I really love that quote from Alex Wild, by the way.
Brian Fisher (my former Evolution T.A. from ye ole UC-Davis days) and Alex Smith make open access history by publishing a taxonomic paper in PLoS ONE. It doesn't matter that this paper is about ants, not deep sea ants either like those discovered from whale falls above. I mean really, everyone knows they are just derived crustaceans anyways, by extension they are honorary deep sea taxa. Some amazing blogger already discussed the paper anyways.
This is a huge step forward for taxonomy and PLoS ONE made the right decision to dive into taxonomy. After all, the International Institute for Species Exploration reported nearly 17,000 species were described in 2006 alone. That is quite a market if you ask me! I am looking forward to more open access species. See here, here and here for reasons why Craig and I support open access and open access taxonomy.
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Hey, another UC, Davis alum. I slaved my way to Ph.D. in Physiology at UCD from '99 to '05, although I was mostly at the Bodega Marine Lab. When were you there?
PLoS is one of the best ideas in science from the past decade. Free dissemination of information.
B.Sc. in Evolution and Ecology 2002-2004 so we overlapped! I worked in the Grosberg Lab. I would go to Bodega Bay to collect inverts.
As one of the few non-ecology graduate students (basically my lab was the only one), I was not amongst the elite privileged ecology students at BML, so we probably did not meet. If you ever saw the tall, bearded guy with a multiple facial piercings skulking around, that was me.