Transcript

Claire Moulton: To explore the author benefits of Open Access publishing through our Read & Publish agreements, I’m meeting with some of our authors to hear more.

Claire Moulton: I’m here with corresponding author, Rickesh Patel who is currently a postdoc at Lund University in Sweden.

Claire Moulton: With his co-authors, he recently published an article in Journal of Experimental Biology showing that mantis shrimp can identify an object by its shape rather than its colour.

Claire Moulton: Ricky, what does it mean for you as an author to be able to publish Open Access through our Read & Publish initiative?

Rickesh Patel: It actually now means quite a bit.

Rickesh Patel: So during my fairly short career as a scientist I’ve been really privileged to be part of universities and institutions that have had subscriptions to The Company of Biologists and JEB.

Rickesh Patel: So it’s never really been a problem for me personally to be able to access these papers.

Rickesh Patel: However, I can imagine there are quite a few individuals that might be interested in the science, like science communicators or people that might be writing about science on their blog spots or other things like that that may not be part of institutions that allow them free access to these articles.

Rickesh Patel: And that could be a struggle for them.

Rickesh Patel: So it’s really nice to know that my article which is Open Access will be freely available to anyone that wants that information and can access it.

Claire Moulton: How did you experience the Read & Publish workflow?

Claire Moulton: Was it simple to use?

Claire Moulton: Did you have to fill in paperwork?

Rickesh Patel: It was extremely simple.

Rickesh Patel: So I did my work in my previous institution but now I’m a postdoc at Lund University and I emailed JEB explaining my situation and they told me it was fine.

Rickesh Patel: So I went ahead and did the the Read & Publish agreement and it was very simple.

Rickesh Patel: There’s very little paperwork and it really wasn’t any more complicated than normally publishing.

Claire Moulton: Can you tell us a little bit about the story behind your paper?

Rickesh Patel: Sure. So mantis shrimp are marine crustaceans which have become recently quite popular due to their really wonderful eyes they have.

Rickesh Patel: So they have these two fairly large eyes on their heads that can move independently from one another but they’re most famous for the really striking photoreceptor diversity that they have in the retinas.

Rickesh Patel: And they have all sorts of spectral channels that go from the deep UV all the way to the far red.

Rickesh Patel: So I also found recently with my co-author that mantis shrimp will use landmarks during navigation.

Rickesh Patel: So while running those experiments, when I started noticing that they would actually use landmarks when navigating,

Rickesh Patel: it really got me thinking about what mantis shrimp used when they recognise an object.

Rickesh Patel: What visual information is salient to a mantis shrimp when it sees an object and recognises it.

Rickesh Patel: So I developed an experiment in which mantis shrimp were trained to [recognise] an object of a specific colour and shape.

Rickesh Patel: So my co-authors and I found that mantis shrimp in our experiment were able to recognise the object’s shape but was not able to recognise the object’s colour.

Rickesh Patel: And during an experiment in which we conflicted the cues where we presented two objects and one had the correct shape and one had the correct colour, mantis shrimp would more often than not choose the object of the correct shape over the correct colour.

Rickesh Patel: So in total, we found that in our experiment mantis shrimp were able to identify the object shape but was not able to identify the object’s colour and therefore the shape seem to be more important.

Claire Moulton: So I noticed that you’re also an illustrator and is that mainly scientific images?

Rickesh Patel: So as a bachelor’s student I actually had a dual degree in biology and in visual art.

Rickesh Patel: And that was for a scientific illustration.

Rickesh Patel: So I’ve done that a fair bit, but I also do enjoy other visual arts, like drawing and painting, but yes, I do scientific illustrations quite a bit.

Claire Moulton: Okay. Thank you so much for giving your time today because it really does mean a lot to us to be able to feature authors who have been successful publishing with the journals and being able to publish Open Access through our Read & Publish agreements.

Claire Moulton: Thank you very much.

Rickesh Patel: It’s my pleasure. Thanks.

Claire Moulton: Thank you.