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

• O’Connor et al: Reconstruction of the diapsid ancestral genome permits chromosome evolution tracing in avian and non-avian dinosaurs.
• Whitlock et al: Assemblage-level structure in Morrison Formation dinosaurs, Western Interior, USA.
• Wang et al: First bone-cracking dog coprolites provide new insight into bone consumption in Borophagus and their unique ecological niche.
• Tietje and Rödel: Evaluating the predicted extinction risk of living amphibian species with the fossil record.
• Leite and Fortier: The palate and choanae structure of the cf. Susisuchus (Crocodyliformes, Eusuchia): phylogenetic implications.
• Field et al: Early Evolution of Modern Birds Structured by Global Forest Collapse at the End-Cretaceous Mass Extinction.

Open Science News

• Nine pitfalls of research misconduct – Nature News.
• Thursby et al: Prepublication disclosure of scientific results: Norms, competition, and commercial orientation.
• Internet Archive awarded grant from Arcadia Fund to digitize university press collections.
• Feldman et al: Citation Count Analysis for Papers with Preprints.
  • “We observe that papers submitted to arXiv before acceptance have, on average, 65% more citations in the following year compared to papers submitted after. We note that this finding is not causal..”
• Benjamin Kaube: Scientists should be solving problems, not struggling to access journals.
  • “The time wasted trying to access them is a tax on human progress and on the development and dissemination of new scholarly knowledge. By estimating the average amount of time wasted by researchers trying to gain access to a single article, I’ve calculated that research output equivalent to around 11,500 academics is lost each year.”
• van Otegem et al: Five principles to navigate a bumpy golden road towards open access.
• Lisa Matthias: Open Science in Indonesia.
• Objections to the Creative Commons attribution licence are straw men raised by parties who want open access to be as closed as possible, warns John Wilbanks.
• After 24 years, when will academic culture finally shift? Björn Brembs telling it straight.
• Ross-Hellauer et al: Are funder Open Access platforms a good idea?

Stuff I’ve done

• Published! The evolving preprint landscape: Introductory report for the Knowledge Exchange working group on preprints.
• Gave a keynote talk at the DARIAH annual meeting in Paris about why ‘open’ science is just good science. Slides available on Figshare.
• Initiated the Peer Review Transparency project for Palaeontology. Open for contributions!

Other cool stuff