About the Editor

John Measey is Associate Professor of Biological Sciences at Stellenbosch University. He has authored or co-authored more than 200 peer reviewed scientific papers and book chapters, and six books. He has been the Editor-in-Chief of an ISI journal for 9 years, and currently serves as Associate Editor for 4 other journals. He has graduated more than 20 postgraduate students, and his blog on writing and publishing in biological sciences is read by thousands globally. British born and educated, he lives and works in the beautiful Western Cape, South Africa.

Do you have something to contribute?

This book is written in bookdown (Xie, 2016b) specifically to make it a ‘live project’ that will be open to anyone who wants to contribute, improve, or use as the basis for your own book. The easiest way for readers to contribute their own chapters as stories to to contact me (john@measey.com), or you can interact with the content directly through a GitHub pull request. At the repository for this book, you will find Rmd files for each chapter, and as a GitHub user, you can simply edit the Rmd file and submit the changes. If I am happy with the changes proposed, I will merge your content with that of the book and add your name to the Acknowledgements.

One of the amazing potentials for bookdown books is that all the files for this book are hosted in a repository on Github. You have the opportunity to fork this repository and write your own version for a different discipline, a different language or for a different region of the world. It is also my hope that this book can grow to become a community of practice for Early Career Researchers in Biological Sciences and other disciplines. This guide needs to be a ‘living document’, and anyone who wants to provide feedback or contribute new sections is more than welcome. Please feel free to open an issue, or make a Pull Request if you spot a typo.

References

Xie Y. 2016b. Bookdown: Authoring books and technical documents with R markdown. CRC Press.