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Showing posts from January, 2010

Suite of ecology journals moving to open access research data policy

In the recent editorial ( Am Nat 2010. Vol. 175, pp. 145–146 ) of The American Naturalist , it was announced that the journals " The American Naturalist , Evolution , the Journal of Evolutionary Biology , Molecular Ecology , Heredity , and other key journals in evolution and ecology..." would be introducing data archiving policies supporting access, re-use and long term preservation. These policies are to be put in place in one year, and the example policy for the The American Naturalist is given: This journal requires, as a condition for publication, that data supporting the results in the paper should be archived in an appropriate public archive, such as GenBank, TreeBASE, Dryad , or the Knowledge Network for Biocomplexity. Data are important products of the scientific enterprise, and they should be preserved and usable for decades in the future. Authors may elect to have the data publicly available at time of publication, or, if the technology of the archive allow

Mattress Tobogganing in Quebec

Mid-December the new bed was delivered, and the delivery guys were supposed to take away the old bed. But - as I live in the country and it was snowy - the delivery truck got stuck down the road from my place. While the delivery guys were waiting for the tow truck, they decided to carry up the mattress, box spring and bed frame. They also decided to carry down the old mattress and box spring (wrapped in the plastic that the new items had arrived in). Spontaneously they decided to use these as plastic-wrapped toboggans first to toboggan down my driveway and then carry their toboggans around the corner, to the hill on my street, down to their truck. The mattress proved to be the better of the two, getting some pretty good speed down the road. I almost regret not having kept the old mattress for tobogganing! :-)