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Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week

SV-POW! ... All sauropod vertebrae, except when we're talking about Open Access. ISSN 3033-3695
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Prologue Back when I started writing about issues in scholarly publishing, I would sometimes write about the distinction between for-profit (bad) and non-profit (good) publishers. While I still recognise this as an issue, thinking it through over the last few years has made it clear that this distinction is largely orthogonal to the one that really matters — which is between open and non-open publishers.

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Author Matt Wedel

Judgmental readers will recall that I have dabbled in mammal skulls, thanks to the corrupting influence of my friend and colleague, Brian Kraatz. At the end of my last post on this sordid topic, I mentioned that Brian and Emma Sherratt were working on a version 2.0 based in 3D morphometrics.

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I have before me the reviews for a submission of mine, and the handling editor has provided an additional stipulation: In other words, the first time I mention Diplodocus , I should say “ Diplodocus Marsh 1878″; and I should add the corresponding reference to my bibliography.

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Suppose that I and Matt were right in our SVPCA talk this year, and the “ Supersaurus ” cervical BYU 9024 really is the C9 of a gigantic Barosaurus . As we noted in our abstract, its total length of 1370 mm is exactly twice that of the C9 in AMNH 6341, which suggests its neck was twice as long over all — not 8.5 m but 17 m. How horrifying is that?

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Long-time SV-POW! readers will remember that three years ago, full of enthusiasm after speaking about Barosaurus at the Edinburgh SVPCA, Matt and I got that talk written up in double-quick time and had it published as a PeerJ Preprint in less than three weeks. Very quickly, the preprint attracted substantive, helpful reviews: three within the first 24 hours, and several more in the next few days.

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It’s been interesting seeing the response to my comment on the ICZN petition to establish Diplodocus carnegii as the replacement type species of the genus Diplodocus . In particular, Mickey Mortimer’s opposition to the petition seems to be based primarily on this argument: I find this unconvincing, on the basis that the ICZN was never designed with dinosaurs in mind in the first place.

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If you keep an eye on the wacky world of zoological nomenclature, you’ll know that earlier this year Emanuel Tschopp and Octávio Mateus published a petition to the International Commission on Zoological Nomemclature, asking them to establish Diplodocus carnegii , represented by the ubiquitous and nearly complete skeleton CM 84, as the type species of Diplodocus . That is because Marsh’s (1878) type species, YPM 1920, is a pair

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Author Matt Wedel

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As explained in careful detail over at Stupid Patent of the Month, Elsevier has applied for, and been granted, a patent for online peer-review. The special sauce that persuaded the US Patent Office that this is a new invention is cascading peer review — an idea so obvious and so well-established that even The Scholarly Kitchen was writing about it as a commonplace in 2010.

Published
Author Matt Wedel

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