Green Tea and Velociraptors

Welcome to your usual roundup of interesting stuff that happened in the last month from the worlds of Open Science and Palaeontology! Enjoy, and let me know if I’ve missed anything out. Previous time.

Palaeontology News

• Rudenko: Prehistoric Body Theater: Bringing Paleontology Narratives to Global Contemporary Performance Audiences.
  • This is just a special bit of magic!
• Brocklehurst: Vertebral morphometrics and lung structure in non-avian dinosaurs.
• Kundrat et al: Amazing second species of the iconic Archaeopteryx has been named – really important discovery for the origins of birds from dinosaurs, and the evolution of flight.

Open Science news

• Knowledge Unlatched, failed transparency, and the commercialisation of open access book publishing – Marcel Knöchelmann.
• Continuing the debate over academic freedom, Plan S, and Open Access, via Stephen Curry.
  • And a great addition to this discussion from Martin Eve.
• Alperin et al: How significant are the public dimensions of faculty work in review, promotion, and tenure documents?
• The European Commission responded to our complaint about Elsevier and their role in the Open Science Monitor. You can annotate their letter here, in preparation for a counter-reply.
  • The Lisbon Council have also provided an update from their side. Basically, no-one seems to mind about the role of Elsevier here.
• Shimanski and Alperin: The evaluation of scholarship in academic promotion and tenure processes: Past, present, and future.
• Allen and Mehler: An important, balanced article on the potential challenges and opportunities of open science for early-career researchers.
• Brilliant from Vincent Lariviere and Cassidy Sugimoto, highlighting the importance of funder mandates in driving higher rates of open access adoption.
• Ivonne Lujano writes about the new Panama Open Science Declaration.
• And while the CNRS institutes in France have had access to Springer Nature journals cut off, Finnish universities have gone and signed another contract with them. Hm.

Stuff I’ve done

• Björn Brembs and I submitted a formal complaint about Elsevier and the wider scholarly publishing industry to the EU competition authority. Shots fired!
  • Covered by Research Europe, including with a quote from Elsevier on the matter.
  • Also covered by Global Competition Review, but the article is not freely available, sadly (yet).
• Little video with the Substance team at the SciELO 20 year conference in Sao Paulo!

• Plan S and DORA together provide fertile ground for dispelling the myth that impact factors or journal brands have anything to do with research quality, and the potential ramifications for this go beyond just Europe. A combined approach of bottom-up, grassroots campaigns supported by organisations like DORA, coupled with high-level policy action at the international level is essential. Only then can we break out of the current academic reward system and accommodate a better system of research evaluation. – Guest blog post for DORA.

• Interviewed here for Research Fortnight about the latest in the Elsevier and Open Science Monitor saga.
  • Posted my full comments online for transparency.
• “SciELO has published open access journals for 20 years and that is what we want for the world. Preventing access to science can cost lives.” – Some comments from me in a FAPESP blog post about the recent SciELO 20 year conference.
• Open Science – who benefits? Article for a mrine science magazine, available online.
• Gave a keynote talk at the IEEE Beliv data visualisation conference in Berlin. Shockingly, on open science (and reproducibility)!
• Went to the European Parliament in Strasbourg to deliver a talk on science communication. Last chance before Brexit..
• And delivered another talk in Oxford on, no surprises, Open Science.
• Wrote this little piece for EURODOC and Open Access Week 2018 on the basics of Open Peer Review.