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

• Lomax: A forefin of Leptonectes solei from the Lower Jurassic (Pliensbachian) of Dorset, UK.
• Deline et al: Evolution of metazoan morphological disparity.
• Linzmeier: Refining the interpretation of oxygen isotope variability in free-swimming organisms.
• Martinelli et al: The first Caipirasuchus (Mesoeucrocodylia, Notosuchia) from the Late Cretaceous of Minas Gerais, Brazil: new insights on sphagesaurid anatomy and taxonomy.
• Valentin Fischer uploaded a TONNE of new articles to paleorXiv too, for all ichthyosaur fans!
• Zhang et al: A new sauropodiform dinosaur with a ‘sauropodan’ skull from the Lower Jurassic Lufeng Formation of Yunnan Province, China.

• Nawrot et al: Stratigraphic signatures of mass extinctions: ecological and sedimentary determinants.
• Adams et al: A large neosuchian crocodyliform from the Upper Cretaceous (Cenomanian) Woodbine Formation of North Texas.
  • NOTE that this makes 100 articles now shared on paleorXiv! 

Open Science News

• The Foundations for Open Scholarship Strategy Development is now in Spanish! Thanks to Antonio Hartley.
• The announcement of Plan S in the EU, a powerful mandate towards Open Access in Europe.
  • The best coverage of this, in light-hearted form.
  • Robert-Jan Smits on How Plan S will Benefit Early-Career Researchers – EURODOC.
  • And a great overview from Cat MacCallum at Hindawi.
  • Response from EURODOC on this.
• Google unveils a new search engine for Open Data.
• Report on the global landscape of peer review published by Publons.

• Montgomery et al: Open Knowledge Institutions: Reinventing Universities.
• Monbiot: Scientific publishing is a rip-off. We fund the research – it should be free.
  • The responses here from publishers and researchers are well worth a read too.
• PKP and SciELO announce development of a new open source preprint server.

Stuff I’ve done

• Preprints help journalism, not hinder it – Nature correspondence piece with Corina Logan and Laurent Gatto out.
  • Check out this blog post for an overview of similar pieces published on this topic.
• Made a lot of progress with the Open Science MOOC here, which is still open for continuous feedback.
  • The MOOC now also has a Facebook page!
  • You can also add yourself automatically to the GitHub organisation too.
  • More updates in this blog post.
• The Open Science MOOC also became part of the Joint Roadmap for Open Science Tools!
  • Comes with a Wikidata entry too!
• Quoted in this piece by Science Business on the developments around Plan S:
  • “Scientists who spoke to Science|Business agreed the initiative has teeth. “This is one of the stronger funder-based policies in open access committed to in recent years, and [the funders] should be applauded for that,” said Jon Tennant, palaeontologist and open science activist.”
  • Blogged the full comments here.
• Wrote an article on how dinosaurs got so big for BBC Widlife Magazine.
• The final version of the ‘State of the art in peer review’ is now out.

• Gave a keynote talk in Zadar, Croatia, on how open science is just good science. Slides available here.
• Co-authored piece in the LSE Impact Blog with Tom Olijhoek: The “problem” of predatory publishing remains a relatively small one and should not be allowed to defame open access.
• Delivered a keynote talk in Sao Paulo about the global road to Open Science!