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Where peer-review went wrong
[Note: this post is by Mike. Matt hasn't seen it, may not agree with it, and would probably have advised me not to post it if I'd asked him.] The magic is going out of my love-affair with peer-review....
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Some more of peer-review’s greatest mistakes
Last time I argued that traditional pre-publication peer-review isn’t necessarily worth the heavy burden it imposes. I guess no-one who’s been involved in the review process — as an author, editor or...
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What is this peer-review process anyway?
Let me begin with a digression. (Hey, we may as well start as we mean to go on.) Citations in scientific writing are used for two very different reasons, but because the two cases have the same form we...
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Posting palaeo papers on arXiv
Over on Facebook, where Darren posted a note about our new paper, most of the discussion has not been about its content but about where it was published. We’re not too surprised by that, even though...
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Dear Royal Society, please stop lying to us about publication times
I’ve recently written about my increasing disillusionment with the traditional pre-publication peer-review process [post 1, post 2, post 3]. By coincidence, it was in between writing the second and...
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Counting beans
The reason most of my work is in the form of journal articles is that I didn’t know there were other ways to communicate. Now that I know that there are other and in some ways demonstrably better ways...
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Giving it both barrels at the Guardian
My new article is up at the Guardian. This time, I have taken off the Conciliatory Hat, and I’m saying it how I honestly believe it is: publishing your science behind a paywall is immoral. And the...
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Is it immoral to hide your research behind a paywall?
As noted a few days ago, I recently had an article published on the Guardian site entitled Hiding your research behind a paywall is immoral. The reaction to that article was fascinating, exhilarating...
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My adventure in the world of Humanities
I got back this lunchtime from something a bit different in my academic career. I attended Court and Spark: an International Symposium on Joni Mitchell, hosted by the university of Lincoln and...
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Should we still give taxonomic authorities?
I have before me the reviews for a submission of mine, and the handling editor has provided an additional stipulation: Authority and date should be provided for each species-level taxon at first...
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What should we do now Beall’s List has gone?
It’s now been widely discussed that Jeffrey Beall’s list of predatory and questionable open-access publishers — Beall’s List for short — has suddenly and abruptly gone away. No-one really knows why,...
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Listen to Matt spout nonsense on Fist Full of Podcasts
Hey sports fans! I met David Lindblad at Beer ‘N Bones at the Arizona Museum of Natural History last month, and he invited me to talk dinosaurs on his podcast. So I did (LINK). For two hours. Some of...
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Is everything we know about sauropod phylogeny nonsense?
Out today: a new Turiasaurian sauropod, Mierasaurus bobyoungi, from the Early Cretaceous Cedar Mountain formation in Utah. This comes to us courtesy of a nice paper by Royo Torres et al. (2017),...
View ArticleAwarding grants by throwing dice
Yesterday, Alex Holcome’s tweet drew my attention to Shahar Avin’s paper “Centralised Funding and Epistemic Exploration”, currently in press at The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science. You...
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What if Amphicoelias fragillimus was a rebbachisaurid?
An important paper is out today: Carpenter (2018) names Maraapunisaurus, a new genus to contain the species Amphicoelias fragillimus, on the basis that it’s actually a rebbachisaurid rather than being...
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Scientific Reports is an objectively bad journal
As I was figuring out what I thought about the new paper on sauropod posture (Vidal et al. 2020) I found the paper uncommonly difficult to parse. And I quickly came to realise that this was not due to...
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Name the journal. Shame the publisher.
Here’s an odd thing. Over and over again, when a researcher is mistreated by a journal or publisher, we see them telling their story but redacting the name of the journal or publisher involved. Here...
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