It’s baffled me for years that there is no open graph of scholarly citations — a set of machine-readable statements that (for example) Taylor et al. 2009 cites Stevens and Parrish 1999, which cites Alexander 1985 and Hatcher 1901.

This is very belated, but back in the summer of 2014 I was approached to write a bunch of sections — all of them to do with dinosaurs, naturally — in the book Evolution: The Whole Story . I did seven group overviews (Dinosauria overview, prosauropods, sauropods, stegosaurs, ankylosaurs, marginocephalians, and hadrosaurs), having managed to hand the theropod work over to Darren.

The previous post (Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse) has been a surprise hit, and is now by far the most-read post in this blog’s nearly-ten-year history. It evidently struck a chord with a lot of people, and I’ve been surprised — amazed, really — at how nearly unanimously people have agreed with it, both in the comments here and on Twitter.

I’ve been on Twitter since April 2011 — nearly six years. A few weeks ago, for the first time, something I tweeted broke the thousand-retweets barrier. And I am really unhappy about it. For two reasons.

It’s been pretty quiet around here, huh? Why? It’s all just too awful to write about sauropod vertebrae at the moment. Trump. Brexit. Perverse incentives in academia. I can’t even get up enough enthusiasm to do the revisions for my own accepted-with-revisions manuscripts, let along write blog-posts. Oh, western civilisation. And you were doing so well.

I got an email this morning from Jim Kirkland, announcing: And by the time I read that message, the sixth talk had appeared! Each talk is 20-25 minutes long, so there’s a good two and a quarter hours of solid but accessible science here, freely available to anyone who wants to watch them.

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It’s now been widely discussed that Jeffrey Beall’s list of predatory and questionable open-access publishers — Beall’s List for short — has suddenly and abruptly gone away. No-one really knows why, but there are rumblings that he has been hit with a legal threat that he doesn’t want to defend. To get this out of the way: it’s always a bad thing when legal threats make information quietly disappear;

Back in February last year, I had the privilege of giving one of the talks in the University of Manchester’s PGCert course “Open Knowledge in Higher Education”. I took the subject “Should science always be open?” My plan was to give an extended version of a talk I’d given previously at ESOF 2014.

Welcome to 2017! Let’s start the year with a cautionary tale. I’ll leap straight to the moral, then give an example: it’s very easy to reach the wrong conclusion about fossils from photos. That’s because no single photo can give an accurate impression of distortion. For that, you need at least a much bigger selection of photos; or better still, a 3d model; or of course best of all, the fossil itself.

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