The problem I find myself reading a lot recently about “portable peer-review” — posts like Take me as I am, and my paper as it is? by scicurious at Neurotic Physiology , which excellently diagnoses a terrible, wasteful problem in scientific publishing : What a waste! What a drag on the progress of science! What a ridiculous situation we’re got ourselves into, with our chasing-after-prestigious-journals games.

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We’ve seen a lot of arguments recently about the RCUK open-access policy and the length of embargoes that it allows on Green OA articles under various circumstances. When is it reasonable to insist on six months? When might publishers have cause to want to stretch it out to 24 months? And so on. The truth here is terribly simple.

Whenever I write a complicated document, such as my submission to the Select Committee on open access, I get Matt to do an editing pass before I finalise it. That’s always worthwhile, but I have to be careful not to just blindly hit the Accept All Changes button.

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For a paper that I and Matt are preparing, we needed to measure the centrum length of a bunch of turkey cervicals. That turns out to be harder than you’d think, because of the curious negative curvature of the articular surfaces.

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It turns out that G. K. Chesterton conveniently summarised all of my advice on slide preparation more than a century ago: (Inscribed in the front of a child’s picture book, around 1906.)

Matt and I made a sacred pact not to even think about any new work until we’d got our due-by-the-end-of-March papers done. But then we got chatting, and accidentally started three new projects. Possibly four. And that’s just today. *headdesk* Who knows how many of them will ever see the light of day? Realistically, we are surely going to have to kill some of them if we’re ever going to get anything finished.

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