On the tragic fate of PeerJ
I said last time that Jisc’s feeble transition-to-open-access report was the first of two disapointing scholarly-communication announcements that week. The second was of course the announcement that...
View ArticleThe untold story of the Carnegie Diplodocus
My talk (Taylor et al. 2023) from this year’s SVPCA is up! The talks were not recorded live. But while it was fresh in my mind, I did a screencast of my own, and posted it on YouTube (CC By). For the...
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Please review our new paper on pneumatic variation in sauropod vertebrae!
We’ve noted many times over the years how inconsistent pneumatic features are in sauropod vertebra. Fossae and formamina vary between individuals of the same species, and along the spinal column, and...
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Matt’s Brachiosaurus in the wild
No, not his new Brachiosaurus humerus — his photograph of the Chicago Brachiosaurus mount, which he cut out and cleaned up seven years ago: This image has been on quite a journey. Since Matt published...
View ArticleTutorial 19g: Open Access definitions and clarifications, part 7: why your...
Matt and I are about to submit a paper. One of the journals we considered — and would have really liked in many respects — turned out to use the CC By-NC-SA license. This is a a very well-intentioned...
View ArticleThe Past, Present and Future of Jensen’s “Big Three” sauropods
My talk (Taylor and Wedel 2019) from this year’s SVPCA is up! The talks were not recorded live (at least, if they were, it’s a closely guarded secret). But while it was fresh in my mind, I did a...
View ArticleGreen open-access does NOT mean delayed or non-commercial
Open-access journalist Richard Poynder posted a really good interview today with the Gates Foundation’s Associate Officer of Knowledge & Research Services, Ashley Farley. I feel bad about picking...
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Tutorial 32: How to ensure that no-one will ever use your PhyloPic silhouettes
Step 1: Include the Share-Alike provision in your Creative Commons license, as in the mysteriously popular CC BY-SA and CC BY-NC-SA. Step 2: Listen to the crickets. You’re done. Congratulations! No-one...
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What exactly is the problem with Elsevier and co?
For a long while, there has been a lot of anger among researchers and academic librarians towards the legacy publishers: the big corporations that control access to most of the world’s scholarly...
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Copyright: promoting the Progress of Science and useful Arts by preventing...
In my recent preprint on the incompleteness and distortion of sauropod neck specimens, I discuss three well-known sauropod specimens in detail, and show that they are not as well known as we think they...
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Here comes VAMP, a new open-access journal of vertebrate palaeontology
Just launched: a new open-access journal of vertebrate paleontology, brought to you by the University of Alberta, Canada! It’s called VAMP (Vertebrate Anatomy Morphology Palaeontology), and it charges...
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My neck-cartilage angle paper is out!
Arriving as an early Christmas present, and coming in just a week before the end of what would otherwise have been a barren 2014, my paper Quantifying the effect of intervertebral cartilage on neutral...
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Sauropods’ neutral neck postures were really weird
Last night, I submitted a paper for publication — for the first time since April 2013. I’d almost forgotten what it felt like. But, because we’re living in the Shiny Digital Future, you don’t have to...
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CC-By documents cannot be re-enclosed if their publisher is acquired
Just a quick post today, to refute an incorrect idea about open access that has unfortunately been propagated from time to time. That is the idea that if (say) PLOS were acquired by a barrier-based...
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The CC By licence does not let people distort and misrepresent your work
I was skim-reading the Political Studies Association’s evidence submitted to RCUK’s review. I was struck by one part that perpetuates a common but completely unfounded misapprehension: There is little...
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Come on, AAAS. You can do better than this.
A couple of weeks ago, more than hundred scientists sent an open letter to the AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science) about their new open-access journal Science Advances, which is...
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Open Letter to the AAAS about Science Advances
Dear AAAS, This is an open letter concerning the recent launch of the new open access journal, Science Advances. In addition to the welcome diversification in journal choices for authors looking for...
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Guest Post: Jan Velterop on open-access licences
[Introduction from Mike. I'm on the OKFN's open-access mailing list, where we're currently embroiled in a rather tedious reiteration of the debate about the merits of the various open-access licences....
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The Paleontological Society’s new open access options
My thanks to Steve Wang for pointing out that The Paleontological Society (in the USA, not to be confused the UK’s Palaeontological Association) has a new open access policy. The highlights are: The...
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Can repositories solve the access problem?
The progressive RCUK policy on open access has recently come under fire, particularly from humanities scholars, for favouring Gold OA over Green. For various reasons — and I won’t, for now, go into the...
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