My apologies Malcolm for being unaware of the extent of HCB and it's
ranking.. that's terrific.
I do think you make a key point that the "there are not enough people
out there who want [ or I would add are able w. their already busy
jobs] to do the work...."
David--thanks for your update on the status of TIEE.. that is
definitely encouraging! I think, apart for what still seem to be
notable exceptions like HCB, it is really difficult to run a top
quality journal strictly on volunteer efforts. That it does happen
sometimes, makes those cases all the more impressive. Enough said
perhaps as we will not all agree on any particular circumstance, but
I hope that the ESA committee process in August and this fall
identifies a good resolution for this.
Best to all
Susan
On Jul 24, 2009, at 8:51 AM, malcolm McCallum wrote:
Excuse me for correcting your perception that legit journals do not
spring up from
volunteer efforts, but HCB has been doing this for 4-years. IT is
just reaching
the minimum age for inclusion in ISI and the last time I did its
self-calculated
citation rating it was over a 1, which if that holds would make it one
of the top
two journals in herpetology and ranked higher than Journal of
Herpetology which
was recently ranked as among the top 100 most influential journals in
biology and
medicine (although I suspect it is actually just below 1 right now)
So, I respectfully must correct your perception that highly ranked
journals do not run on volunteer forces. IN fact, we have done this
to avoid
the need for page charges or submission fees so that authors from
nations with
fewer funds can afford to publish there.
WHy do most journals not use a voluneer force? Because there are
not enough
people out there who want to do the work -or- the publishing outlet
has become
more of a cash cow than anything else. Lets face it, some of these
online respected
journals charge a few hundred dollars per pub, in other words they
cover the entire
cost for publishing online with the first paper published. The rest
is profit and
personnel costs. Sounds almost like a scam, doesn't it??
Malcolm McCallum
On Fri, Jul 24, 2009 at 12:41 AM, Susan
Kephart<skeph...@willamette.edu> wrote:
Dear Charlene and other Ecologgers..<:)
I"m really very sorry to hear of this decision coming at a time
when there
has been such a movement to integrate teaching and research and to
provide
credible, peer-reviewed publication venues for exchange of
pedagogical
advances, teaching practices, and research on what works and
doesn't work in
the classroom.
My hope is that others who have used this resource will speak up,
that the
responses will be read by the governing board, and that somehow
through ESA
and its governing board, or endowed contributions to ESA, that
some of this
valuable resource can be continued without interruption. If you
teach any
course, and you've not yet looked at TIEE, I suggest checking out the
website while you can. It includes some real gems as the Publication
Committee apparently has already noted.
Finally, I don't think that an all volunteer effort should be
expected or is
realistic for TIEE--we certainly don't do that for important research
journals that are highly rated/cited. ESA has an enviable record of
supporting high quality, peer-reviewed papers, and it takes at
least a
minimum of resources to accomplish that well. I have not
submitted papers
to TIEE but I've certainly seen it's visibility and presence and I
suspect
it's been valuable for high school as well as college level
educators. This
means it's potentially a recruiting tool for future ESA members,
as is the
SEEDs program as well.
Thanks to all those who created this resource and have contributed
so much
to it.. let's hope we can find a way to support this through ESA.
I've been
a very long time member and was impressed by this initiative when
it began.
Moreover, although I joined ESA as a PhD student, and not for
pedagogical
reasons, I do think TIEE has drawn in many of today's educators and
teacher-scholars who would have never joined ESA otherwise and
were not much
a part of the ESA membership in the early days.
Best to all
Susan
Dr. Susan R. Kephart
Dept of BIology
Willamette University
Salem, OR 97301
503 370-6481
On Jul 23, 2009, at 2:53 PM, Charlene D'Avanzo wrote:
For 5 years Teaching Issues and Experiments in Ecology (TIEE) has
been
supported by several NSF grants to me and Bruce Grant. As many
ecology
faculty know, TIEE is a peer reviewed publication of the ESA
designed to
help ecologists teach well; it also supports college ecology
Scholarship of
Teaching and Learning (SoTL). Last year the TIEE editors
submitted a request
to the ESA Governing Board for ESA to assume publication of TIEE
as a
once-a-year electronic journal. Twice the Governing Board sent
this request
to ESA's Publication Committee, which was very impressed by
TIEE's quality
and depth. Twice this committee strongly recommended that the
Board vote to
move forward with TIEE as an electronic ecology education
journal, in part
because the fairly small cost (about 20% of the Education
Coordinator's
salary) would be so well spent. I am very sad to report that in
May the ESA
Governing Board decided not to accept this committee's
recommendation to
publish TIEE in the foreseeable future. Therefore, we will no
longer be
accepting submissions for TIEE.
A main reason why TIEE is so exceptional is because it is peer
reviewed.
Although the V.P. for Education. Meg Lowman, has no written
outcome of the
meeting, I understand that the Board generally did not view peer
review as
necessary for ecology education resources like TIEE. Many people,
including
grad students, have been able to use TIEE as a SoTL venue because
it is peer
reviewed. For education journals published by all the main
professional
biology societies peer review insures the publication's
excellence - just
as it does for scientific journals.
This summer I reviewed education proposals for NSF. One sad irony of
TIEE's demise is that nearly every ecology proposal I read
referred to TIEE.
At last weeks AAAS "Vision and Change in Undergraduate Biology
Education"
meeting, college biology teaching informed by research,
assessment, and
knowledge about 'how people learn' was seen as vital for the
future of
biology education. This is what TIEE embodies.
Those of you unfamiliar with TIEE can go to tiee.ecoed.net to see
what it
is. There you will find Experiments for lab, Issues for use in
lecture,
genuine (e.g. LTER) Data Sets, and research papers written by
about 75
authors and published in 6 volumes since 2004. All are peer
reviewed and are
based on contemporary, researched-based understanding about the most
effective teaching practices.
--
Charlene D'Avanzo
Professor of Ecology &
Director, Center for Learning
Hampshire College
Homepage: http://helios.hampshire.edu/~cdNS/
TIEE: http://tiee.ecoed.net/
************************************
--
Malcolm L. McCallum
Associate Professor of Biology
Texas A&M University-Texarkana
Editor, Herpetological Conservation and Biology
http://www.herpconbio.org
http://www.twitter.com/herpconbio
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