No abstract

As part of BioMed Central’s open science mission, we are pleased to announce that two of our journals have integrated with the open data repository Dryad. Authors submitting their research to either BMC Ecology or BMC Evolutionary Biology will now have the opportunity to deposit their data directly into the Dryad archive and will receive a permanent, citable link to their dataset. Although this does not affect any of our current data deposition policies at these journals, we hope to encourage a more widespread adoption of open data sharing in the fields of ecology and evolutionary biology by facilitating this process for our authors. We also take this opportunity to discuss some of the wider issues that may concern researchers when making their data openly available. Although we offer a number of positive examples from different fields of biology, we also recognise that reticence to data sharing still exists, and that change must be driven from within research communities in order to create future science that is fit for purpose in the digital age.This editorial was published jointly in both BMC Ecology and BMC Evolutionary Biology.

As part of BioMed Central’s open science mission, we are pleased to announce that two of our journals have integrated with the open data repository Dryad. Authors submitting their research to either BMC Ecology or BMC Evolutionary Biology will now have the opportunity to deposit their data directly into the Dryad archive and will receive a permanent, citable link to their dataset. Although this does not affect any of our current data deposition policies at these journals, we hope to encourage a more widespread adoption of open data sharing in the fields of ecology and evolutionary biology by facilitating this process for our authors. We also take this opportunity to discuss some of the wider issues that may concern researchers when making their data openly available. Although we offer a number of positive examples from different fields of biology, we also recognise that reticence to data sharing still exists, and that change must be driven from within research communities in order to create future science that is fit for purpose in the digital age.This editorial was published jointly in both BMC Ecology and BMC Evolutionary Biology.

BioMed Central is a Science, Technology and Medical publisher of online, open access journals. We have always endeavoured to ensure that our journals adhere to the norms of the research communities we serve (Knapp et al., 2011; Krell 2012; Sands & Moylan 2012). We were therefore somewhat bewildered by the tone of the piece from Dubois et al. (2013) criticising online-only journals, specifically our interpretation of the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature (the Code) on criteria for publication for nomenclatural purposes (ICZN 1999) prior to the 2012 Amendment to the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN 2012a,b,c). We responded to this in our recent blog (Harold et al., 2013).

BMC Ecology announces the winning entries in its inaugural Ecology Image Competition, open to anyone affiliated with a research institute. The competition, which received more than 200 entries from international researchers at all career levels and a wide variety of scientific disciplines, was looking for striking visual interpretations of ecological processes. In this Editorial, our academic Section Editors and guest judge Dr Yan Wong explain what they found most appealing about their chosen winning entries, and highlight a few of the outstanding images that didn’t quite make it to the top prize.