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Open AccessStinkin' LordsStinkin' PublishersEarth and related Environmental Sciences
Published

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, where before it had none.

Hybrid Open AccessStinkin' PublishersEarth and related Environmental Sciences
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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 term “hybrid open access” refers to a subscription journal in which individual articles can optionally be made open access on payment of a fee — for the Big Four publishers, typically (though not always) in the

Open AccessEarth and related Environmental Sciences
Published

Looking again at Clay Shirky’s “How we will read” interview, I re-read these now classic words: Here’s what Shirky could have gone on to say, but didn’t. An unfortunate side-effect of this shift is that we still have these big, lumbering publishing corporations clogging up the landscape, with nothing constructive to do . And the reason that’s a problem rather than merely a waste, is that whereas it used to take special

Open AccessPeerJEarth and related Environmental Sciences
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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 12 June.

LegislationOpen AccessStinkin' PublishersEarth and related Environmental Sciences
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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 the ongoing FASTR legislation.

ASPMass EstimatesMathPneumaticityEarth and related Environmental Sciences
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Author Matt Wedel

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.

Open AccessPaleontologists Behaving BadlyEarth and related Environmental Sciences
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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: (Apart from anything else, the waiving of APCs pretty clearly indicates that this is not a scam journal.) I replied: Let’s hope they go with it. I’d love them to build another low-cost, high-quality, journal in the palaeontology OA space, to compete with

HummingbirdMass EstimatesMathSkeletal ReconstructionsStinkin' TheropodsEarth and related Environmental Sciences
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Author Matt Wedel

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 densities I calculated from those values.* * House sparrow, Passer domesticus , n = 16,

100% Totally RealCamarasaursElephantOUMNHRibsEarth and related Environmental Sciences
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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.

Stinkin' HeadsStinkin' MammalsStinkin' TheropodsEarth and related Environmental Sciences
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Author Matt Wedel

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