Diptera: Streblidae) and their hosts (Bennett et al. 2014). Finally, when someone requests unpublished information from me, rather than simply emailing it to them, I have been posting it so it is more widely available. Two recent examples of this are my collection records (Ku and O'Grady 2013) and a large donation of Bill Heed's repleta group stocks deposited in the AMNH's Monell Cryo Collection (O'Grady 2014).
I plan on continuing to post these types of contributions to Figshare and will be monitoring how much use they actually get. It's been about a year since I started doing this and I have over 800 views - but no citations yet.
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