“This shouldn’t take too long..” said this idiot last week. As part of the development of PaleorXiv, I’ve now built a comprehensive database of self-archiving policies for journals that publish Palaeontological research. The different columns represent different ‘stages’ of manuscript publication at which you can self-archive for free: Preprint: Version of a research paper prior to […]
The Paleobiology Database (PBDB) is a public, digital archive of the fossil record. Based on countless hours of work from more than 400 scientists around the world, it now contains more than 1.3 million individual fossil occurrences from around the world in a single database that is accessible by everyone. That’s pretty awesome. What’s even more […]
However ill-defined it may be, the peer-review process is still the gold standard that will continue to drive scholarly publication. (source) I’m not really sure what this means. It sounds like, ‘no-one knows what peer review really is, but we’ll maintain it at the core of research anyway’.. The same for.. While it is not […]
Earlier this year, we announced that we were going to build an Open Science MOOC! So far, more than 30 people from around the world have contributed their time and expertise. Thanks to their volunteer input, we have all managed to construct a proposed structure for this project, which can be found here. This is […]
We asked, you spoke, we listened. Last week, we announced that PaleorXiv was open for submissions. This led to a great deal of discussion, as expected, including some important concerns from members of the Palaeo community. We are thankful for all of the engagement so far from all of you. As I previously stated “I want […]
As I’m sure many of you are aware, this is not the only platform I write on. This is my own personal blog, which explains the perpetually low quality of the ramblings on here. I also write a lot for ScienceOpen, and also the PLOS Paleo Community. The former of these includes a lot of […]
Recently, Matt Shawkey*, an Associate Professor at the University of Gent, tweeted his opinions about citing preprints in formal research publications, stating that they should not be cited as equivalents to papers that had been peer reviewed. This led to a great deal of interesting discussion around the topic, but scattered all over various Twitter […]
A journalist approached me yesterday, and asked the question: “I’d like to know what you think about [journal/publisher] blacklists and whether you would pay for one?” I can’t reveal too much about the context just yet (see here), but it was regarding the release of a new ‘blacklist’ this month by a company called Cabell’s […]
tl,dr: We’re launching a preprint server for Paleontology, paleorXiv. Email me for submissions. Open Access is the future of publishing, one way or another. One way that different research communities are doing this is through preprints. These are research articles that are published online prior to the peer review process. The main rationale behind them […]
Oh god, not another post about Open Access. Yep, sorry, we’re going to keep talking about this stuff, because it’s something worth talking about. Recently, a new tool has come out, from the makers of OADOI and ImpactStory, that allows users to ‘jump the paywall’ and access research articles for free. It’s called Unpaywall, and […]