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Help us, we're poor

Straight to it. Myself and Bastian Greshake have been invited to OpenCon this year. Sadly though, we were not awarded travel grants. Super sadly, we’re both poor too. As such, we’ve launched a crowdfunding campaign on IndieGogo to help us get to Washington DC. All the details are on the page, including a video with […]

Reddit Science and the impact factor of doom

So Reddit is pretty awesome for science communication, in my experience. It’s an enormous network of potential audiences to reach with new research, and things like Reddit AMA’s allow pretty cool engagement directly with research and researchers. Some researchers have had pretty poor experiences with Reddit, as we might expect. After all, Reddit is just […]

The first crocodile ancestors | PLOS Paleo Community

Did you know that birds and crocodiles are practically cousins? Around 230 million years ago, you wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference between the two different lineages. This is because birds and crocodilians (which includes alligators, caiman, and gharials) are part of a much larger group called Archosauria, or ruling lizards, which means they […]

Birds of a fibula | PLOS Paleo Community

Over the last 20 years, there has grown insurmountable evidence that birds are the direct modern descendants of dinosaurs. Eagles are dinosaurs. Pigeons are dinosaurs, annoyingly. Even penguins are weird, swimming dinosaurs. The data supporting this comes from a whole range of scientific domains, from the discovery of thousands of feathered dinosaurs in the fossil record to chemical […]

Why I will never publish with Wiley again

So anyone who knows me knows that I’m not the hugest fan of large, commercial publishers, and for a variety of reasons. I want to tell you of a recent experience though with Wiley, one of the most prominent (profiteering) research publishers out there. This experience, in combination with numerous other factors, was so infuriating, that […]

A challenge to publishers to justify embargo periods

Embargo periods on scientific research are now fairly commonplace. They are sanctions imposed by publishers on different versions of a research manuscript, often termed the author-accepted manuscript (AAM) or post-print,  in order to delay public release of those versions. Typically at this stage, the publishers themselves have had little or no input to the process besides […]