Preprints are rapidly becoming popular in biology as a way to speed up the process of science, get feedback on manuscripts prior to publication, and establish precedence (Desjardins-Proulx et al. 2013). Since biologists are still learning about preprints I regularly get asked which of the available preprint servers to use. Here’s the long-form version of my response. The good news is that you can’t go wrong right now.

As I’ve argued here, and in PLOS Biology, preprints are important. They accelerate the scientific dialog, improve the quality of published research, and provide both a fair mechanism for establishing precedence and an opportunity for early-career researchers to quickly demonstrate the importance of their research.

A couple of weeks ago Eli Kintisch (@elikint) interviewed me for what turned out to be a great article on “Sharing in Science” for Science Careers. He also interviewed Titus Brown (@ctitusbrown) who has since posted the full text of his reply, so I thought I’d do the same thing. Definitely. Sharing code and data helps the scientific community make more rapid progress by avoiding duplicated effort and by facilitating more reproducible research.

If you’ve every worked with scientific data, your own or someone elses, you know that you can end up spending a lot of time just cleaning up the data and getting it in a state that makes it ready for analysis. This involves everything from cleaning up non-standard nulls values to completely restructuring the data so that tools like R, Python, and database management systems (e.g., MS Access, PostgreSQL) know how to work with them.

Martorell, C. & R.P. Freckleton. 2014. Testing the roles of competition, facilitation and stochasticity on community structure in a species-rich assemblage. Journal of Ecology doi:10.1111/1365-2745.12173 At a given location in nature, why are some species present and others absent? Why do some species thrive and have lots of individuals and others are barely eeking out an existence? What determines how many species can live together there?

Engaging in Art and Science Collaborations This is a guest post by Zack Brym (@ZackBrym). He is a graduate student in our group interested in the form and function of orchard trees. He has also developed an interest in scientific communication.

This is a guest post by Elita Baldridge (@elitabaldridge). She is a graduate student in our group who has been navigating the development of a chronic illness during graduate school. She is sharing her story to help spread awareness of the challenges faced by graduate students with chronic illnesses.

As some of you may know, I’ve been working with Michael Angilletta for the past year on organizing a Gordon Research Conference. I announced the mentoring program that is affiliated with the conference last week, but here is the official info on the conference itself. Please forgive a little repetition from the mentoring program post.

The British Ecological Society has announced that will now allow the submission of papers with preprints (formal language here). This means that you can now submit preprinted papers to Journal of Ecology, Journal of Animal Ecology, Methods in Ecology and Evolution, Journal of Applied Ecology, and Functional Ecology. By allowing preprints BES joins the Ecological Society of America which instituted a pro-preprint policy last year.

Graduate Student and Postdoctoral Mentoring Program Gordon Research Conference:  Unifying Ecology across Scales ADDED BELOW: Who can apply is added under financial support (why it’s where will make more sense when you read it) Time and Place: July 19-25, 2014 at the University of New England in Biddeford, Maine Conference Description: Ecological patterns and processes […]

*This is a guest post by Dan McGlinn, a weecology postdoc (@DanMcGlinn on Twitter). It is a Research Summary of: McGlinn, D.J., X. Xiao, and E.P. White. 2013. An empirical evaluation of four variants of a universal species–area relationship. PeerJ 1:e212 http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj.212.