This post pulls together information on basic parameters of tubular bones from Currey & Alexander (1985), on ASP from Wedel (2005), and on calculating the densities of bones from Wedel (2009: Appendix). It’s all stuff we’ve covered at one point or another, I just wanted to have it all in one convenient place.

I recently reread Dubach (1981), “Quantitative analysis of the respiratory system of the house sparrow, budgerigar and violet-eared hummingbird”, and realized that she reported both body masses and volumes in her Table 1. For each of the three species, here are the sample sizes, mean total body masses, and mean total body volumes, along with mean densities I calculated from those values.* * House sparrow, Passer domesticus , n = 16,

It’s well worth reading this story about Thomas Herndon, a graduate student who as part of his training set out to replicate a well-known study in his field. The work he chose, Growth in a Time of Debt by Reinhart and Rogoff, claims to show that “median growth rates for countries with public debt over roughly 90 percent of GDP are about one percent lower than otherwise;

There’s been a lot of concern in some corners of the world about the Finch Report’s preference for Gold open access, and the RCUK policy’s similar leaning. Much of the complaining has focussed on the cost of Gold OA publishing: Article Processing Charges (APCs) are very offputting to researchers with limited budgets. I thought it would be useful to provide a page that I (and you) can link to when facing such concerns.

A couple of weeks ago we tried to work out what it costs the global academic community when you publish a paper behind an Elsevier paywall instead of making it open access. The tentative conclusion was that it’s somewhere between £3112 and £6224 (or about $4846-9692), which is about 3.6-7.2 times the cost of publishing in PLoS ONE.

What does it cost to publish a paper  in a non-open access Elsevier journal? The immediate cost to the author is often zero (though page charges, and fees for colour illustrations mean this is not always true). But readers have to pay to see the paper, either directly in the case of private individuals or through library budgets in the case of university staff and students. What is the total cost to the world?

In the middle of February, Times Higher Education ran a piece by Elsevier boycott originator Tim Gowers, entitled Occupy publishing .

How many open-access papers are getting published these days?  And who’s doing it?  Inspired by a tweet from @labroides (link at the end so as not to give away the punchline), I went looking for numbers. We’ll start with our old friends Elsevier, since they are the world’s largest academic publisher by volume and by revenue.

[This post is mostly a rehash of a comment I made on the last one, but I guess more people see posts than comments.

Why we do mass estimates Mass estimates are a big deal in paleobiology.