Green Tea and Velociraptors

Welcome to your usual weekly roundup of vaguely interesting stuff that happened in the last week! Enjoy, and let me know if I’ve missed anything out. Previous week.

Palaeontology news

• Foffa et al: Filling the Corallian gap: New information on Late Jurassic marine reptile faunas from England.
• Wu et al: A grazing Gomphotherium in Middle Miocene Central Asia, 10 million years prior to the origin of the Elephantidae.
• Brignon: New historical data on the first dinosaurs found in France.
• Prieto-Marquez and Guenther: Perinatal specimens of Maiasaura from the Upper Cretaceous of Montana (USA): insights into the early ontogeny of saurolophine hadrosaurid dinosaurs.
• Brocklehurst: An examination of the impact of Olson’s extinction on tetrapods from Texas.
• Muscente et al: Quantifying ecological impacts of mass extinctions with network analysis of fossil communities.

Open Science News

• Weak demand forces Springer Nature to cancel $3.2 billion float at last minute – Reuters.
• Khair: Expenditures of CARL member libraries for scholarly resource subscriptions licensed through CRKN for 2016 – 2017.
• Open science projects collaborate on joint roadmap – JROST.
• New report on the impact of Open Access on learned societies in the UK – DeltaThink.
• Sweden stands up for open access – cancels agreement with Elsevier.
  • Go Sweden! Swedish universities will save €12 million a year on subscription fees.
  • More on this from Nature News, with details on what is happening around Europe.
  • And more via The Scientist.
• Linking impact factor to ‘open access’ charges creates more inequality in academic publishing – Bianca Kramer and Jeroen Bosman.
• Why So Many Repositories? Examining the Limitations and Possibilities of the Institutional Repositories Landscape.
• Why are AI researchers boycotting a new Nature journal—and shunning others?
  • Basically, because the journal is more about abusing its status to make money, than the advancement of science. Sound familiar?
• OpenAIRE partners with the Open Science MOOC. Whoop!

Stuff I’ve done

• Delivered a talk in Vienna about whether blockchain is a magic bullet cure for science, or a solution for a problem that does not exist.. (slides on Figshare).
• And another talk in Split, Croatia, at the PEERE peer review summer school, on the future of peer review.
• Shifted the Foundations for Open Scholarship Strategy Development to markdown. Still open for contributions!
• Made a tonne of progress on the Open Science MOOC as part of the Mozilla global sprint. Thanks, everyone!
• Spoke at a webinar, Open Science Clinique: Winning Marie Curie with Open Science, about Open Science for junior researchers.

Other cool stuff