Weekly stuff roundup: 6th April, 2018

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.

Smith et al: The Only Known Jawed Vertebrate with Four Eyes and the Bauplan of the Pineal Complex.
Boyd and Lomax: The youngest occurrence of ichthyosaur embryos in the UK: A new specimen from the Early Jurassic (Toarcian) of Yorkshire. (blog post)
Frederick and Gallup Jr: The demise of dinosaurs and learned taste aversions: The biotic revenge hypothesis. “Here we advance the hypothesis along with supporting evidence that the emergence of toxic plants coupled with an inability to form learned taste aversions may have contributed to the extinction of dinosaurs.”
Matzke and Irmis: Including autapomorphies is important for paleontological tip-dating with clocklike data, but not with non-clock data.
What a fossil revolution reveals about the history of “big data” – David Sepkoski.

French Universities Cancel Subscriptions to Springer Journals. Negotiations between the publisher and a national consortium of academic institutions have reached a stalemate – The Scientist.

Global Access to Research Software: The Forgotten Pillar of Open Science Implementation – Global Xoung Academy.
The European Commission has launched a tender for its Open Research Publishing Platform.
- See this excellent Twitter thread by Bianca Kramer for some context, and this analysis by Martin Eve.
- Hated Science Publisher Elsevier To Help EU Monitor Open Science – Including Open Access – Glyn Moody.
- Thoughts on the Call for Tenders for the EC’s Open Research Publishing Platform – Jean-Sébastien Caux.
Johansson et al: Preprints: An underutilized mechanism to accelerate outbreak science.
What’s wrong with the Journal Impact Factor in 5 graphs – Dalmeet Singh Chawla. Absolutely fan-bloody-tastic resource here.
It’s time for the US to get serious about funding open access – Nature Index.
A Reality Check on Author Access to Open Access Publishing – Hilda Bastian.
Finnish researchers are calling for improved transparency in academic journal pricing.
The scientific paper is obsolete. Here’s what’s next – James Somers.

Coverage of our panel discussion at CIES 2018 in Mexico City from Education International.

Couple of pieces for Discover Magazine are now online:
- #40 – A Titan for the Record Books: 100 million-year-old giant is the likely the largest creature ever to walk the Earth.
- What If the Most Basic Thing We Know About Dinosaurs Is Wrong? A proposal ditches the traditional dino family tree.
Quoted in this piece, The Ethical Social Network, for Inside Higher Education: “Not all academic social networking sites take the same responsible approach to user privacy, however. Academia.edu and ResearchGate have both been subject to criticism from some academics who dislike the way their data are used by the sites. Jon Tenant, a paleontologist and open science advocate who has criticized these for-profit academic networking sites, said that many researchers are “blind or at least complacent to the fact that they are typically the service provider, product and consumer for external companies within the current academic ecosystem.””
Quoted in this video: Intersections of Openness: Open Access, Science, & Education, by Abbey Elder.

The FOSTER Open Science Training Handbook is now online, available via Gitbooks and Zenodo.
Submitted the Open Science MOOC to the Mozilla Global Sprint.

Ego is the Enemy, especially for Academics – Madhukar Pai. “The battle against ego must be fought on many fronts, and daily. All of us need to work towards a place where, to paraphrase Holiday, we think less of ourselves, and be less invested in the story we like to tell about our own specialness. As a result, Holiday says, we will be liberated to accomplish the world-changing work we set out to achieve (as academics).“

Green Tea and Velociraptors