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.

Palaeontology stuff

• Cadena et al: The first Oligocene sea turtle (Pan-Cheloniidae) record of South America.
• Pritchard et al: A tiny Triassic saurian from Connecticut and the early evolution of the diapsid feeding apparatus.
• Tanaka et al: Nest substrate refects incubation style in extant archosaurs with implications for dinosaur nesting habits.
• Panciroli et al: New partial dentaries of amphitheriid mammalian Palaeoxonodon ooliticus from Scotland, and posterior dentary morphology in early cladotherians.
• Viglino et al: A new dolphin from the early Miocene of Patagonia, Argentina: Insights into the evolution of Platanistoidea in the Southern Hemisphere.
• Raven and Maidment: The systematic position of the enigmatic thyreophoran dinosaur Paranthodon africanus, and the use of basal exemplifiers in phylogenetic analysis.
• Close et al: How should we estimate diversity in the fossil record? Testing richness estimators using sampling‐standardised discovery curves.
• Purnell et al: Experimental analysis of soft‐tissue fossilization: opening the black box.
• Ferreira et al: Phylogeny, biogeography and diversification patterns of side-necked turtles (Testudines: Pleurodira).
• Fischer et al: The evolutionary history of polycotylid plesiosaurians.
• Schachat et al: The importance of sampling standardization for comparisons of insect herbivory in deep time: a case study from the late Palaeozoic.
• Syme and Salisbury: Taphonomy of Isisfordia duncani specimens from the Lower Cretaceous (upper Albian) portion of the Winton Formation, Isisford, central-west Queensland.

Open Science stuff

This talk from Martin Grötschel is simply fantastic. Taken at the APE conference in Berlin, January 2018.

• Signing Critical Peer Reviews & the Fear of Retaliation: What Should We Do? – Hilda Bastian.
• Releasing 1.8 million open access publications from publisher systems for text and data mining – Thérèse Hameau.
• Seeber et al: Self-citations as strategic response to the use of metrics for career decisions: “We find that the introduction of a regulation that links the possibility of career advancement to the number of citations received is related to a strong and significant increase in self-citations among scientists who can benefit the most from increasing citations, namely assistant professors, associate professors and relatively less cited scientists, and in particular among social scientists. Our findings suggest that w2hile metrics are introduced to spur virtuous behaviours, when not properly designed they favour the usage of questionable practices. (paywalled)
• Delgado and Am: Experiments in interdisciplinarity: Responsible research and innovation and the public good.
• Separation of feedback, publishing and assessment of scientific studies – Victor Venema.
• The French Couperin research consortium has cancelled all of its subscriptions to SpringerNature journals. Win!

Jon stuff

• Gave a workshop with Education International at CIES in Mexico City on Open Science: From Vision to Practice. Also gave a talk entitled: Mergers, Acquisitions, Dysfunction: The MAD-ness of scholarly publishing. Full programme here.

Other stuff

• Long-term Sustainability of Research Infrastructures: Science Europe’s Offer to Contribute to Ongoing Efforts – Science Europe.
• More than one-third of graduate students report being depressed – Nature Career Brief. The paper this refers to is infuriatingly paywalled.
• Citation Censure: When your peers don’t cite your research – Edmond Sanganyado.
• At least half of evolutionary biologists and ecologists fudge results, survey finds – Andrew Masterson.
• Can You Criticize Science (or Do Science) Without Looking Like an Obsessive? Maybe Not. – Andrew Gelman. Also introduces the ‘Javert Paradox’…