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 Montanari: Cracking the egg: the use of modern and fossil eggs for ecological, environmental and biological interpretation. Yin et al: Cranial morphology of Sinovenator changii (Theropoda: Troodontidae) on […]
The term ‘article processing charge’, or APC, is ubiquitous in discussions about Open Access. It refers to the author-facing charge levied by many publishers in order to make an article freely available on their website. Now, putting aside the fact that this system actively discriminates against less-wealthy authors and institutes, I think that the term […]
So I’ve been thinking a bit about copyright issues with scholarly research recently, and have a few questions about the ethics of copyright transfer. Typically, the process of copyright transfer for research articles happens something like this: Researchers submit a manuscript to a journal for peer review. Should that paper be accepted for publication after […]
Yesterday, I tweeted some of my New Year research resolutions for 2018. It seemed to strike a chord with many, getting a lot of positive feedback. Oddly, I’ve been doing most of these since the beginning of my research career (I started my PhD in 2012), and I’m happy to say that it seems like […]
Last week, I unveiled Open Access graphic 3.0. However, it was still pretty terrible, seeing as I have absolutely no creative design skills at all. Luckily, my girlfriend, and the other part of ‘Team Open’, Lisa Matthias, does. She made this wonderful infographic below, which is free for anyone to re-use and share as they […]
The last iteration of this post made the assumption that ‘gold’ Open Access meant you had to pay for it. I of all people should know that this is what us English scientists call ‘pish-posh’. It turns out that in reality, around 70% of journals indexed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) have […]
“This shouldn’t take too long..” said this idiot last week. As part of the development of PaleorXiv, I’ve now built a comprehensive database of self-archiving policies for journals that publish Palaeontological research. The different columns represent different ‘stages’ of manuscript publication at which you can self-archive for free: Preprint: Version of a research paper prior to […]
tl,dr: We’re launching a preprint server for Paleontology, paleorXiv. Email me for submissions. Open Access is the future of publishing, one way or another. One way that different research communities are doing this is through preprints. These are research articles that are published online prior to the peer review process. The main rationale behind them […]
Oh god, not another post about Open Access. Yep, sorry, we’re going to keep talking about this stuff, because it’s something worth talking about. Recently, a new tool has come out, from the makers of OADOI and ImpactStory, that allows users to ‘jump the paywall’ and access research articles for free. It’s called Unpaywall, and […]
The other day, I wrote a post about how to make your past, present, and future research all Open Access for free in a way that is legal and compliant with publisher policies. After a quick chat with some colleagues, I’ve tried to update the infographic to make it a bit more user friendly and […]