Yeah, it would have been interesting to comment on color variation across
the range - meristics are fine, but they don't always tell you the whole
story. In a perfect world, publishers would view color plates as being
beneficial for the society/journal, since high-quality color offers a lot of
advantages over b&w. However, these days you're lucky if you get a decent
reproduction of b&w figures - to save space they'll often shrink stuff down
to single column width. Copeia is usually OK about layout issues (there have
been exceptions!) but they ask $800/page for color plates.
The alternatives span the whole range of quality - from something like
Ichthyological Explorations of Freshwaters, which (at least used to) offers
free color, but charges an exorbitant fee for subscriptions, and a totally
outrageous fee for individual PDFs of articles (which, if you use a Mac, you
can't even read!)...to journals like Zootaxa, which seem to have their
priorities more in line with disseminating information rather than making
money.
Ahh, if only I had a couple million bucks to start up a real fish journal...
cheers,
Dave
-- St. Louis, MO>It's disappointing that they acknowledge the color slides of nuptial males >but do not include them in the article. >Lee Harper
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