It takes a community to define a discipline: the 5th anniversary of Environmental Research Letters

ERL has turned five years old and Dan Kammen has noted some successes and his vision in a short article:

The motivation for founding ERL was initially more focused: to alter the mode of publication and review in the diverse, yet linked fields of environmental and resource studies and to ensure new levels of interaction, inclusion and equity, providing the platform for the world-changing research findings published in ERL. The key driver in this conversation was the issue of access. Specifically the situation that too many research findings were produced by, and for, very specific academic 'clubs', and that the opportunity to engage in discussion and debate over important emerging findings about our world was being severely limited by the process of publication in frequently slow-to-publish and tremendously expensive traditional academic journals. 

The need for change was, and still is, obvious. Environmental and resource studies have been the fastest growing and most diverse nexus of academic research, private sector concern and public sector action. Universities worldwide are adding academic and extension professorships and staff as well as experiencing increasing student interest in this area at a record pace. Corporate social and environmental sustainability has been changing dramatically and, in lurching fits and starts, a mosaic of environmental regulations—both carrots and sticks—are emerging worldwide. The 'Rio + 20' Earth Summit in June 2012 will be a testament to both the dramatic broadening of this interest, and the frustration about the lack of progress at building strong global institutions to permit international cooperation. This is a clear call for an on-going and evolving process of community building.

Some features of ERL that I've liked, and Kammen emphasizes:

• it's open access
• they are now doing "video abstracts"
• impact factor = 3.05
• they actually are very interdisciplinary
• they actually do turn around articles very quickly

Here's the video abstract for Kammen's article:

[FE has hosted an ERL RSS feed in the sidebar for a year now, check it out.]

Unpublished comments should be taxed

I don't think any journal editors read this blog, but I'm posting this just in case one ever does.

In the scientific literature, if a scientist disagrees with a previously published finding they can submit a "comment" to the journal and this comment is handled a bit like a normal paper (eg. there is peer review). However, for some journals (eg. Nature), the editors solicit a "reply" from the original authors, which is basically a comment on the submitted comment.  If the comment-reply pair is considered useful for advancing scientific understanding of the original paper (this is where peer review comes in), then they are published together.

My coauthors and I have just finished dealing with the third comment submitted in reaction to a paper we published in August. Many people dislike our result and have tried to falsify it.  None of these comments have been published, however, because in each case our reply has demonstrated the faulty approaches of the comments.  We have learned many things from the process, so in some sense it represents the interactive component of scientific research at its best, but dealing with comments is exhausting.  When a comment is submitted, we must read it, think about it, conduct simulations and additional analysis to demonstrate its faults, write up the results, edit the write up and compose a formal review.  Given my recent experience, I would guess that each comment consumes about four person-days of work between myself and my coauthors (costing ~$550 at post-doc-like wages).  For time-constrained researchers, this is a lot of time.  And for us, the authors of the original paper being commented on, there is not much flexibility in timing since journals ask for responses to be submitted quickly (Nature gives ten days).  So comments demand a serious time-commitment from the original researchers on short notice.

In cases where the original research really had serious issues that are clarified by comments, then this process produces valuable public goods. But in cases where the response is strong enough to prevent the comment's publication (our recent three experiences), then public confusion is avoided (a public good relative to the counterfactual state) at the expense of the original researchers' time and effort.  This is a clear externality imposed on the original researchers by the commenting authors.  As we know from Econ 101, this will lead to the overproduction of low-quality (rejected) comments in equilibrium, since the full social cost of a comment (the lost time of the original authors) is not borne by the commenting authors.  What should be done here? The answer is obvious from Econ 101: we need a Pigovian tax on low-quality comments.  We should penalize commenting authors if their comment is rejected, but not if it is accepted.  This will force authors with a comment to think hard about the quality of their comment before submitting it and will raise the quality of the average comment that is actually submitted in equilibrium.  Society will still get the public good benefits from the strong comments, but authors of original papers will be less burdened by dealing with the excessive supply of low-quality comments.  In the current no-tax regime, the oversupply of low-quality comments generates a pure deadweight loss in the form of occupying the original researchers' valuable time and slowing down their research.

What should the tax be? Well, based on my earlier estimate, roughly $550 for a comment that is rejected.  This is on par with the marginal cost of publishing an additional color figure (~$450 in Nature).  How can this tax be implemented and enforced? When a comment is submitted, a $550 bond must be paid at the time of submission. If the comment is published, the bond is returned to the authors. If the comment is rejected, the journal keeps the bond. (Or, if they are feeling nice and want to maximize social welfare, they give it to the original/replying authors! Under this model, I would be $1650 dollars richer and less annoyed at spending my time replying...)

Scitable: accessible open access science

Scitable is a new and interesting educational initiative by the Nature Publishing Group.  It seems like they're trying to distill a broad body of scientific knowledge into a series of short, open-access papers that high school students and/or students in developing countries can access and interpret (without needing an advanced graduate degree). According to them:

Scitable is a free science library and personal learning tool brought to you by Nature Publishing Group, the world's leading publisher of science. 

Scitable currently concentrates on genetics and cell biology, which include the topics of evolution, gene expression, and the rich complexity of cellular processes shared by living organisms. Scitable also offers resources for the budding scientist, with advice about effective science communication and career paths.

For example, they have a section on ecology with subsections like global and regional ecology that have papers on subjects like The Ecology of Fire or Disease Ecology.

Right now the site has genetics, cell bio and ecology up. But word is that they're in the process of assembling other sections (eg climate dynamics) which will be published eventually.

(h/t Adam)

Global Policy Journal

I ran across a copy of this new journal in the lounge of the WWS.  It looks pretty interesting and boasts an impressive editorial board.  I like their approach of focusing on global issues while pursuing interdisciplinary and applied authors/readers (and I don't know any other journals that have had a contribution by General David Petraeus).

Here's the editorial statement:

Global Policy has a multi-disciplinary, interdisciplinary and international outlook that is committed to developing the accuracy, forward lookingness and policy relevance of academic research. It will not privilege a particular ethnocentric approach but will reflect a multiplicity of approaches that are indicative of the emergence of a global system of multipolar governance and policymaking. 

The editors’ approach to selecting material will be:

Committed to advancing the academic study of global policy and the politics in which it is embedded; Open  to interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary contributions; Reflexive in its consideration of diverse political discourses on global problems; Engaged in respect of its contribution to public debate and understanding of urgent global policy issues and; Serious in its commitment to the publication of only world class academic scholarship and the work of key public and private figures or authorities. 

The scope of Global Policy’s content can be specified by a number of criteria:

• 01. Globally relevant risks and collective action problems.
• 02. Policy challenges with global impact.
• 03. Competing and converging discourses of global policy and governance.
• 04. Case studies of policy with clear lessons for other countries and regions.
• 05. The interrelationship between policy, politics and institutions at the global level, with implications for institutional design. 
• 06. Conceptual, theoretical and methodological innovations needed to explain and develop global policy.

The editors are committed to developing both the highest standards of scholarship and evidence based reasoning by authors, with the scholarly articles subject to rigorous peer review. We are at the same time committed to the effective communication of research in the most accessible and professional fashion. We shall use a set of editorial conventions that do not compromise on accuracy and the proper explanation of methods, but that do systematically prioritise readers’ interests in the excellent presentation of data and complete clarity of exposition. We shall seek to engage meaningfully with the widest range of readers and contributors

Annual Review of Resource Economics

The Annual Reviews have come out with a new journal (a few issues old) that will be extremely useful resource for many FE readers: Annual Review of Resource Economics.

ABOUT THIS JOURNAL: The Annual Review of Resource Economics, provides authoritative critical reviews evaluating the most significant research developments in resource economics, focusing on agricultural economics, environmental economics, renewable resources, and exhaustible resources.

To get a sense of the journal, I just cut and pasted the most recent table of contents below (authors aren't listed, but many of them are quite distinguished).

Plowing Through the Data
Methods for Performance Evaluations and Impact Measurement
Green National Income and Green National Product
Behavior, Robustness, and Sufficient Statistics in Welfare Measurement
The Challenges of Improving the Economic Analysis of Pending Regulations: The Experience of OMB Circular
Commodity Booms and Busts
Food Quality: The Design of Incentive Contracts
Nutritional Labeling and Consumer Choices
Efficiency Advantages of Grandfathering in Rights-Based Fisheries Management
Game Theory and Fisheries
Natural Resource Management: Challenges and Policy Options
The New Economics of Evaluating Water Projects
Management of Hazardous Waste and Contaminated Land
The Economics of Infection Control
The Economics of Natural Disasters
Valuing Mortality Risk Reductions: Progress and Challenges
Pricing Nature
The Economics of Non-Point-Source Pollution
Microeconometric Strategies for Dealing with Unobservables and Endogenous Variables in Recreation Demand Models
The Environment and Trade
The Social Cost of Carbon
Corporate Average Fuel Economy Standards and the Market for New Vehicles 

Nature and Science as [the] top social science journals too?

I was a little surprised by this, since publishing in Nature and Science is sometimes viewed as a "second tier" prospect in the social sciences:

An average social science article published in Nature (2000-2010) is more heavily cited than an average article in any social science journal, with a "citation impact" of 51 (see the Reuter's article here).

The second best place to get your social science article? Science (citation impact = 35).

Nature and Science don't publish many social science articles, 65 and 80 respectively over the last decade, but the articles they publish seem to do well.  For reference, note the citation impact for top economics-only journals (Quarterly Journal of Economics is top in 2008 with citation impact = 5) and the top political science-only journals (Political Analysis is top in 2007 with citation impact = 2.5).

A standard critique of Reuter's citation impact measure is that it counts an article's citations over a fairly short window of time just following that article's publication (2 years).  In the social sciences, articles may remain as unpublished working papers for several years, preventing many of their citations from being counted in Reuter's analysis. Is this long lag in publication timing driving Reuters' finding?  Probably not.  Reuter's also publishes a measure of impact that spans a longer time window following an article's publication: the 28 years from 1981-2008.  Giving an article in the Quarterly Journal of Economics almost thirty years to accumulate citations still leaves its average citation count (49) just behind a the two-year citation count for an article in Nature (51).  Similarly, the long-run citation count for The American Political Science Review is 31, just behind the two-year citation count for Science (35).

[If you're interested in citations and the structure of human knowledge more generally, see this earlier post.]

Nature Climate Change Publishes first articles

Nature Climate Change is a new, high-profile and interdisciplinary journal focused on climate change research.  Its first research articles were released last week, abstracts below.

Nonlinear heat effects on African maize as evidenced by historical yield trials

David B. Lobell, Marianne Bänziger, Cosmos Magorokosho & Bindiganavile Vivek

New approaches are needed to accelerate understanding of climate impacts on crop yields, particularly in tropical regions. Past studies have relied mainly on crop-simulation models or statistical analyses based on reported harvest data3, 4, each with considerable uncertainties and limited applicability to tropical systems. However, a wealth of historical crop-trial data exists in the tropics that has been previously untapped for climate research. Using a data set of more than 20,000 historical maize trials in Africa, combined with daily weather data, we show a nonlinear relationship between warming and yields. Each degree day spent above 30 °C reduced the final yield by 1% under optimal rain-fed conditions, and by 1.7% under drought conditions. These results are consistent with studies of temperate maize germplasm in other regions, and indicate the key role of moisture in maize’s ability to cope with heat. Roughly 65% of present maize-growing areas in Africa would experience yield losses for 1 °C of warming under optimal rain-fed management, with 100% of areas harmed by warming under drought conditions. The results indicate that data generated by international networks of crop experimenters represent a potential boon to research aimed at quantifying climate impacts and prioritizing adaptation responses, especially in regions such as Africa that are typically thought to be data-poor.

Perceptions of climate change and willingness to save energy related to flood experience

A. Spence, W. Poortinga, C. Butler & N. F. Pidgeon

One of the reasons that people may not take action to mitigate climate change is that they lack first-hand experience of its potential consequences. From this perspective, individuals who have direct experience of phenomena that may be linked to climate change would be more likely to be concerned by the issue and thus more inclined to undertake sustainable behaviours. So far, the evidence available to test this hypothesis is limited, and in part contradictory. Here we use national survey data collected from 1,822 individuals across the UK in 2010, to examine the links between direct flooding experience, perceptions of climate change and preparedness to reduce energy use. We show that those who report experience of flooding express more concern over climate change, see it as less uncertain and feel more confident that their actions will have an effect on climate change. Importantly, these perceptual differences also translate into a greater willingness to save energy to mitigate climate change. Highlighting links between local weather events and climate change is therefore likely to be a useful strategy for increasing concern and action.

Challenges for interdisciplinary journals

The American Meteorological Society has a new (1 yr old) journal Weather Climate and Society that is trying to integrate research across several disciplines. For people like myself, the birth of journals like this is comforting because it suggests there is a growing community of researchers interested in applying hard physical science to address social issues.  This is a good thing.  But like everyone trying to do this, they are running into real challenges.  Here are portions of an editorial that resonated with some of my own experiences.  

The Costs and Losses of Integrating Social Sciences and Meteorology

Jeffrey K. Lazo

....[A] colleague stopped by to ask my advice on a manuscript concept he was considering submitting to Weather, Climate, and Society. He is an outstanding research meteorologist who has been working with a team on models to improve flood warning systems in developing countries. He was interested in demonstrating the economic benefits of the improved warning system and wanted to apply a cost–loss model. Based on his reading of a number of articles in meteorological journals, the cost–loss model was the method of choice for demonstrating economic value.

My initial reaction was largely visceral, because I have a dislike for the cost–loss model. The cost–loss model has been used extensively in the meteorology literature as “the economic model,” but it does not really show up in the economics literature (I should note that my Ph.D. is in economics and, in six years of graduate school, I never once heard of the cost–loss model). A simple search for “cost–loss model” in AMS publications yields 161 hits. A similar search of the economic literature yielded none....

My concern is that the cost–loss model as used in most articles in the meteorology literature does not even begin to capture the full value of economics and build upon the extensive literature in economics on the value of information and decision making under uncertainty. It is simply too simple....

That said, the first issue of Weather, Climate, and Society contained an article based on a theoretical extension of the cost–loss model (Millner 2009; in fact, I recommend reading Millner for an explanation of the cost–loss model). In that article, Millner showed that incorporating a specific behavioral feature in the cost–loss model resulted in net benefit estimates potentially significantly lower than those derived from the basic model. His article demonstrated that behavioral aspects limit the effectiveness of the cost–loss model. I feel this should be read as a demonstration that the meteorological community needs to move beyond the cost–loss model. Building in part on the limitations of the cost–loss model that Millner’s work suggests, I encourage the meteorological community to move beyond the use of that model as the basis for defining economic value....

Weather, Climate, and Society aims to publish “scientific research and analysis on the interactions of weather and climate with society.” This editor’s opinion is that this will largely involve the integration of the social sciences applied to topics of hydrometeorological concern (including weather, water, and climate broadly defined). In light of the prior discussion on cost–loss models, this means we need to better integrate valid economics as economic theory, methods, and practice frame economics with analysis of hydrometeorological issues. More broadly, we need to use appropriate theories and methods from all of the social sciences and not necessarily “accepted” versions of social sciences from the physical sciences perspective.

All of the social sciences have extensive bodies of knowledge they can bring to the study of hydrometeorological issues. Some have a longer history of examining issues related to weather, water, and climate; for instance, sociologists have long studied evacuation decision making during hurricanes. However, for the most part the research and literature is rather thin at the intersection of social and physical sciences relevant to audiences of Weather, Climate, and Society.

Given this landscape, there are definite challenges for the authors, reviewers, and editors for this journal. First, is that most of us (authors, reviewers, and editors) are fairly new to this effort at developing a highly disciplinary but very broadly focused journal combining atmospheric and social sciences. There is a learning curve at this early stage of the journal, because we are all developing and setting standards and expectations. There have been and will continue to be some frustrations as these are clarified. However, as these are clarified and we move forward,Weather, Climate, and Society will be the premier journal for interdisciplinary work “at the interface of weather and/or climate and society.”

There are also difficulties in writing, reviewing, and editing manuscripts for such a highly interdisciplinary journal. For instance, authors, reviewers, and editors for economics journals are almost always economists. I suspect authors, reviewers, and editors for meteorology journals are almost always meteorologists, or at least in general from the “hard” sciences. In addition to meteorologists, authors, reviewers, and editors for Weather, Climate, and Society are from the “harder sciences” such as economists, sociologists, geographers, anthropologists, etc. One challenge for authors will be to maintain high standards for their research while also being able to respond to very diverse (and sometimes divergent) critiques from reviewers with expertise from different disciplines.

For the time being at least, this may make Weather, Climate, and Society the most difficult journal across all American Meteorological Society (AMS) publications to publish in and to be an editor for. However, it may well also make Weather, Climate, and Society the most valuable and dynamic journal in terms of moving the various disciplines forward in new, challenging, and interesting areas of societally relevant research, methods, and applications.

(I hope I cut out enough of it that I'm not infringing on copyrights).