Interview with PeerJ Editor G. Matt Davies

This week we interviewed Editor Dr. G. Matt Davies. He is Assistant Professor of Soil and Plant Community Restoration in The Ohio State University’s School of Environment and Natural Resources. We caught up with him via email and asked him about his background, his experience as a PeerJ editor, and his thoughts on Open Access publishing.

PJ: Could you tell us a bit about yourself, and what brought you into your research?

GMD: My route into research here was a little convoluted as I’m originally from Wales and studied Archaeology at what is now Trinity Saint David’s. After digging for a while I decided to move into the present and took a Master’s in Environmental Management at The University of Edinburgh. There I was fortunate to meet Colin Legg, a really remarkable ecologist, and he got me interested in issues to do with vegetation management. For my Masters dissertation I studied the effects of traditional Scottish moorland management, which involves rotational burning, on lichen diversity and it was a short hop from there to a PhD with Colin looking at controls on moorland fire behaviour and severity. Since then I’ve worked at the University of Washington, studying sagebrush steppe ecosystems, and then back in again at the University of Glasgow. My current research interests are focused on vegetation dynamics in relation to restoration and disturbance and I retain an interest in fire ecology. More recently I’ve been looking at variation in peatland fire severity and its effects on vegetation and carbon dynamics.

PJ: What excited you about PeerJ that persuaded you to become an Academic Editor / Editor of a PeerJ submission?

GMD: I’ve been interested in Open Access publishing for a while but a little nervous about getting involved due to the plethora of “rogue” journals that have sprung up. I followed the launch of PLOS with interest but was always slightly put-off by the publishing costs – being at an early stage in my career I rarely had the funding to pay the publishing fees. I was initially attracted to PeerJ by the business model and the attractive website. Afterwards I was really impressed by PeerJ’s commitment to transparency in publishing – the promotion of open reviews, publication of peer-reviews and rebuttals and the potential for on-going commenting and review of published articles. I’m also very skeptical of the Impact Factor agenda and that journal editors are best placed to make decisions about what is or is not of interest to the scientific community. I love that PeerJ makes quality open access publishing affordable and puts decisions about the importance of scientific research into the hands of the scientific community themselves.

Matt burning an experimental fire on heather moorland in Scotland

PJ: How many hours a week would you say that you devote to PeerJ, and how does it fit into your schedule?

GMD: I’ve only been involved with PeerJ for a short time and so far have been AE for two submissions. Finding reviewers for my first paper turned into a bit of a drag as loads of folk said no. The journal staff were, however, very helpful and quickly lent a hand to identify other possible people. The PeerJ system is really nice to use which helps too. Reading the paper and responding to the authors probably took a few hours. I’m currently AE for my second submission and that has gone much more smoothly as I quickly found two reviewers. The nice thing about PeerJ is that you manage your own workload, and assign yourself papers choosing those that are of interest which match your expertise.

PJ: What are your thoughts about the value of Open Access publishing?

GMD: As I see it there are currently two major problems with scientific publishing. Firstly, decisions are made about accepting papers based on their supposed “novelty” or “importance”. There are a number of issues here as these decisions are made by a small number of people and not by the community at large. This closes the door on studies that seek to test previous findings or have negative results (the so-called file drawer problem), these should be as much the bedrock of sound science as exciting new findings. PeerJ puts decisions about the importance of articles in the hands of the scientific community and allows them to comment on and discuss published papers. I have some personal experience of the frustrations of the current system – what is currently my most-cited paper was rejected without review by the editor of first journal I submitted it to, apparently it was not interesting or novel enough.

The other big problem is that subscription-based publishing puts scientific information beyond the reach of folk outside of research and academia. This is a real issue in my own field as it means that managers on the ground can’t access the latest thinking on evidence-based approaches to conservation and management. There are other attempts to bring research to managers (for example the Collaboration for Environmental Evidence which focuses on systematic reviews of key questions for environmental management) but I’ve had moments working with managers when I’ve realised that none of them can access any of the work I’ve written. As, first and foremost, an applied ecologist, if my work isn’t influencing practice then what’s the point? Ok, so I probably need to do more outreach but if research were readily accessible that would surely help too. I think there is an appetite for scientific information both from managers and, sometimes, the general public – just look at the coverage PeerJ’s article on Brontosaurus got. Would it have achieved such an impact if it was published in an obscure, closed journal? Getting press coverage is great however, in my experience and for reasons I don’t understand, journalists rarely let you comment on a proof of their article. Much better to have the real research out there for everyone to see.

PJ: Anything else you would like to talk about?

GMD: The big issue for me at present is that I really want to publish in Open Access journals but perceptions of OA journals make that difficult. For those of us on tenure-track contracts there’s still pressure to publish in “prestigious” established journals. Publishers like PeerJ need to really concentrate on reaching out to the higher levels of University administration and convince them to take responsible OA publishers, and article-level metrics, seriously and forget about Impact Factors and other such nonsense. Currently there is a ground-swell of interest in publishers like PeerJ and PLOS but Universities still need to free academics to publish where their work will really make a difference.

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