Blog Profile / Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week

Funders have all the power in OA negotiations. So why aren’t they using it?

A few days ago I explained why I don’t think “hybrid OA” is a legitimate path to the full-open-access world we all want. The TL;DR is first that it’s offered at stupidly high prices, and secondly that it’s completely impossible to detect or prevent double-dipping because journal subscriptions are the most opaquely priced good in […]

Why did RCUK betray us to barrier-based publishers?

I know I’ve written about this before, but Richard Poynder’s new post reminds me that we Brits really do need to be up in arms over the abject behaviour of our supposed representatives, the research councils (RCUK). As a direct result of this policy, the publisher Emerald has now introduced 24-month embargoes on RCUK-funded papers, […]

Some problems with hybrid open access

Here’s what Science Europe, an association of European research and funding organisations, said in their recent position statement Principles on the Transition to Open Access to Research Publications: The Science Europe member organisations [...]Show More Summary

Publishing is a button: what Clay Shirky didn’t say

Looking again at Clay Shirky’s “How we will read” interview, I re-read these now classic words: Publishing is not evolving. Publishing is going away. Because the word “publishing” means a cadre of professionals who are taking on the incredible difficulty and complexity and expense of making something public. That’s not a job anymore. That’s a […]

PeerJ is a year old tomorrow!

Here’s a thing … Looks like the first ever mention of PeerJ on this blog was a year and nine days ago. All we said in that first post was “… the proliferation of other publishing experiments such as F1000 Research and PeerJ …” with no further comment. That was just before the formal launch of PeerJ, which was on […]

Why open access is not socialism

On 29th May, I gave a frankly evangelistic talk on open access at UCL’s “Future Univercities” seminar. I was the first of three speakers on the panel. When Johnny Golding got up to speak second, she began by saying something like “that was as passionate a defence of socialism as I’ve ever heard”. It got […]

All joined with a single voice to praise CHORUS, thus: “meh.”

Introduction I’m sure we all remember the White House OSTP’s recent memo on open access — a huge step forward that extends an NIH-like Green OA policy to all US federally funded research. It was a triumph for common sense, an explicit repudiation of the mindset behind the Research Works Act, and an affirmation for […]

Tutorial 24: variables for tubular bones, ASP, MSP, and bone density

This post pulls together information on basic parameters of tubular bones from Currey & Alexander (1985), on ASP from Wedel (2005), and on calculating the densities of bones from Wedel (2009: Appendix). It’s all stuff we’ve covered at one point or another, I just wanted to have it all in one convenient place. Definitions: R […]

Dear legitimate open-access publishers: stop spamming!

I just got this message from Rana Ashour of Paleontology Journal, an open-access journal published by Hindawi, who are generally felt to be a perfectly legitimate publisher: Dear Dr. Taylor, I am writing to invite you to submit an article to Paleontology Journal which is a peer-reviewed open access journal for original research articles as well […]

How dense are birds? Some new (old) data. Also, hummingbirds and ketchup.

I recently reread Dubach (1981), ”Quantitative analysis of the respiratory system of the house sparrow, budgerigar and violet-eared hummingbird”, and realized that she reported both body masses and volumes in her Table 1. For each of the three species, here are the sample sizes, mean total body masses, and mean total body volumes, along with mean […]

How fat is an elephant?

We jumped the gun a bit in asking How fat was Camarasaurus? a couple of years ago, or indeed How fat was Brontosaurus? last year. As always, we should have started with extant taxa, to get a sense of how to relate bones to live animals — as we did with neck posture. So here we go. I […]

Well, I guess that’s that

Dear PLOS ONE: time to sort out your multiple review tracks

Here at SV-POW!, we are an equal-opportunity criticiser of publishers: Springer, PLOS, Elsevier, the Royal Society, Nature, we don’t care. We call problems as we see them, where we see them. Here is one that has lingered for far too long. PLOS ONE’s journal information page says: Too often a journal’s decision to publish a paper […]

Who owns a peer-reviewed, revised, accepted manuscript? YOU DO!

Suppose that, for some good and sane reason, you need to place a paper in a paywalled journal. You do some research. You write a paper and prepare illustrations. You send it off to a journal, and a volunteer editor sends it out to volunteer peer-reviewers. You handle the reviews, revise your manuscript, write rebuttals […]

The SV-POW! open-access decision tree

As part of the progressive erosion of RCUK’s initially excellent open-access policy, barrier-based publishers somehow got them to accept their “open-access decision tree“, which you can now find on page 7 of the toothless current version of the policy. The purpose of this manoeuvre by the Publishers Association is to lend an air of legitimacy […]

Biology and palaeontology papers in arXiv

Back in February last year, in a comment section, we got to discussing arXiv, the free-to-use open-access preprint repository that pretty much every physicist, mathematician and astonomer deposits their papers in. At the time, I wrote: The immediate answer is that arXiv doesn’t accept palaeontology papers — the closest it comes is “computational biology”. After […]

Of course the serials crisis is not over, what the heck are you talking about?

Jeffrey Beall’s fatuous pronouncement that The Serials Crisis is Over has been nagging away at me since it was posted yesterday. I admit my first reaction was that it was some kind of parody or satire, but Beall’s subsequent comments seem to rule out that charitable interpretation. I’m pleased to see that the comments on that [...]

Of divorce lawyers and scholarly publishers

I was reading an article recently about crowd-funded startups. One of the featured startups aims to make divorce more painless. That started me thinking about divorce lawyers. Their web-sites say they will “guide you as painlessly as possible through the jungle of legal rules and practices” and “have not only your best interests in mind, but also [...]

Oblivious sauropods being eaten, part 2: Bakker’s snoozing brontosaur

From The Dinosaur Heresies. Part 1.

The opportunity cost of paywalled research

My eye was caught by this tweet: I'd like to read papers from #chi2013. But I won't $15 each to do so. So there's a bunch of conversations that will never happen…— Greg Wilson (@gvwilson) May 04, 2013 And I found myself wondering how often this scenario plays out around the world every day. How [...]