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When a paper goes for peer-review at PLOS ONE, the reviewers are told not to make any judgement about how important or sexy or “impacty” the paper is — to judge it only on methodical soundness. All papers that are judged sound are to be published without making guesses about which will and won’t improve the journal’s reputation through being influential down the line.

Copied from an email exchange. Mike: Did we know about the Royal Society’s PLOS ONE-clone? http://rsos.royalsocietypublishing.org/about I am in favour of this. I might well send them my next paper while the universal waiver is still in place. Matt: Did not know about it. Their post-waiver APC is insane. How can they possibly justify $1600?

The REF (Research Excellence Framework) is a time-consuming exercise that UK universities have to go through every few years to assess and demonstrate the value of their research to the government; the way funding is allocated between universities is largely dependent on the results of the REF. The exercise is widely resented, in part because the processes of preparing and reviewing the submissions are so time-consuming.

I’m at the Royal Society today and tomorrow as part of the Future of Scholarly Scientific Communication conference. Here’s the programme. I’m making some notes for my own benefit, and I thought I might as well do them in the form of a blog-post, which I will continuously update, in case anyone else is interested.

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A couple of weeks ago, Mike sent me a link to this interview with ecologist James O’Hanlon, who made this poster (borrowed from this post on O’Hanlon’s blog): {.size-large .wp-image-11671 .aligncenter loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“11671” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2015/04/13/how-conveniently-can-you-package-your-results/ohanlon-et-al-isbeposter/” orig-file=“https://svpow.files.wordpress.com/2015/04/ohanlon-et-al-isbeposter.jpg”

Today is a good day for sauropod science. Since we’re not getting this up until the afternoon, you’ve probably already seen that Emanuel Tschopp and colleagues have published a monstrous specimen-level phylogenetic analysis of Diplodocidae and, among other things, resurrected Brontosaurus as a valid genus.

This abomination — a proposal for a “UK National Licence” for open-access papers, making them available only in the UK, is not an April Fool joke.

There’s been some concern over Scientific Reports ’ new scheme whereby authors submitting manuscripts can pay $750 to have them peer-reviewed more quickly. Some members of the editorial board have quit over this development, feeling that it’s unfair to authors who can’t pay. Myself, I feel it at least shows admirable audacity — NPG has found a way to monetise its own lethargy, which is surely what capitalism is all about.