I’ve recently written about my increasing disillusionment with the traditional pre-publication peer-review process [post 1, post 2, post 3]. By coincidence, it was in between writing the second and third in that series of posts that I had another negative peer-review experience — this time from the other side of the fence — which has left me even more ambivalent about the way we do things.

Here’s a blast from the past: {.size-full .wp-image-6889 .aligncenter loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“6889” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2012/10/02/2000ads-bizarre-fin-handed-compsognathus/2000ad-prog-8-back-cover-flesh-card-game-compsognathus/” orig-file=“https://svpow.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/2000ad-prog-8-back-cover-flesh-card-game-compsognathus.jpeg” orig-size=“521,344” comments-opened=“1”

In a third “open letter to the mathematics community”, Elsevier have announced that, for “the primary mathematics journals”, they now offer free access to all articles over four years old. The details page shows that 53 journals are involved.

Having taken time to discuss at length why we posted our neck-anatomy paper on arXiv, let’s now return to the actual content of the paper.

Over on Facebook, where Darren posted a note about our new paper, most of the discussion has not been about its content but about where it was published. We’re not too surprised by that, even though we’d love to be talking about the science. We did choose arXiv with our eyes open, knowing that there’s no tradition of palaeontology being published there, and wanting to start a new tradition of palaeontology being routinely published there.

Today sees the publication, on arXiv (more on that choice in a separate post), of Mike and Matt’s new paper on sauropod neck anatomy. In this paper, we try to figure out why it is that sauropods evolved necks six times longer than that of the world-record giraffe — as shown in Figure 3 from the paper (with a small version of Figure 1 included as a cameo to the same scale): {.size-full .wp-image-6806

Another extraordinary specimen from the wonderful Oxford University Museum of Natural History: the skeleton of a goliath frog Conraua goliath , the largest extant anuran, which comfortably exceeds 30 cm and 3 kg in life: {.aligncenter .size-full .wp-image-6785 loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“6785”

In a comment on the previous post, Emily Willoughby links to an excellent post on her own blog that discusses the “necks lie” problem in herons.

Back when we were at Cambridge for the 2010 SVPCA, we saw taxidermied and skeletonised hoatzins, and were struck that the cervical skeleton was so very much longer than the neck as it appears in life — because necks lie.

Friday evening I was in a pub with Mike, Darren, John Conway, and Emma Lawlor. We were killing time waiting for the Pink Giraffe Chinese restaurant down the street to open. I was chatting with John about “All Todays”, his speculative presentation with Cevdet Kosemen (a.k.a. Nemo Ramjet) on how future sentients might reconstruct Holocene animals if they were known only from fossils.

Jarosław Stolarski drew my attention to an article on the Nature News blog by Jeffrey Beall: Predatory publishers are corrupting open access . I’d not seen that specific article, but the issue of “predatory open access publishers” is well known — in fact, Beall himself maintains an excellent list of such publishers and a helpful set of criteria for recognising them.