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What if we just post PDFs on the open web?
An interesting conversation arose in the comments to Matt’s last post — interesting to me, at least, but then since I wrote much of it, I am biased. I think it merits promotion to its own post,...
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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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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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Science is formalised humility
I think I figured out what the core, immutable quality of science is. It’s not formal publication, it’s not peer-review, it’s not “the scientific method” (whatever that means). It’s not replicability,...
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The best part of science (and the second best part)
I just saw this tweet from palaeohistologist Sarah Werning, and it summed up what science is all about so well that I wanted to give it wider and more permanent coverage: The second best part of...
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Where do formatted references come from?
It’s an oddity to me that when publishers try to justify their existence with long lists of the valuable services they provide, they usually skip lightly over one of the few really big ones. For...
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What would happen if I placed my manuscripts in the Public Domain?
We know that most academic journals and edited volumes ask authors to sign a copyright transfer agreement before proceeding with publication. When this is done, the publisher becomes the owner of the...
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What would happen if I publicly posted the reviews I receive?
After the authors’ own work, the biggest contribution to a published paper is the reviews provided, gratis, by peers. When peer-review works as it’s supposed to, they add significant value to the final...
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How disruptive is PeerJ?
Matt and I were discussing “portable peer-review” services like Rubriq, and the conversation quickly wandered to the subject of PeerJ. Then I realised that that seems to be happening with all our...
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How much is our intuition about sauropod mass worth?
As promised, some thoughts on the various new brachiosaur mass estimates in recent papers and blog-posts. Back in 2008, when I did the GDI of Giraffatitan and Brachiosaurus for my 2009 paper on those...
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New (but very old) preprint: A survey of dinosaur diversity by clade, age,...
Today, available for the first time, you can read my 2004 paper A survey of dinosaur diversity by clade, age, place of discovery and year of description. It’s freely available (CC By 4.0) as a PeerJ...
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Sauropods’ neutral neck postures were really weird
Last night, I submitted a paper for publication — for the first time since April 2013. I’d almost forgotten what it felt like. But, because we’re living in the Shiny Digital Future, you don’t have to...
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The central irony of life in academia
Hey, look, there goes my future! One thing that always bemuses me is the near-absolute serendipity of the academic job market. To get into research careers takes at least a decade of very deliberate,...
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Down in flames
I first encountered Larry Niven’s story/essay “Down in Flames” in the collection N-Space in high school. This was after I’d read Ringworld and most of Niven’s Known Space stories, so by the time I got...
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What does it mean for a vertebra to be “horizontal”?
I was lucky enough to have Phil Mannion as one of the peer-reviewers for my recent paper (Taylor 2018) showing that Xenoposeidon is a rebbachisaurid. During that process, we got into a collegial...
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When is a vertebra “horizontal”, part 2
Thanks to everyone who’s engaged with yesterday’s apparently trivial question: what does it mean for a vertebra to be “horizontal”? I know Matt has plenty of thoughts to share on this, but before he...
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Vertebral orientation, part 3: Matt weighs in
WOW! I knew I was dragging a bit on getting around to this vertebral orientation problem, but I didn’t realize a whole month had passed. Yikes. Thanks to everyone who has commented so far, and thanks...
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Maybe pneumaticity is variable because it’s built on a shaky foundation
In my recent visit to the LACM herpetology collection, I was interested to note that almost every croc, lizard, and snake vertebra I saw had a pair of neurovascular foramina on either side of the...
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Supersaurus, Ultrasaurus and Dystylosaurus in 2019, part 5: what actually is...
When I started this series, it wasn’t going to be a series at all. I thought it was going to be a single post, hence the title that refers to all three of Jensen’s 1985 sauropods even though most of...
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Please review our new paper on pneumatic variation in sauropod vertebrae!
We’ve noted many times over the years how inconsistent pneumatic features are in sauropod vertebra. Fossae and formamina vary between individuals of the same species, and along the spinal column, and...
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