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.

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.

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.

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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

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,

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.

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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.

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 as necessary, send in the revised version, and the editor accepts it. Congratulations!

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 to continuing to deny citizens access to the research they funded for up to 24 months after publication.