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.

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.

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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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.

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Long time readers may remember the stupid contortions I had to go through in order to avoid giving the Geological Society copyright in my 2010 paper about the history of sauropod research, and how the Geol. Soc. nevertheless included a fraudulent claim of copyright ownership in the published version. The way I left it back in 2010, my wife, Fiona, was the copyright holder.

As predicted, the popular and useful Social Sciences repository SSRN, having been acquired by Elsevier, is now being destroyed.

A few months ago I got an email from Nathan Myers, who asked me: In many ways, I’m the wrong person to ask: I’ve never started a journal, OA or otherwise, nor even served on an editorial board. But, hey, I’m not one to let something like that stop me. So here’s what I told Nathan. I’m sure I missed a lot of important possibilities: please point them out in this comments. I’ll try to keep this post updated as the landscape changes.

Back in mid-April, when I (Mike) was at the OSI2016 conference, I was involved in the “Moral Dimensions of Open” group. (It was in preparation for this that wrote the Moral Dimensions series of posts here on SV-POW!.) Like all the other groups, ours was tasked with making a presentation to the plenary session, taking questions and feedback, and presenting a version 2 on the final day. Here’s the title page that I contributed.

In discussions of open access, it’s pretty common for us biologists to suffer from arXiv envy: the sense that mathematicians and physicists have the access problem solved, because they all put their work on arXiv. That’s a widespread idea, which is why we see tweets like this one, which floated past in my stream today: Turns out, not so much.