Folks — important news on Research Councils UK’s new draft open access policy. A while back I wrote to RCUK asking when the deadline for submissions is, and I did eventually hear back from Jane Wakefield, Press and Communications Manager. The deadline is Tuesday 10th April — not today, as I’d originally thought thanks to a game of Chinese whispers.
The discussion over the new paper by Woodruff and Fowler (2012)–see this post and the unusually energetic comment thread that follows–made me want to go back to the literature and see what was known or could be inferred about neural spine bifurcation in the Morrison sauropods before the recent paper was published.
No. No, they did not. Despite what this clown had to say on this morning’s BBC Radio 4 Today Programme. (That’s occasional SV-POW! reader/commenter Paul Barrett in the back half of that audio clip, being amazingly restrained.) Turns out that the published work this interview is based on is this one in Laboratory News .
The story so far … Nature Precedings is, or was, a preprint server, somewhat in the spirit of an arXiv for biology. It describes, or described, itself as “a permanent, citable archive for pre-publication research and preliminary findings”. This is a very useful thing.
Tonight, I sent my submission to Research Councils UK in response to their call for comments on the recently issued docment RCUK Proposed Policy on Access to Research Outputs . I am now posting my comments publicly.
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Just a quick note that I’m the interview subject in the P.S.I.O.N podcast this week. P.S.I.O.N is the Paediatric Surgery International Online Network — an area far outside my expertise, but of course what we talked about was open access rather than paediatric surgery.
By one of those happy coincidences that you sometimes get, today saw the publication of not one but two dinosaur ontogeny papers: this morning I was sent a copy of Woodruff and Fowler (2012) on ontogenetic changes in the bifid spines of diplodocoids, and tonight I was alerted to Werning (2012) on Tenontosaurus growth trajectories based on osteohistology. It’s interesting to compare them.
A few weeks ago, I noted that the new journal Biology Open , which had just published its very first issue, had made the unfortunate choice to use the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (CC BY-NC-SA) license.
My new piece is now up the LSE Impact Blog — in which I recognise that it’s a mistake to think of Elsevier and other for-profit barrier-based publishers as evil. The money quote: For the rest, read the article: Visibility is currency in academia but it is scarcity in publishing. The push for open access shows that academic publishers can’t serve two masters. By the way, if you read it, do leave a comment;
A short one, because I’ve been commenting on other people’s blogs a lot recently ( Scholarly Kitchen , Open and Shut , The Scientist ) and it infuriates me how hard it is get a good back-and-forth discussion going in those venues. The contrast of course is with SV-POW!