Kicking off 2018 with paleorXiv
Happy New Year from the paleorXiv team! We hope you all had a relaxing festive season, whatever you got up to. We thought it would be nice to start 2018 by updating you all on what we’ve been up to at paleorXiv, and see what the future has in store for us all.
New GitHub resources
Our resources page is hosted entirely on GitHub, which means that anyone is allowed to contribute to, or comment on, any aspect of it they wish. Some of the most important bits here include:
- Our code of conduct, diversity statement, and moderation policy (see here for some details on the latter).
- Our submission guidelines for authors.
- A nice poster you can print out and share with your colleagues.
- A slidedeck containing more information and FAQs about paleorXiv and preprints.
Publication milestone
Before the end of 2017, you all published 50 articles on paleorXiv, and now we are at 55 in total! How amazing is that, considering we only launched in late August. That’s almost one every two days, which is an amazing achievement from the Palaeontology community, considering what it represents: authors choosing to make their work freely available at no cost to themselves.
I tried uploading a postprint of a recent paywalled paper to @paleorxiv b/c @Protohedgehog has been on about how easy it is. Happy to say it was super easy & I will upload many more. Make all your papers open access for free- check it out: https://t.co/FQhc8CBGvx https://t.co/Uc1PQGaHGK
— David Evans (@DavidEvans_ROM) January 3, 2018
New webpage URL
This might not seem like that big a deal, but helps to certainly add a more professional touch to the platform. The new URL is: https://paleorxiv.org/ – and the old website points directly to this now. Time to update your bookmarks!
New submission template
This one is particularly neat. The folks at EngrXiv made their Latex submission template available on GitHub, so it was simple for us to fork and modify it for paleorXiv. We’ve now submitted this to the Overleaf gallery, and it should be ready as a submission template within a week! You can find an example of this here for now.
What does this actually mean? Overleaf is an online writing platform, using either Latex or RTF for collaborative editing – imagine if all the woes of trying to use Word across multiple co-authors were gone… If you use this platform (recommended), with just a couple of clicks you’ll be able to directly share your manuscripts on paleorXiv, while submitting them for formal peer review in a traditional journal venue too. How awesome is that?
New stickers
Yes, we’re really going crazy here and breaking the bank. Well, considering we have a non-existent budget. For the first 10 authors to submit an article in 2018, we’ll send along a couple of these to you as thanks! We’ve got 2/10 already since announcing, so make sure not to miss out!
New secondary webpage
Our primary information portal can now be found here. Even this website is open source, which means that anyone can contribute to it! Have a question that’s not in our FAQs? Leave a comment! What better way to help build a real community around a platform then getting them involved in its development.
What would you like to see in the future? Just let us know and we’ll do what we can!