An unusual MSc defence setting

Defending your MSc with an oral presentation can be a harrowing experience. The assembled crowd is anticipating the results of your research study, you are aware that your presentation counts as 20% of your final mark (in South Africa at least). It is time for your best performance. However, with COVID comes challenges and also opportunities. For Sam Peta, being able to present his MSc thesis defence online allowed him not to miss the opportunity of a lifetime with fieldwork in Mauritius. With the island closed to visitors (from South Africa) for nearly two years, Sam's only opportunity to go came around the same time that he needed to defend his thesis. 

An hour before the defence, the heavens opened and torrential rain fell on Mauritius. Undeterred, Sam continued to prepare to give his talk. The, about 30 minutes before the defence was due to start, the power to the house failed and we were thrown into the gloomy darkness of a power-cut in a storm on a tropical island. Quickly we devised a plan, we could use the mobile network and hope that the laptop battery would continue to work for the full talk. Just as we got it all set up, around 10 minutes before the start, the power popped back on again and we breathed a sigh of relief.

Sam settled into presentation mode, making himself comfortable as much as he could while he talked to the congregated academics. The talk went well but now it was time for the inquisition. Sam responded to all questions in his usual detailed response, and after nearly an hour the defence was over.

I took Sam out for dinner at the Flying Dodo to celebrate this final hurdle of his MSc studies. We will remember this MSc defence for a long time to come.

Sam Peta - In Mauritius at long last

The COVID-19 restrictions have been tough on most people, but for MSc student Sam Peta they turned his international fieldwork for his MSc studies into a very local affair. Sam was supposed to be investigating diet and trophic levels of invasive and native populations of the Guttural Toad (Sclerophrys guttuarlis) using a suite of quantitative methods. Those invasive populations include Cape Town, and the Indian Ocean islands of Mauritius and Reunion. 

However, the COVID lockdowns started only 3 months into Sam's thesis, when he had only managed a single trip to the native range in Durban. At the time, we thought that we'd still get Sam into the field to work on the island populations before the end of his thesis. But back then we were not familiar with the course of the pandemic, the waves and the variants that would see those in southern Africa become the new pariahs of the rest of the world. 

Although the trip was postponed, happily for Sam he managed to make it to Mauritius and conduct the planned field work on their tiny toads. Sadly, this work is too late for his thesis, but it'll be a great addition to his existing work on Guttural Toad diet. Reunion remains closed.

Racism in Science: take away lessons from the E. O. Wilson debacle

Racism is still a persistent reality in 21st Century human societies. Those societies include scientific and academic institutions, even though we all would rather that those labels could never be associated with us or our approach to the world about us. Like other problems in academia (seeMeasey 2022for a miscellaneous group of issues from bullying to fraud), our best approach is to be aware of issues with racism and not to pretend that they don’t exist.

This blog post is written to highlight the lessons that we need to learn from the recent (and not so recent) revelations about the racist beliefs of E. O. Wilson. There is no doubt that E. O. Wilson was a great ecologist. His ideas and ecological insight will continue within the scientific literature many decades into the future. But following new revelations in an article by Farina and Gibbons (2022), we can no longer have any doubt that E. O. Wilson was also a racist, and actively used his influential position to promote his racist views albeit through third parties in order to avoid exposing himself. 

The article by Farina & Gibbons (2022) is well worth reading, as they provide the evidence for E. O. Wilson’s views and also the way in which he corrupted the academic system, through publishing gatekeepers, to promote ‘scientific racism’ of those who espoused it, and defended them when they were threatened. 

Take-away lessons

It is all too easy to admire scientists (and others in society) who lead their fields and achieve levels of greatness in their own lifetimes, and sometimes beyond. Today, that global admiration and recognition often results in those individuals reaching levels at which they are unassailable in their societies. Such was the case with E. O. Wilson. Following his death in December 2021, a critical article in New Scientist by Monica R. McLemore (2021) was lambasted by many scientists on social media for suggesting (again) that E. O. Wilson was a racist - a claim that they considered baseless. But this wasn’t the first time that E. O. Wilson had been called a racist, and it was something that he was acutely aware of and did his best to hide from colleagues and the public (Farina and Gibbons 2022). The importance of the article by Farina and Gibbons (2022) is that they demonstrate the evidence for E. O. Wilson’s activities, and his complicity with others who shared his beliefs. 

This is not the only example where our current academic system has become corrupted by those who reach the highest ranks of their profession. Those individuals become so highly regarded by their colleagues and institutions that they are cocooned and protected against any accusations of wrong-doing. This is mostly as these positions come with such power and influence that they command an income to their institutions that cannot be threatened. Another prominent example is that of academic fraud (seeMeasey 2022for examples). Even when individuals are exposed by their colleagues and former students, their institutions continue to protect and defend them because they represent a source of income that is unparalleled by their less controversial and lower income colleagues. Indeed, for as long as we promote the winner-takes-it-all attitude to funding science, we can expect that there will be individuals that use and exploit the system for their own gains (seeHeard 2015for a nice perspective on this problem). Sadly, those who exploit the system to the highest level, will also be protected by their institutions. 

In a nutshell, as scientists we are all human. There are those among us who will have bizarre and ugly beliefs, including racism. We cannot pretend that these prejudices will go away with an old generation, they will continue to morph and change as time goes by. What we can do is to remove the professional inequalities that currently exist in hiring and publishing science, and be aware that no matter how high our colleagues reach in greatness within their own fields, it does not mean that they cannot be wrong. 

Further Reading

Fainra S. & Gibbons M. (2022) The Last Refuge of Scoundrels. Science for the People Magazine 25. https://magazine.scienceforthepeople.org/online/the-last-refuge-of-scoundrels/ 

Heard, S. (2015) Why grant funding should be spread thinly. Scientist Sees Squirrel Blog Post:https://scientistseessquirrel.wordpress.com/2015/05/12/why-grant-funding-should-be-spread-thinly/

McLemore, M.R. (2021) The Complicated Legacy of E. O. WilsonScientific American,https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-complicated-legacy-of-e-o-wilson/ 

Measey, J. (2022) How to publish in Biological Sciences: a guide for the uninitiated. CRC Press, Boca Raton. ISBN: 9781032116419http://www.howtopublishscience.org/ 

Andrea now in Madagascar

After what seemed like an eternity of waiting for the pandemic to behave, MeaseyLab postdoc Andrea Melotto has finally made it to Madagascar. He had to fly via Italy and Paris, and quarantine on arrival, but he made it all the way through while still remaining COVID negative. Now Andrea has 6 weeks to work on the invasive Asian Spiny toad, Duttaphrynus melanostictus, which was documented as arriving in 2014 (see Licata et al., 2020). Andrea's task is to perform a standard set of morphological, performance and behavioural traits with toads from the invasion core and expanding invasion front. This will mirror the same set of traits measured previously for the invasive Guttural toad in Mauritius, Reunion and Cape Town (see here to watch a video of Andrea talking about his previous work). 

He is staying at the seaport town of Toamasina where the toads are now well established. It only took a single night to search the area and collect enough toads for his experiments. 

Andrea is working with Benjamin Muller, Noelikanto Ramamonjisoa and Karen Freeman from the Madagascar Fauna and Flora Group, and Angelica Crottini from CIBIO, Research Centre in Biodiversity and Genetic Resources, InBIO Universidade do Porto.

The answer does not lie with publishers

Mekonnen et al. (2021) make some great points made about the current publishing model from an African perspective. It is frustrating that especially middle-income countries are being priced out of the Open Access (OA) market. We already know that these same countries are underrepresented in the ecological literature (e.g. Manlove & Belou 2018; Nuñez & Amano 2021). But while I agree with the sentiment and thrust of Mekonnen et al. (2021), they have missed the most important message on the future of scholarly publishing.

Mekonnen et al. (2021) have been duped into thinking that the solution lies with publishers. This is akin to suggesting that we turn over the problem with global climate change to the fossil fuel industry. The publishers, and in particular the big four (Elsevier, Springer-Nature, Wiley and Taylor-Francis control around 50% of all papers published in the biological sciences), are responsible for the current pricing structure and the revealing result in Mekonnen et al. (2021)’s Figure 1 - that we pay more for OA in journals with higher impact metrics. Gray (2020), who previously documented this trend, makes the much more important point that the so-called ‘impact metrics’ should never change the Article Processing Charge (APC) of publishing a manuscript. A higher imperative should be placed on the realisation that ‘impact metrics’ themselves have been captured by the publishers, who now sell them to our institutions and governments. Mekonnen et al. (2021) don’t even question why higher impact journals cost more; publishers produce the hierarchy and then exploit it. The movement away from assessing scientists on impact metrics for hiring and promotion is especially important, yet most African universities are notably absent from the Declaration of Research Assessment (DORA). The negative outcome of publishing metrics on scientists’ behaviour, including those in ecology, are now well recorded (Measey 2022). Turning away from metrics allows us to free ourselves from the tyranny of the publishers and their unethical pricing. Grossman & Brembs (2021) point out that the real costs of publishing are two orders of magnitude lower than those typically charged by publishers. But their most important result is that the actual cost of publishing Diamond OA journals (where neither author nor reader pays for access) is only ~$10 per paper.

The real question that Mekonnen et al. (2021) should have asked is: why are academics still using for-profit publishers when they are so obviously exploiting us?

Publishing science is changing, and it’s not just the OA movement. There is a far more important Open Science movement that needs to be given a much more prominent role. This involves preregistration of our research plans, preprints, open data, open code, open peer review and only then open publishing. If we look at what needs to be done, we should very quickly realise that publishers are the last people that we should be working with. Most of the innovations to Open Science will require institutional buy-in, and ultimately this must come from our own libraries as curators of our scholarly output (Measey 2022).

Mekonnen et al. (2021) are correct that African universities are currently paying a disproportionate price in the current publishing model, as are other middle-income countries and all those at less prestigious institutions. These same institutions have the most incentive to change the current publishing model into one that serves everyone better. A growing number of options are available.

The ‘overlay’ publishing model provides Diamond OA for journals at two orders of magnitude lower than for-profit publishers. Although the best examples (that even have their own Impact Factor) are in physics and mathematics, ecology joined the ranks using a ‘nearly overlay’ model in 2021 with the launch of Peer Community Journal. This builds on the Peer Community In initiative that has reviewed preprints since 2017, but now offers the option to publish in a growing suite of biological sciences: Evolutionary Biology, Ecology, Paleontology, Animal Science, Zoology, Neuroscience, Genomics and Mathematical & Computational Biology. The 2021 cost of publishing the first volume of Peer Community Journal was ~$65 per article, although these activities also covered the entire Peer Community In initiative.

Ecology Letters is published by Wiley on behalf of The French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). CNRS could instead end their publishing agreement with Wiley and move to an ‘overlay’ (or almost overlay) platform. CNRS has signed DORA, and so leaving Wiley and their for-profit publishing model would fit entirely within this commitment. According to OpenAPC CNRS paid €2 920 301 in APCs for 1724 articles - that's an overpayment of €2.9 million to the publishers, instead of setting up their own overlay publishing system! Moreover, in a world where ecology has all of its society journals with Diamond OA, who would ever choose to pay an APC to publish or hide their work behind a paywall?

Mekonnen et al. (2021) are correct when they say that the solutions lie with funders and the academic community. Currently, funders appear to be overly influenced by governments where the publishing lobbyists have already won the initiative. That leaves it up to us, the academics, and the societies that we run. We can choose Diamond OA today. We can sign DORA and we can make a movement away from for-profit publishing en masse. We can also use this opportunity to move towards Open Science, making us more accountable to the public who funds our work. If we can’t decide to make the move to Open Science ourselves, what is the real message that we are giving to society?

REFERENCES

Gray RJ. 2020. Sorry, we’re open: Golden open-access and inequality in non-human biological sciences. Scientometrics 124:1663–1675. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11....

Grossmann A, Brembs B. 2021. Current market rates for scholarly publishing services. F1000Research 10:20. DOI: 10.12688/f1000research.27468.2.

Manlove KR, Belou RM. 2018. Authors and editors assort on gender and geography in high-rank ecological publications. PLOS ONE 13:e0192481. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0192481

Measey, J. 2022 How to publish in Biological Sciences: a guide for the uninitiated. CRC Press, Boca Raton. (OA at http://www.howtopublishscie...

Mekonnen, A., Downs, C. Effiom, E.O., Kibaja, M., Lawes, M.J., Omeja, P., Ratsoavina, F.M. et al. 2021. Can I Afford to Publish? A Dilemma for African Scholars. Ecology Letters . https://doi.org/10.1111/ele....

Nuñez MA, Amano T. 2021. Monolingual searches can limit and bias results in global literature reviews. Nature Ecology & Evolution 5:264–264. DOI: 10.1038/s41559-020-01369-w.