Over the weekend I saw this great tweet: by Philippe Desjardins-Proulx and was pleased to see yet another actively open young scientist. Then I saw his follow up tweet: At first I was confused.

It’s that time of year again when the new Impact Factor values are released.

When last we left our intrepid scientists, they were starting to ponder the changes that might result from the new pre-proposal process. In general, we really like the new system because it helps reviewers focus on the value of big picture thinking and potentially reduces the overall workload of both grant writing and grant reviewing.

Before we start, this post refers to posts already written on this topic. To make sure no one gets lost, please follow the sequence of operations below: Step 1: Do you know about the new pre-proposal process at NSF?

Are you interested in stoichiometry? Energy flow through individuals, communities or ecosystems? Implications of organismal physiology? Do you like macroecology? Field experiments? Lab experiments? Theory? Are you particularly interested in integrating various combinations of the above?

Ethan and I have been watching the emergence of crowdfunding in science with great interest. We meant to blog about it, but our rate of blog idea generation is >> our rate of blog writing.

People find blog posts in different ways. Some visit the website regularly, some subscribe to email updates, and some subscribe using the blog’s feed.

This is the first of a new category of posts here at Jabberwocky Ecology called Research Summaries. We like the idea of communicating our research more broadly than to the small number of folks who have the time, energy, and interest to read through entire papers.

Jeremy Fox over at the Oikos Blog has written an excellent piece explaining why fundamental, basic science, research is worth investing in, even when time and resources are limited. His central points include: Fundamental research is where a lot of our methodological advances come from. Fundamental research provides generally-applicable insights.

Joan Strassman has a very nice post about why it is sometimes useful to step back from the intricate details of biological systems in order to understand the general processes that are operating.

I have, for a while, been frustrated and annoyed by the behavior of several of the large for-profit publishers.