Monthly Archives: August 2011
TRY, Initiative on Plant Traits — database
Welcome to the TRY Initiative on Plant Traits
Quantifying and scaling global plant trait diversity
A network of vegetation scientists jointly headed by
DIVERSITAS, IGBP and the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry
Main objectives:
- Construction of a global database of plant functional traits
- Make the data available for the ecological community
- Support the design of a new generation of global vegetation models
There is a link to a detailed article which has just been published in Global Change Biology.
AIP releases new app for authors and reviewers — iPeerReview
“AIP releases new app for authors and reviewers – 04 Aug 2011
AIP Publishing, a division of the American Institute of Physics (AIP), has announced the release of its new app, iPeerReview. The new app allows authors and reviewers to use their iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch devices to access a broad range of information on papers submitted to any of AIP’s journals in Peer X-Press, AIP’s manuscript submission and review system.
Once logged in, users can perform a number of activities related to their papers. They can access a list of all active and completed papers, view the status history of a paper, view and save a paper in PDF format, email a paper, and link to a paper on AIP’s Scitation platform if it is in production or to Peer X-Press if it is under review.
When users access iPeerReview, they can either log in or access papers that they have previously saved to their device. The app will determine if they are an author, a reviewer, or both. In the event that they are both an author and a reviewer, iPeerReview will allow them to access both sets of papers under separate tabs.”
Source: Knowledgespeak Newsletter
JISC announces support for govt. recommendations for peer review process changes
JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) in the U.K. is supporting an open peer review process. It should be more transparent and reviewers should be trained. JISC also recommends the sharing of data in the scientific community, and there is mention in this brief of the Dryad project to facilitate this sharing of data in a repository.
“The recommendations came out of a House of Commons Science and Technology
Committee report that also urged that researchers make their scientific data
publicly available, and that reviewers have formal training.”
Source: Knowledgespeak Newsletter, Aug. 2, 2011.
Open Access Coalition
Today Kansas and 21 other
universities and colleges announced that they’re joining forces to form the
Coalition of Open Access Policy Institutions, or Coapi. The new group will
“collaborate and share implementation strategies, and advocate on a national
level,” it said in a statement.
Read more: http://bit.ly/p8A9eo
Source: Trevor Dawes, Circulation Services Director, Princeton Univ.