Small step for scientists, large leap for science communication

It’s said that many hands make light work, but could that be true for science communication too? In an opinion piece in PNAS that came out last week (Kuehne and Olden 2015 http://www.pnas.org/content/112/12/3585.full ), we propose that lay summaries – published online alongside traditional abstracts – are an efficient and needed science communication option in a changing media landscape. Communication of research is undergoing radical and rapid change through ever-increasing reliance on the internet, resulting in a shift from traditional top-down knowledge transfers to a “media ecosystem” (see figure below). Within this ecosystem, widespread adoption of lay summaries could substantially bolster current science communication efforts by creating reliable and direct pathways between scientists and diverse audiences including journalists, policymakers, resource managers, and the general public. We argue that it wouldn’t hurt interdisciplinary communication between scientists either!

Although lay summaries should enhance science communication across all disciplines, the need for broadly accessible research results is paramount in ecology and the environment. So we are taking this opportunity to urge journal editors and publishers in these fields to provide the platform for publication and incorporate requirement of lay summaries into their peer-review process.  If you support the inclusion of online lay summaries we hope that you’ll join us in signing an open letter http://washington.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_bQIXBWeha7Aeahv to major ecology and environmental journals which will be sent on April 10^th.

Thanks!

Lauren Kuehne and Julian Olden

University of Washington School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences

Plastic Purge: Mike SanClements on Reducing Plastic!

Plastic Purge Trailer from Mike SanClements on Vimeo.

Check out Dr. Mike SanClements discuss his efforts to reduce plastic in his life . . . and his new book on the subject!

Why I published in PLoS ONE. And why I probably won’t again for awhile.

By Andrew Tredennick

One morning as I was working on revisions for a paper I had submitted to PLoS ONE, this popped up on my Twitter feed,

I've now heard from several tenured or near-tenure profs that publishing in @plosone was career suicide. Thanks a lot Open Access

— Ethan Perlstein (@eperlste) January 21, 2013

and I immediately felt defeated. Had I chosen poorly when deciding to submit to PLoS ONE? Or, are those people that view PLoS ONE as “career suicide” just old-school professors who, for some weird reason, think papers don’t get reviewed at PLoS ONE? And, does that even matter, since I’ll need those same old-school professors to want to hire me in a couple years? Needless to say, my motivation for finishing the revisions waned.

Fight for your papers?

By Kristin Marshall

So, you just finished writing a paper on a really cool project. Finally.  And you’ve gotten your co-authors to sign off on it.  Finally.  And it only took 15 drafts. Amazing. Now what? Where should you send it?  The blogosphere has been humming with discussion on where to submit your papers in the past couple months.  Check out Jeremy Fox’s advice over at Dynamic Ecology, or Ethan White’s at Jabberwocky Ecology, or our very own Nate Hough-Snee’s right here.

Rather than add my general philosophy to that discussion, I am going to give a concrete example of one of my papers and its trajectory from first submission to publication. Specifically, the paper I recently blogged about on Yellowstone willows that appeared in ProcB.

In our own backyard

By Kelly S. Ramirez

Hello Readers, Happy New Year and welcome back to Early Career Ecologists! We are excited to get back into our normal posting schedule. Here’s to a productive and stimulating 2013.

Over my holiday break I read The Dog Stars by Peter Heller. (I finally got around to reading it after hearing this NPR interview). Briefly, The Dog Stars is a novel about a man, Hig, living in post apocalyptic Colorado, nine years after a plague has wiped out most of the human population; he is left with his dog, the stars and a neighbor with a massive weapons arsenal.

What I found so great about the novel, first, was Heller’s use of poetry and disjointed prose to highlight Hig’s loss – of his family, his surrounding environment, really the entire world. Amidst the sorrow though, Heller maintains a sense of hopefulness and lightheartedness that makes this a beautifully written and enjoyable novel.

But I am not here to write a book review- check out here and here if you stumbled upon this page for that reason. Though if you are wondering, I would say the catastrophic feel of this book falls somewhere between The Road, by Cormac McCarthy* and WALL×E, the lighthearted animated Disney film about a futuristic robot. This post is instead focused on the role of literature and film in public understanding of climate change.