Matt drew my attention to an old paper I’d not seen before: Riggs (1903) on the vertebral column of Brontosaurus . The page I linked there shows only the first page (which in fact is half a page, since Riggs’ work is only in the right column). Why only the first page? As Matt put it, “It’s been 110 years, just give us the PDF already.
[This is a guest-post by Richard Poynder , a long-time observer and analyst of academic publishing now perhaps best known for the very detailed posts on his Open and Shut blog. It was originally part of a much longer post on that blog, the introduction to an interview with the publisher MDPI.
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?
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.
I had an email out of the blue this morning, from someone I’d not previously corresponded with, asking me an important question about PeerJ. I thought it was worth sharing the question, and its answer, more generally.
Just launched: a new open-access journal of vertebrate paleontology, brought to you by the University of Alberta, Canada! It’s called VAMP (Vertebrate Anatomy Morphology Palaeontology), and it charges no APC. Here’s a illustration from one of the two articles in its first issue.
I wrote last week that I can’t support Nature’s new broken-access initiative for two reasons: practically, I can’t rely on it; and philosophically I can’t abide work being done to reduce utility. More recently I read a post on Nature’s blog: Content sharing is *not* open access and why NPG is committed to both. It’s well worth reading: concise, clear and helpful.
It’s been a week since Nature announced what they are now calling “read-only sharing by subscribers” — a much more accurate title than the one they originally used on that piece, “Nature makes all articles free to view” [old link, which now redirects]. I didn’t want to leap straight in with a comment at the time, because this is a complex issue and I felt it better to give my thoughts time to percolate.
Despite the flagrant trolling of its title, Nature ’s recent opinion-piece Open access is tiring out peer reviewers is mostly pretty good. But the implication that the rise of open-access journals has increased the aggregate burden of peer-review is flatly wrong, so I felt obliged to leave a comment explaining why. Here is that comment, promoted to a post of its own (with minor edits for clarity):