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In the Editorial in the October 2006 MTN, there was an announcement that somehow I had missed. This related to “a recent decision by the International Sea Turtle Society to no longer publish extended abstracts from the Annual Sea turtle Symposium.” The editors noted that MTN could be a peer-reviewed substitute vehicle for the publication of these displaced reports and abstracts, and this would indeed be a valuable service. Nevertheless, the decision by the officers of the International Sea Turtle Society is a dismaying one, and I hope it may be reversed.

My enquiries have revealed that it is not a matter of failure to find an editor or compiler for this crucial task. Rather, the Society was disturbed that its annual Proceedings generated a rather large number of unreviewed “gray literature” reports that, it felt, should be published in the peer-reviewed literature. This somehow led to a vote to cease to publish the Proceedings altogether rather than to initiate a peer-review process for the papers submitted each year. I must take issue with this line of reasoning and its conclusion. The following points are salient:

i)The annual Proceedings of the sea turtle symposia, which were first published after the 7th symposium in 1987, now occupy over a foot of shelf space (even without the forthcoming 24th and 25th symposia) and include several thousand pages of detailed, important, and up-to-date information on all aspects of marine turtle science. Within our field, these volumes constitute the single most important information resource available. To voluntarily cease to publish this eminently successful information vehicle, and convert this living, growing series into an extinct, purely archival one would be a tragedy.

ii)While it is possible that the abstracts could be made available in electronic form, this would be an inadequate solution. Paper documents last for several centuries if properly stored; electronic and related media (punched cards, 5 inch floppies, 3 and a half inch diskettes, CD ROMs) change format or become obsolete constantly and are suitable only for relatively short-term preservation of information. (True, almost everything can be downloaded and printed but, with the price of ink-jets being what it is, how often do we do this, especially with really large documents?)

iii)I certainly raise no objection to the contributions for the annual Proceedings being peer-reviewed, but on the other hand I do not regard this as essential. A simple process of copy-editing by a compiler with knowledge of the subject could correct egregious error and also, where necessary, improve the quality and fluency of contributions by younger contributors. This process would also be valuable for those who lack access to a research library or whose primary language is not English.

iv)Full peer review is a slow process – the delays often reach two years or more -- whereas contributions to the annual Proceedings, especially those relating to deteriorating conservation situations, may have an urgency that would not be well served by such delays.

v)While publication of the presentations in MTN would be better than nothing, one suspects that only a small percentage of presented papers would be submitted for publication -- and if the percentage were higher than we anticipate, MTN would have to expand massively in size to accommodate the new influx. Up to now there has been a gently coercive sequence of events – “you may get a travel grant IF you agree to give a presentation, and if you give a presentation you HAVE TO send in an extended abstract” – that ensures that the Proceedings incorporate all of the presentations made at each symposium. Without a Proceedings, the vast majority of presentations would disappear like a will-o-the-wisp at the conclusion of the symposium week, and even if one attempted to take personal notes during presentations, the unavoidable practice of simultaneous sessions would prevent these being even remotely comprehensive.

vi)Peer review is a standard procedure for scientific journals, but we are far more than just scientists. The sea turtle community not only includes many dedicated amateurs as well as professionals; it also includes educators, conservationists, anthropologists, volunteer beach patrollers, government officials, and many others kinds of people. Not only can mandatory peer review requirements force presentations by such people into formats that are far from user-friendly, but also insistence upon the peer review process would stifle a great amount of interesting information that takes the form of field reports, ideas and insights, suggested new approaches, and raw data, rather than finished contributions of hypothesis driven science. Editors of peer-reviewed journals usually decline to publish such material. In the world of conservation, we need to get our data and information wherever it is to be found – interviews with fishermen, newspapers, magazines, local amateur newsletters, and other sources -- and to limit oneself to peer-reviewed published sources would be a massive handicap in this process. Note too that the informal herpetological literature – magazines like Reptiles, Marginata, Manouria, La Tortue – have a collective readership far larger than that of the professional herpetological journals (as well as publishing color photos of excellent quality). I note also that, in the rather wide range of professional biological conference that I have attended, peer-review is not the norm for published symposium proceedings or abstracts, and I would also observe that a newsletter with timely immediacy and attractive informality can lose both of these virtues when it morphs, by evolution or saltation, into a full-fledged scientific journal.

We need to be conscious of the needs both of young turtle people, and also of those in far-flung corners of the world where electronic information may not always be accessible or affordable, and where well-stocked scientific libraries may not exist. Such individuals need to build up personal libraries, and to start to do so at an early stage of their careers. To do this, they could not do better than to found their personal professional library upon an annually updated set of the Proceedings of the Annual Sea Turtle Symposia (and of course the two volumes of The Biology of Sea Turtles, and a complete set of MTN).