Call for crustacean papers: Fishes

Even though I have been a working professional scientist for some time, there are always more journals than time, so I am always on the lookout for journals that would be appropriate for Marmorkrebs papers.

When I first saw the journal Fishes, I though, “This is not for me, because I don’t study animals with backbones.” But despite the title, Fishes takes papers on invertebrates, too. The journal’s mandate includes “aquatic life science and aquatic animals (fishes, molluscs and crustaceans, both fresh water and marine).”

Fishes caught my eye for a few reasons.

It is a new journal, it is open access, and they are waiving article processing charges for articles published in 2017. Given that the main reason I see people not publishing open access is that people are unable to pay article processing fees, offering free publication as an “introductory offer,” as it were, is interesting to many researcher.

That said, while this journal doesn’t have much of a track record yet, the publisher, MDPI, has a mixed track record at best.

In brief, on the negative column, MDPI journals have published several very poor papers. They have also sent out a lot of unsolicited emails (this post was prompted by one).

On the positives column, MDPI is a member of the Directory of Open Access Journals and the Committe on Publication Ethics. The Fishes editor-in-chief appears to be a real person. Richard Poynder has a thorough article and interview from 2015 covering the debates about whether the Fishes publisher could be rightfully called a “predatory publisher.” Scammers are typically not as transparent as MDPI owner Shu-Kun Lin is in this interview, although some of his answers give me pause.

And publishing articles for free – as Fishes is doing this year – would be an incredibly bad scam.

External links

Fishes

The Open Access Interviews: Publisher MDPI

Is MDPI a reputable Academic Publisher?

Call for crustacean papers: The Journal of Crustacean Biology

Journal of Crustacean Biology is well established, peer-reviewed journal published by The Crustacean Society. But there are changes afoot!

The journal is moving over to Oxford University Press at the start of the new year (Volume 37, Number 1). The journal will be getting a new format (presumably in line with other Oxford University Press journals like Integrative and Comparative Biology), colour covers, and will have an open access option – I think for the first time for the journal.

Society members pay no page charges, will get reduced open access fees, and free access to the Journal’s digital archive. Plus, society members will a 25% discount on Oxford University Press books. Given the cost of academic books, it will only take a few book purchases to make membership in the Society pay for itself!

Current editor-in-chief Peter Castro encourages the submission of review articles, short research notes, and articles on techniques and methods. You can email him for the new author’s instructions.

The journal has published several Marmorkrebs papers already (Kawai et al. 2009; Martin & Scholz 2012; Shinji et al. 2016), so hopefully it will publish more Marmorkrebs papers there under the auspices of the new publisher!

External links

Journal of Crustacean Biology
The Crustacean Society website

Call for crustacean papers: Nauplius

Nauplius is a peer-reviewed, open access journal published by Sociedade Brasileira de Carcinologia, also known as the Brazilian Crustacean Society. Its mandate is to cover all aspects of crustacean biology. It has clocked up a more than 20 year track record, but, like so many fine regional journals, was new to me (embarrassingly 😔).

Because it is sponsored by the Society, there are no article processing fees for publishing in the journal. Remember this journal for the next time someone says, “But I can’t afford to publish open access.” Really? You can’t afford free?

The new feature of this journal is that they have moved to a continuous publication model, Papers are available online shortly after acceptance, rather than being held back for the delivery of a bundled issue.

It might be a good venue to submit research on Marmorkrebs!

External links

Nauplius website
Nauplius on Facebook

Pre-print power

Pre-prints are, of course, yesterday’s news in some circles. They are nothing new for the physics community, which has been using the arXiv pre-print server for more than two decades now. Several fields, including biology, have been reluctant to follow that trail. There is still a lot to talk about with pre-prints.

Pre-prints have been in the news a little more than usual lately, with a string of articles and editorials and blog posts about the potential benefits for pre-prints. (List of recent links at the bottom.) They’ve also been on my mind since a recent manuscript by Vogt and colleagues was the first in the Marmorkrebs research community to go up on a pre-print server, BioRxiv.

I asked two of the authors about what motivated their decision to post a pre-print, and how they thought this worked out for them.

Frank Lyko wrote:

We were a bit frustrated by the reviewing process. It takes time as it often takes some unexpected twists and turns. Also, it’s not uncommon that reviews or editorial decisions are completely off the mark. Posting provides you with an opportunity to let the community be the judge and not worry about the hidden agendas of reviewers or editors.

We wanted this story to be out in the open. Peer review can take an inordinate amount of time. BioRxiv promises to be fast, and indeed, 5 hours(!) after the initial submission, the screening process was completed. The paper was then instantly posted with a doi and thus became a citable reference.

And another point (even if it was not relevant in our case). The publication fees for some of the good journals now amass to several thousand euros. We are usually in the €5000 range if we want to include open access, which is egregious. BioRxiv posting is for free.

Günter Vogt wrote:

In the days after posting one of the staff writers of Science came across the paper and wrote a small article for the Science News. This small article was then discussed in the net and we have addressed some of the critical issues in our final paper in Biology Open, for example, the important question when a parthenogenetic lineage should be considered as an independent species and when not. The abstract of the BioRxiv version was clicked 1627 times already and the full paper was downloaded 666 times. This is a quite good distribution of knowledge in six weeks.

bioRxiv is still a developing resource. The site  recently started showing tweets about the paper. While more people are posting to the site (right), though, the number is a tiny fraction of biological publishing. This page indicates over 806,636 articles were added to PubMed in 2013, which works out to 67,000 papers a month. A couple of hundred bioRxiv papers per month pales in comparison.

As noted in the quotes above, the manuscript by Vogt and colleagues has been accepted for publication in a standard journal. I will be interested to see if interest in journal article tracks that of the pre-print. My own experience, with the PeerJ pre-print server, has been that while pre-prints are nice, the final journal article gets more attention.

References

Desjardins-Proulx P, White EP, Adamson JJ, Ram K, Poisot T, Gravel D. 2013. The case for open preprints in biology. PLOS Biology 11(5): e1001563. http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.1001563

Pennisi E. 2015. Crayfish create a new species of female ‘superclones’. Science News ScienceShots. http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.aad1673

Shuai X, Pepe A, Bollen J. 2012. How the scientific community reacts to newly submitted preprints: article downloads, Twitter mentions, and citations. PLOS ONE 7(11): e47523. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0047523

External links

Peer review, preprints and the speed of science
A PeerJ PrePrint – so just what is that exactly?
Preprints in paleontology: really that radical?
Preprints in science
Accelerating Scientific Publication in Biology
Four different reasons to post preprints
The science of asking

Call for crustacean papers: Crustacean Research

Crustacean Research is a peer-reviewed, open access journal that covers all fields of biology of crustaceans and their related taxa. This journal has been running for some time, but it is new to me. The former president of The Crustacean Society, Akira Asakura, is editor-in-chief.

The publication costs are quite reasonable for an open access journal. People who are not members of the Carcinological Society of Japan pay about US$30 per page if there is no colour on the page. $300 for a ten page paper compares very favourably to, say, PLOS ONE ($1,350).

It might be a good venue to submit research on Marmorkrebs!

The Ecdysiast feature

The newest issue of The Crustacean Society’s newsletter, The Ecdysiast, is now available for viewing here. There are several articles of interest for readers. One is coverage of the SICB crayfish symposium that occurred in January It includes a note of the untimely death of Francesca Gherardi.

Also of interest are articles by Fred Schram, the general editor for the Journal of Crustacean Biology. In particular, “To be open or not to be open: That is the question” (page 7) is a look at open access from the perspective of someone in the thick of trying to maintain a journal in the face of a changing market, which includes declining Society membership.

Is OA the wave of the future? – maybe. However, we might suggest that “efficient” application of the OA model will lead to the collapse of many journals, especially those produced by small scholarly societies.

(Plug: If you are interested in crustacean biology, you should join the Society!)

2010 was the best year ever for Marmorkrebs research

Last year, I couldn’t help but being a little disappointed that there had not been more papers on Marmorkrebs published than the year before.

That is not a problem this year.

And this isn’t even including a massive review chapter on crayfish that came out at the very end of the year, or a paper that got published in the last ten days of 2010, but has an official 2011 publication date on it (Jimenez & Faulkes 2011).

2010 was not only a bumper year for Marmorkrebs research, but may also have marked a turning point, as Marmorkrebs research started to go more into the field than the lab. The story of Marmorkrebs broke into news media as an emerging invasive species and pest on two fronts.

We also got several critical questions answered: What species is Marmorkrebs most closely related to? (Procambarus fallax.) Can it survive in the wild in northern Europe? (Oh, yes.)

I was also intrigued to see a surge in the number of open access papers published this year. The first had been just last year, but this year saw about half the papers published in open access journals.

With data for the first decade of Marmorkrebs research to play with, I am cautious about seeing an increasing trend. In the spirit of science, I’m going to make some predictions. According to a linear regression of the data, we should see 14 papers on Marmorkrebs in 2015, and 20 papers in 2020.

Of course, the increase might be exponential rather than linear. Too early to say, but it might be a bit exciting if it was.

And there are papers already in the wings for 2011.

Faulkes, 2010

Faulkes Z. 2010. The spread of the parthenogenetic marbled crayfish, Marmorkrebs (Procambarus sp.), in the North American pet trade. Aquatic Invasions 5(4): 447-450.
http://dx.doi.org/10.3391/ai.2010.5.4.16

Abstract

The parthenogenetic marbled crayfish Marmorkrebs was discovered in the pet trade in Europe in the 1990s. Since then, its distribution through the pet trade has spread from Europe to other continents, including North America. North American pet owners were surveyed online with the aims of trying to track when Marmorkrebs entered the North American pet trade, the ways in which it spread through the pet trade, and how widely distributed Marmorkrebs are throughout the continent. Marmorkrebs have been in the North American pet trade since at least 2004, with the number of people increasing every year. While many Marmorkrebs are sold through online sources, face-to-face personal contacts account for almost as many acquisitions. The increasing spread of Marmorkrebs through the pet trade increases the probability that Marmorkrebs will be released into North American ecosystems.

Key words: crustacean • aquaria • hobbyists

A Google Spreadsheet of the data shown in Figure 1 can be found here. Below is a Google Map version; the different colours represent years people first reported getting Marmorkrebs.


View Marmorkrebs pets in a larger map

Chucholl and Pfeiffer, 2010

Chucholl C, Pfeiffer M. 2010. First evidence for an established Marmorkrebs (Decapoda, Astacida, Cambaridae) population in Southwestern Germany, in syntopic occurrence with Orconectes limosus (Rafinesque, 1817). Aquatic Invasions 5(4): 405-412.
http://dx.doi.org/10.3391/ai.2010.5.4.10

Abstract

Marmorkrebs are one of 12 currently known non-indigenous crayfish species (NICS) to be found in Central European waters. It is unique in the manner that there exist only females which reproduce parthenogenetically, i.e. eggs develop unfertilized and all offspring are genetically identical. Marmorkrebs have been first discovered in the German aquarium trade in the mid 1990s and became a very common pet species since then. Here, we present first evidence for a well established Marmorkrebs population in a small lake in the Upper Rhine catchment near Freiburg (Germany). The population occurs syntopically with Orconectes limosus, another NICS which invaded the Rhine system about 50 years ago. Morphometric and ovary weight measurements were taken from 12 Marmorkrebs specimens that were captured on July 3, 2010. The rostrum spination was pronounced and resembled the one found on a free-living individual captured in Saxony (Germany). Ovary development stages (Gonadosomatic Index) were heterogeneous and single berried females were found from early June to late July, which might indicate an asynchronous breeding habit. The relative abundance and distribution of both crayfish species were assessed by visual counts at nighttime at two occasions. Both species attained a comparable, moderate density throughout the lake margin. The Marmorkrebs was the prevalent species on shallow, swampy habitat patches, which are presumably similar to its natural prime habitats. The successful establishment of Marmorkrebs despite a pre-existing O. limosus population, stresses the competitive ability of Marmorkrebs. In addition to the recently suggested hypothesis that Marmorkrebs might be temperature limited in most parts of Europe, we feel that it is also necessary to consider its probable natural prime habitats and life cycle: Marmorkrebs are presumably able to colonize summer-warm, lentic habitats in most parts of Central Europe.

Keywords: Marmorkrebs • marbled crayfish • non-indigenous species • invasion success • parthenogenesis • Procambarus fallax

Martin and colleagues, 2010b

Martin P, Shen H, Füller G, Scholtz G. 2010. The first record of the parthenogenetic Marmorkrebs (Decapoda, Astacida, Cambaridae) in the wild in Saxony (Germany) raises the question of its actual threat to European freshwater ecosystems. Aquatic Invasions 5(4): 397–403. http://dx.doi.org/10.3391/ai.2010.5.4.09

Abstract

A cambarid specimen was collected in a brook in Saxony (south-east Germany). Preliminary morphological inspection identified it as the parthenogenetic Marmorkrebs (Decapoda, Astacida, Cambaridae). However, this individual showed some striking morphological differences compared to specimens of our laboratory Marmorkrebs culture. Hence, we conducted a molecular analysis based on two mitochondrial genes, COI and 12S, to check its identity. The results of the genetic study verified the initial assumption of a Marmorkrebs identity for the Saxon specimen. Thus, in addition to the two indigenous species, the new find is the fourth recorded introduced crayfish species in this area. However, a search for further Marmorkrebs specimens at the same site was not successful. Most published records of Marmorkrebs in European waters concern just single individuals and an established population has so far not been observed. This stands in contrast to other recently introduced cambarid species. Thus, we critically discuss the potential of the Marmorkrebs to spread within Europe. The major obstacle may be that the temperature necessary for optimal development and reproduction of the Marmorkrebs is significantly higher than that found in most European waters. However, given globally increasing temperatures, this might change in the future.

Keywords: intraspecific variability • developmental noise • genetic identification • potential invader • conservation of species diversity • thermal adaption • global warming

Holdich and colleagues, 2010

Holdich DM, Reynolds JD, Souty-Grosset C, Sibley PJ. 2010. A review of the ever increasing threat to European crayfish from non-indigenous crayfish species. Knowledge and Management of Aquatic Ecosystems 394-395: 11. http://dx.doi.org/10.1051/kmae/2009025

Non-indigenous crayfish species (NICS) in Europe now outnumber indigenous crayfish species (ICS) 2:1, and it has been predicted that they may dominate completely in the next few decades unless something is done to protect them. Of the ten NICS introduced at least nine have become established in areas occupied by four of the five ICS. A decline in stocks of ICS has been recorded in many countries in the face of increasing populations of NICS. Most European countries retain at least one ICS but all are under threat from habitat loss, deteriorating water quality, overfishing, climate change, and most importantly from NICS and crayfish plague. The threat to ICS is so great in some countries that “ark” sanctuary sites are being established.

The three most widely-spread NICS are the North American species: Pacifastacus leniusculus, Orconectes limosus and Procambarus clarkii. These can be considered as “Old NICS”, which were introduced before 1975, compared with the “New NICS”, which were introduced after 1980, such as the North American species: Orconectes immunis, Orconectes juvenilis, Orconectes virilis, Procambarus sp. and Procambarus acutus; and the Australian species: Cherax destructor and Cherax quadricarinatus, all of which have much narrower ranges in Europe. The North American species are potentially capable of acting as vectors of crayfish plague. Outbreaks of this disease occur regularly where there are high concentrations of vectors.

In addition to the NICS currently established in the wild, a further threat exists through the aquarium trade, where many American and Australian species are available via the internet and in aquarist centres. Owners of such species may discard them into the freshwater environment when they grow too big as with some Cherax spp. and Orconectes spp., or multiply too frequently as with Procambarus sp. (a parthenogenetic species). A conceptual model is presented as a possible way forward for protecting the future survival of ICS in Europe.

Keywords: None provided.

Marzano and colleagues, 2009

Marzano FN, Scalici M, Chiesa S, Gherardi F, Piccinini A, Gibertini G. 2009. The first record of the marbled crayfish adds further threats to fresh waters in Italy. Aquatic Invasions 4(2): 401-404.
http://dx.doi.org/10.3391/ai.2009.4.2

Abstract

The red swamp crayfish, Procambarus clarkii, is the most abundant invasive crustacean decapod in Italy. Evidence is however emerging for the presence of other Cambaridae that are erroneously assigned to the P. clarkii taxon. The marbled crayfish, belonging to a still uncertain species of the genus Procambarus, has been found for the first time in Italy in the Canale Maestro della Chiana (Tuscany, Central Italy), where it lives in sympatry with a large P. clarkii population. Although a single specimen was found, this record is particularly relevant due to the parthenogenetic reproductive habit of the marbled crayfish. However, molecular analyses based on COI barcoding did not reveal any differentiation within the P. clarkii population and excluded any form of hybridization between the two species. We will shortly discuss new pathways of invasive species and the threats posed by parthenogenetic species, even though they seem to be still sporadic.

Keywords: barcoding • conservation • marbled crayfish • parthenogenesis • nonindigenous species

New salvos in the publishing wars

I've talked a little about open access research publishing here, so wanted to point out the recent sniping across no man's land on the subject. The opening salvo was fired by Nature. I haven't read the article, because it's password protected and I don't want to pay the 8 bucks, so you can guess where Nature stands on this issue. The tone of the article seems to have caught many off guard as quite nasty.

The Nature article does have reader comments below it, if you have some time. There's quite a few.

You can find a compilation of reactions to the Nature article at A Blog Around the Clock, which includes this pithy comment:

...PLoS has no intention to in any official way acknowledge the existence of this article (according to the old blogospheric rule "Do Not Feed The Trolls")(.)

There's also a lengthy post over at The Questionable Authority on the subject.

My only comment for now is to repeat the mantra that led me to start this website.

Ideas that spread, win.

Additional: Greg Laden has compiled things that Nature has published about PLoS over the years here.

Harvard goes open access

Science magazine is reporting that Harvard University has developed an "Open access" policy.

The resolution authorizes Harvard to place a faculty member's work in a repository that will be available to all at no cost. The researcher would retain the copyright, as in the past, but the university would have a license to release it. Papers would be posted on the Internet upon receipt or following a requested delay. Any author may choose not to participate but would need a waiver from the dean in order to opt out of the system.

I recently wrote about some issues surrounding open access here.

As if to make the point for me, the Science article is locked behind password protection for subscribers.

Ideas that spread and research publishing

The rationale for this website was directly inspired by this TED talk by Seth Godin. Early in the talk, Seth presents a simple mantra:

Ideas that spread, win.



I created Marmorkrebs.org to spread an idea: Marmorkrebs are an exciting and fascinating organism for research.

The jury is still out on whether I will win.

But as I've been compiling all the abstracts to research articles, I've noticed that all of them are protected by journal publishers in one way or another. Some are more liberal than others. The Journal of Experimental Biology, for instance, makes everything available to everyone for free after one year.

I support intellectual property rights. For that reason, I only post abstracts of research papers here. I have no intention of archiving research papers that publishers normally protect behind passwords and subscriptions. If those articles are freely and publicly available, that would be another matter; I would archive those. But currently, none are.

It's important to ask what the benefits of limiting information are. For instance, publishing in journals that have a strong reputation can help to establish the credibility of information. Plus, given that many researchers read more abstracts of papers than entire papers, it may not matter if the main text of a research paper is password protected online if the abstract summarizing the most important points can be read freely. There are many books that I know a lot about -- even though I have never read them! -- because I've read so many reviews of them.

It's also encouraging that some journals, which normally protect their research papers and charge fees to get them, are starting to offer authors a choice to allow their papers to be open access. For a fee, naturally.

Issues like this are why you can find a Creative Commons license on this page. I wanted to state specifically that people are free to spread the ideas contained in this blog, provided people follow the scholarly practice of attribution.

These issues of intellectual property are key to scientific communities, particularly young ones like this little Marmorkrebs community. I hope that next time someone has a Marmorkrebs paper to publish, they think about how well they are spreading their ideas.