Agenda for the Society of Ethnobiology Board Meeting Minutes
Date & Time: Wednesday May 15, 2013 9:00 AM- 3:00 PMLocation: Environmental Science 320A
Attending: Kimberlee Chambers, Denise Glover, Cissy Fowler, Justin Nolan, Steve Wolverton, Dana Lepofsky (arriving about 11:00 AM), Cecil Brown, David Taylor, Alex McAlvay, Janelle Baker, Ginny Popper, ValentinaSavo, James Welch, Steve Weber (arriving after lunch), Scott Herron, Marsha Quinlan, Gene Anderson, Bill Balee
Not Attending: Deborah Pearsall, Jan Timbrook, Kay Fowler, Nancy Turner, Kris Gremillion, Gene Hunn, Paul Minnis
Call to Order
Reports
President’s Report (Justin)
Elections (Cissy)
Thank yous at end of terms (Justin)
Introductions (Bill)
Bill made some opening remarks. Bill would like, in the future, for SoE to include more international participants.
Call for nominations coming up this Fall for new Board members (Bill)
We have two positions to fill in the fall elections and then take office in May 2014.
Board Member – Web Liaison (currently Kris G.)
Board Member – Publications Liaison (currently Peter Stahl)
Discussion about whether to ask membership for nominations or take nominations from within the Board. Kimberlee recommends having better descriptions of Board positions – in addition to the descriptions on the website and the President’s and Secretary’s Handbooks, and Denise is developing a Conference Coordinator’s Handbook. Handbooks ought to possibly be available to non-members too. Handbooks maybe ought to be in blog format. Maybe we ought to push sending out nomination calls to August. Extend elections period.
Nominations for Web Liason: Chelsea Armstrong
Nominations for Publications Advocate: Jessica Dolan (PhD McGill), Jeremy Kessler
Treasurer’s Report (Steve)
Steve shows our banking summary and budget report on the screen. These reports will be posted in the members only section of the website.
We need more members so that we can show public support to maintain our non profit status. We’re increasing our royalties because of publications (from BioOne & Contributions) income. We MUST build membership or we risk losing our non profit status because we expect to continue increasing income from our publications. We had a big year in royalties -- with $14,000-15,000 for BioOne – and the Wiley Ethnobiology textbook. We really need to grow student memberships -- they’re cheap at only $15.00. We need to advertise with a marketing pitch that talks about all of the publications they can access with membership and that talks about the community that you will be involved in. Denise suggests that we need a growth plan. We might develop a team to create a 5 year plan. Gene A. suggests working with Economic Botany. Gene A. suggests giving Gift Memberships to professors who could hook lots of new students.
Cheryl sends invoices with lists of things she’s spent time on. Steve sorts Cheryl’s list into the web expense categories. Steve sorts Contributions charges into a separate category. We sign an annual contract with Cheryl showing how much we expect her to do. Her contract shows her hourly or scope.
We pay about $630/year in PayPal fees.
Web master received$11,667.93 last year.
Secretary’s Report (Cissy)
Social Network/Web Update (Steve)
SOE has 1128 Facebook friends.
Steve will retire from maintaining Facebook after he retires from Treasurer. Chelsea might take over after Steve steps out.
Gene needs to be an administrator on our Facebook page.
Ginny recommends the Society set up a LinkedIn account. LinkedIn will catch people who are looking for jobs. James will handle LinkedIn.
Both of our journals are on Academia.edu. We have 109 followers for EBL and 199 for JoE.
Research Gate. Cissy will set upan account.
SOE already has a Wiser Earth account.
Ginny suggests that we let our members subscribe to an RSS feed so that they’ll know about EBL content, new Contributions. Send notes out to membership about publications coming up.
Kimberly is going to become more active in dealing with membership issues, to increase membership.
Outreach-Inreach Committee Members will take up the effort to do a membership drive.
Scott shares the Open Science Network survey results that show what people have been involved in OSN together with their society memberships and their disciplines.
Conference Report (Steve & Denise)
Incoming Conference Co-coordinator (Denise)
Major initiatives for this year's conference: paperless & podcasting (Denise)
This year, we have 130 registrants. We have 110 presenters (minus 5 or 6 who cancelled). Letter templates will be available in the future that international participants can use to get their Visas. Eighty people signed up for the conference. We have 73 shuttle riders. BRIT field trip has 18 people. The other field trip has 13 people. Mead making workshop has 20 participants. Biocultural collections workshop has 19 registrants. Our income is about $13,000 because we have a cheaper price this year with about $10,000 in expenses. Denise says we’re right on in terms of expectations for the conference compared to previous years. We have about 20-30% of presenters showing posters. We are paperless for this year’s conference because of environmentalism, laziness, and being fed up with documents becoming trash. The conference has a mobile site.
Podcasting at Conference (Alex McAlvay)
We look at the SfAA podcasts webpage (sfaapodcasts.net). Alex is managing the development of podcast recordings this year. We won’t have a full run this year in podcasting recording, but they are recording maybe about 10 talks during the plenary session and a few others that represent the diverse topics that our members study. These podcasts will be posted on the website, maybe through Vimeo, iTunes, University, or some other hosting site. James raises the question of Intellectual Property Rights issues: Conference content on the web is ripe for plagiarism, so we need to copyright the content with Creative Commons or something else. Steve recommends creating a Journal of Visual Ethnobiology.
Joint SoE-SEB conference 2014 (Denise & David)
David founded Literature & Environment Society and has put on conferences. David thinks we ought to link to other kinds of disciplines. David has organized movements to save rivers and to put celebrations together. His projects sustain themselves.
Our 2014 conference will be with the Society of Economic Botany in Cherokee, North Carolina.
The conference is May 11-15. The theme is something like “Energy….” The board meeting will be on Sunday, May 11.
Board members discussed the interdisciplinary character of our Society and how to promote it.
JoEEditors Report (Ginny)
2012
29 submitted
22 rejected (79%)
5 accepted (17%)
1 in review (4%)
2013 to date
18 submitted (78%)
14 rejected
4 in review
Impact Factor (editors, new and old)
2013 issue is in press, due to mail in June
2012 published 13 articles
Everything (minus 1 or 2) goes back for revisions after review
Justin is putting together a special issue of JoEwith 6 articles on food security and food sovereignty that might come out at end of November 2013.
The spacing/timing of the publication of the JoE issues is related to when the Society receives its revenue. To get us on schedule with our dues payments, we shifted the publication schedule to May and November. We need to shift the publications to a schedule of March, July, and November if we are going to publish 3 issues. To print on November 29, we submit on September 15.
Journal Data (Steve)
JoE’s first Impact Factor (IF) is .56, which is low. IF is based on citations of papers, number of citable papers, size of audience, and historical tract record. Steve shows us Scopus data and their SJR rating: For JoE, our SJR indicator was highest in 2009. Other data is available here on the SJR cite. Steve recommends that we have more documents (like Journal of Ethnoboiology and Ethnomedicine) in our issues because that will increase the number of citations we get. Steve pushes for getting bigger names to publish in our journal, like in Special Issue. James says Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine’s crossover is with medicine, which has a higher citation rate anyway, whereas anthropology is JoE’s crossover, which has lower readership. We need to care about Impact Factor because the higher the IF, the better the submissions we receive. Alex mentions searchability as an issue that we need to consider. Alex says we ought to get out information into Journal TOCs. Dana says we’re going to work with BioOne staff to do that.
Open Science Network (OSN): Guest Presentation by Will McClatchey
OSN had elections to develop a new system of governance with representatives from the Societies in the governing unit.
1. OSN would like a person from this board to be official representative – we can appoint 1 or 2.
2.OSN is having elections
3. McClatchey wants to ask the SEE Board to interact with OSN.
4. He shares the OSN survey results.
Scott Herron, Janelle Baker, and Justin Nolan volunteered to be the OSN representatives from SoE.
Contributions Report (Marsha & Dana)
Vision is to make a little bit of revenue, but it is not expected to produce tremendous revenue.
Cissy sent review copies of the Amadeo volume to the book review editors of American Anthropologist, Current Anthropology, Human Ecology, Economic Botany. Ethnobiology Letters is also seeking a reviewer. We will also send out the Welch volume to book reviewers.
Steve says we can temporarily subsidize Contributions from BioOne royalties and membership dues. We can afford it now at about $3500/volume, but we need to grow our membership in order to make Contributions (and EBL) sustainable in the long run. We can afford that we can fund 1 per year.
Who’s going to replace Dana as a Contributions editor when she moves to being editor for JoE? Steve mentions Ian Davidson Hunt.
Ethnobiology Letters (EBL)Report (Cissy Fowler, James Welch, and/or Steve Wolverton)
EBL expanded our editorial board
EBL is indexed in the SciVerse Hub (part of Science Direct), Directory of Open Access Journals, Elsevier, and SCOPUS (they will put our listing online after their technical department irons out how to extract article information from our site).
EBL has a revised Style Guide
EBL is seeking Book Reviewers
Volume 3 thus far: 1 letter from the editor from James on ethics, 6 research communications, 1 perspective, 1 data methods & taxonomy, 8 book reviews, 1 interview
Volume 4 contents thus far: 4 research communications, 1 perspective from Steve, 5 book reviews, 1 letter from the editor on the way from Cissy on open access, more book reviews and research communications, etc. in the works
Ginny & Heather published book review table of contents in their spring/summer issue
We are going to getCrossRef membership so our content can have DOIs.
Mentors Speak (Alex McAlvay)
Alex shows us the website where he posts “Our Mentors Speak” podcasts. Scott suggests figuring out a way to use these in undergraduate curriculum. Alex suggests handing this information to OSN.
New Business
New Local Chapters (Marsha)
1. Society of Ethnobiology—Chicago Area. Contact Person: Kathryn Isabella Krischke
2. Society of Ethnobiology—Rwanda. Contact Person: Prudence NDABASANZE
James is taking over the Local Chapter responsibilities.
Awards Coordinator position (Denise)
Liz Olson is the new Awards Coordinator
Old Business
Dana says we ought to revisit the Board positions titles and job descriptions.
We spend a few minutes brainstorming for topics and editors of special issues in JoE building on the list we made in Victoria.
Adjourn
Justin adjourns the meeting.