more on the ivory-billed woodpecker paper

As noted in my original post, the New York Times Science section today confirmed the existence of the paper to be published questioning the sightings of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker in Arkansas, as well as the identity of the authors. It wasn’t really my intention to provide “breaking news”, but to provide perspective, balance, and commentary on the story. However, long, long ago I was a journalist, and it was fun getting a jump on the Times, even if only by 12 hours or so.

The news feeder at Nature also posted a piece today. While the Times article says the authors did not want to divulge the journal they submitted to, the Nature piece confirms another part of my post, that the Prum et al. paper will be published in an online journal, one of the Public Library of Science (PLoS) endeavors. This is undoubtedly PLoS Biology, an open access journal. [update: confirmed on 22 July by NPR, in which they note the journal has formally accepted the paper]

I talked a bit about Prum et al.’s choice of publication in my first post. I’ll just add now that one of the reasons they may not have chosen to publish their challenge in Science is that Science restricts these types of responses to 750 words. More interesting is their choice of an open-access publication. It is probably more expedient; I’m sure there are a lower volume of papers being submitted. But I believe publishing open-access might have a more ominous result.

Publishing in an open-access journal means that everybody can read the paper online, no subscription, no per-view fee, no restrictions. Everybody — including legislators and policy-makers who do not have access to the original paper in Science, which is now only available at a cost. The Nature piece echoed my concerns that the Prum et al. paper could have serious ramifications on endangered species conservation. Publishing open-access may provide an easy source of ammunition (without balance) for those willing to use normal scientific dissent as proof we need to raise the bar to unreasonably high standards prior to species protection. Uh-oh.