Edward F. Connor, Michael D. Collins, and Daniel Simberloff. 2013. "The Chequered History of Checkerboard Distributions." Ecology. http://dx.doi.org/10.1890/12-1471.1.One of the most vociferous recent debates in community ecology started in the 1970s between Jared Diamond and Dan Simberloff (and colleagues) regarding whether 'checkerboard patterns' of bird distributions provided evidence for interspecific competition.

For many many years I have been raising a key questions in relation to open access publishing - how can we measure how open someone's publications are.  Ideally we would have a way of measuring this in some sort of index.  A few years ago I looked around and asked around and did not find anything out there of obvious direct relevance to what I wanted so I started mapping out ways to do this.

When Aaron Swartz died I started drafting some ideas on this topic.

As I have posted about before - I am involved in the UC Davis ADVANCE project funded by NSF.  From the project website:

UC Davis ADVANCE is a newly funded Institutional Transformation grant that began in September of 2012. Our program is supported by the National Science Foundation’s ADVANCE Program which aims to increase the participation and advancement of women in academic science and engineering careers. 
My role in this project is as a member (and now Co-Chair) of one of the "Policies and Practices Review Initiative" Committee.

I noticed some really weird stuff coming up in automated Google Scholar searches.

In 2011 I wrote a short post about DeepDyve, a service where you could rent access to an article. DeepDyve has launched a "5-Minute Freemium" service where you can view an article online for 5 minutes, for free. You have to log in, either with DeepDyve or using Facebook, but no actual money changes hands.