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

• Maxwell et al: Sporadic sampling, not climatic forcing, drives observed early hominin diversity.
• Vavrek and Brinkman: The first record of a trionychid turtle (Testudines: Trionychidae) from the Cretaceous of the Pacific Coast of North America.

Open Science News

• Springer Nature warns of ‘free access’ threat to revenues: “Springer Nature, the world’s second largest academic publisher, has warned investors ahead of its €3.6bn Frankfurt listing next month that potential legal changes and pressure to provide free access to publicly funded research risk undermining its business model.”
• Death By 1,000 Cuts | Periodicals Price Survey 2018: “For the last 24 years, the titles of this annual survey have reflected the library journals environment. From “Reality Bites” to “Fracking the Ecosystem,” the articles have detailed the prominent issues in serials at the time of publication, many of which have been with us for decades. At times the library world seems mired in the equivalent of the story line of the movie Groundhog Day, in which the lead character is trapped in a time loop, destined to repeat the same actions over and over until he makes significant changes in his attitude and, therefore, his situation.”
• New Commission guidance supports EU Member States in transition to Open Science.
• Laakso and Polonioli: Open access in ethics research: an analysis of open access availability and author self-archiving behaviour in light of journal copyright restrictions.
• Open and inclusive collaboration in science: A framework – OECD.
• PLOS launch their new preprint collaboration with biorXiv.
• 23 new funders join the open research publishing movement – F1000.
  • More here from the Open Funders Research Group.
• First international transfer of accessible books in Kyrgyzstan under the Marrakesh Treaty for persons with print disabilities – EIFL.
• A statement calling on AI researchers to withhold submissions to Nature Machine Intelligence has garnered over 1,600 signatures.
• Liam Earney – National licence negotiations advancing the open access transition – a view from the UK.
• Data-visualization tools drive interactivity and reproducibility in online publishing – Nature.
• Is Copyright Piracy Morally Wrong or Merely Illegal? The Malum Prohibitum/Malum in Se Conundrum – Rick Anderson.
• Federer et al: Data sharing in PLOS ONE: An analysis of Data Availability Statements.
• Ghaphery et al: Green on What Side of the Fence? Librarian Perceptions of Accepted Author Manuscripts.
• Wellcome ‘disappointed’ over fall in open-access compliance: “In particular, compliance by Oxford University Press fell “significantly”, according to the trust, because the publisher has been experiencing problems with converting outputs to a format that is compliant with Europe PubMed Central’s technical requirements. Wellcome said it would monitor the situation over three to six months, to ensure that it was resolved, and seek compensation from the publisher “for the poor service delivered to researchers, institutions and funders over the last 12 months”, it said.”

Stuff I’ve done

• Launched the MetaPaleo project on GitHub! At the moment, includes two sub-projects, which anyone can openly contribute to:
  • OpenPaleo, to investigate the ‘openness’ of palaeontological research.
  • Time Series, to develop a standardised protocol for time series analysis of palaeontological data.
• Add the Communications Strategy to the Open Science MOOC, and updated Module 5 on Open Research Software and Open Source.
  • Also announced new strategic partnerships with Figshare, Conscience, and a range of other organisations.

Other stuff

• Waller et al: Strength in numbers: collaborative science for new experimental model systems.