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.

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: After a bit more discussion, I emailed the arXiv administrators and promised to report back when I heard from them. And I did hear back, but failed to report it because Life happened.

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 was reading an article recently about crowd-funded startups. One of the featured startups aims to make divorce more painless.

From The Dinosaur Heresies. Part 1.

My eye was caught by this tweet: https://twitter.com/gvwilson/status/330747014340018177 And I found myself wondering how often this scenario plays out around the world every day. How many hundreds, or thousands, or millions of people would look at some research if it were zero-cost to do so? How many thousands of valuable conversations never happen because you can’t idly browse at $15 a pop?

“The benefit of published work is that if they have passed the muster of peer review future researchers can have faith in the results”, writes a commenter at The Economist . Such statements are commonplace. I couldn’t disagree more. Nothing is more fatal to the scientific endeavour than having “faith” in a previously published result — as the string of failed replications in oncology and in social psychology is showing.