UPDATE: If you’re looking for the information for 2014, checkout the DEBrief post for links. It’s that time of year again when we’re all busy working on preproposals for the National Science Foundation, and just like last year it’s more difficult than you would think to track down the official guidelines using Google.

Over the past year, you can’t get two scientists together who submit to the BIO Directorate at NSF without the conversation drifting to the radical changes in the proposal process. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, I’ve added some links at the bottom of the post for you to check out.

We’re looking for a new student to join our interdisciplinary research group. The opening is in Ethan’s lab, but the faculty, students, and postdocs in Weecology interact seamlessly among groups. If you’re interested in macroecology, community ecology, or just about anything with a computational/quantitative component to it, we’d love to hear from you.

ESA has just announced that it has changed its policy on preprints and will now allow articles that have been posted on major preprint servers, like arXiv, to be considered for publication in its journals. I am very excited about this change for two reasons. First, as nicely laid out in INNGE blog post by Philippe Desjardins-Proulx*, there are many positive benefits to science of the preprint culture.

We have all bemoaned the increasing difficulty of keeping up with the growing body of literature. Many of us, me included, have been relying increasingly on following only a subset of journals, but with the growing popularity of the large open-access journals I know I for one am increasingly likely to miss papers.

UPDATE: If you’re looking for publicly available grants go check out our new Open Grants website at https://www.ogrants.org/. It has way more grants and is searchable so that you can quickly find the grants most useful to you. Recently a bunch of folks in the biological sciences have started sharing their grant proposals openly.

As some may be aware, ESA has launched a new journal: Ecosphere. ESA describes Ecosphere as “… the newest addition to the ESA family of journals, is an online-only, open-access alternative with a scope as broad as the science of ecology itself. “ The description is vague  – is it a new incarnation of Ecology ? Or is it an ecologically focused equivalent of PLoS One?

As I announced on Twitter about a week ago, I am now making all of my grant proposals open access. To start with I’m doing this for all of my sole-PI proposals, because I don’t have to convince my collaborators to participate in this rather aggressively open style of science. At the moment this includes three funded proposals: my NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship proposal, an associated Research Starter Grant proposal, and my NSF CAREER award.

Sadly, Ethan and I are missing ESA this year, but our group still has a strong presence this year. In fact you can see a weecologist every day of the conference if you so desire! If you’re at ESA and want to know what the weecologists are up to, go check out our various talks and posters.

Over the weekend I saw this great tweet: Personal publishing policy for the PhD: always submit to http://t.co/dE2HMGlP and only publish (as 1st author) in arXiv-friendly journals. — P Desjardins-Proulx (@phdpqc) July 14, 2012 by Philippe Desjardins-Proulx and was pleased to see yet another actively open young scientist.

It’s that time of year again when the new Impact Factor values are released. This is such a big deal to a lot of folks that it’s pretty hard to avoid hearing about it. We’re not the sort of folks that object to the use of impact factors in general – we are scientists after all and part of being a scientist is quantifying things.