In the last post, I catalogued some of the reasons why Scientific Reports , in its cargo-cult attempts to ape print journals such as its stablemate Nature , is an objectively bad journal that removes value from the papers submitted to it: the unnatural shortening that relagates important material into supplementary information, the downplaying of methods, the tiny figures that ram unrelated illustrations into compound images, the

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.

Daniel Vidal et al.’s new paper in Scientific Reports (Vidal et al. 2020) has been out for a couple of days now. Dealing as it does with sauropod neck posture, it’s obviously of interest to me, and to Matt.

It’s been a while, but to be fair the world has caught fire since I first started posting about the Research to Reader conference. Stay safe, folks. Don’t meet people. Stay indoors; or go outdoors where there’s no-one else. You know how it’s done by now. This is not a drill.

Our old sparring partner Cary Woodruff is a big fan of Monarobot, a Mexican artist who does all of her pieces in a Maya artistic style.

When I gave the talk about vertebral orientation for the 1st Palaeo Virtual Congress at the end of 2018, I had to prepare it as a video — so I saved it on YouTube so it would outlive the conference: Having figured out the practicalities of doing this, it made sense to similarly make a permanent record of my SVPCA 2019 talk, The Past, Present and Future of Jensen’s “Big Three” sauropods : I promised back then that I would put

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The Researcher to Reader (R2R) conference at the start of this week featured a debate on the proposition “The venue of its publication tells us nothing useful about the quality of a paper”. I’ve already posted Toby Green’s opening statement for the proposition and Pippa Smart’s opening statement against it. Now here is my (shorter) response in favour of the motion, which is supposed to be a response specifically to Pippa’s opening sttement

Yesterday I told you all about the Researcher to Reader (R2R) conference and its debate on the proposition “The venue of its publication tells us nothing useful about the quality of a paper”. I posted the opening statement for the proposition, which was co-written by Toby Green and me. Now here is the opening statement against the proposition, presented by Pippa Smart of Learned Publishing , having been co-written by

This Monday and Tuesday, I was at the R2R (Researcher to Reader) conference at BMA House in London.

If you check out the Shiny Digital Future page on this site, where we write about scholarly publishing, open access, open data and other such matters, you will see the following: 2009: 9 posts 2010: 5 posts 2011: 9 posts 2012: 116 posts! Woah! 2013: 75 posts 2014: 34 posts 2015: 31 posts 2016, up until the end of June: 34 posts 2016, July onwards: 8 posts 2017: 12 posts 2018: 6 posts 2019: 4 posts 2020: nothing yet.