I guess pretty much all researchers must suffer from Imposter Syndrome every now and then — the sense of not really belonging, not knowing enough, not getting enough done to justify our position.
Back in 2010, SVPCA was held in Cambridge. (It was the year that I gave the “why giraffes have short necks” talk [abstract, slides].) While we were there, I took a lot of photos in the excellent Cambridge University Museum of Zoology, which was just across the courtyard from the lecture theatre where the scientific sessions were held.
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It was Enrique Jardiel Poncela who said that “When something can be read without effort, great effort has gone into its writing”. I would have guessed at someone like Mark Twain, or maybe G. K. Chesterton, but there you go. A couple of months ago, I sent an eight-page submission to the House of Commons BIS Committee’s inquiry into the Goverment’s Open Access policy.
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I think the most painful part of the Elsevier-eats-Mendeley deal has been watching good people acting as apologists for Elsevier and then feeling hurt when people don’t accept their protestations. You can see a good example (but far from the only one) in the comments to Danah Boyd’s post on her #mendelete. I don’t know what Elsevier have been feeding their new minions, but whatever it is it seems to be working.
I was really excited to get an invitation to the evolution-or-revolution debate in Oxford, partly for historical reasons. I thought the Oxford Union was where C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien and their friends held various debates. Sadly, it turns out I was mistaken, and it was merely the stomping ground for a bunch of lame politicians.
I mentioned earlier that I was in Oxford yesterday — mostly to participate in the debate at the Oxford Union, “Evolution or Revolution in Science Communication?” I was on the revolution side, with Jason Hoyt (PeerJ), Amelia Andersdotter (Swedish Pirate Party MEP) and Paul Wicks (Patientslikeme). The “evolution” side was represented by David Tempest (Elsevier), Graham Taylor (ex Publishers’ Association), Jason Wilde (Nature) and — rather
Yesterday I was in Oxford for the Rigour and Openness in 21st Century Science conference (web-site here, tweets here though they also include newer ones from Day 2 which is happening as I write this). There was a lot to enjoy about the day, including meeting Cameron Neylon of PLOS and Jason Hoyt of PeerJ, both for the first time.
Is there any justification for any of these practices other than tradition? Choosing titles that deliberately omit new taxon names. Slicing the manuscript to fit an arbitrary length limit. Squeezing the narrative into a fixed set of sections (Introduction, Methods, Results, Conclusion). Discarding or combining illustrations to avoid exceding an arbitrary count. Flattening illustrations to monochrome.
This is a caudal vertebra from the middle of the tail of an ostrich, LACM Bj342: {.aligncenter .size-full .wp-image-8259 loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“8259” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2013/04/10/crazy-pneumatic-ostrich-caudal/ostrich-caudal-composite-2/” orig-file=“https://svpow.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/ostrich-caudal-composite1.jpeg” orig-size=“4338,3469” comments-opened=“1”