I said last time that Jisc’s feeble transition-to-open-access report was the first of two disapointing scholarly-communication announcements that week. The second was of course the announcement that PeerJ has been acquired by Taylor and Francis. Matt and I have both been big fans of PeerJ since before it launched, and we were delighted to have our 2013 neck-anatomy paper in the first batch of articles published there.
It’s been a while since we checked in on our old friends Elsevier, Springer Nature and Wiley — collectively, the big legacy publishers who still dominate scholarly publishing. Like every publisher, they have realised which way the wind is blowing, and flipped their rhetoric to pro-open access — a far cry from the days when they were hiring PR “pit bulls” to smear open access. These days, it’s clear that open access is winning.
I have a new article out in the Journal of Data and Information Science (Taylor 2022), on a subject that will be familiar to long-time readers.
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Well, this is a very pleasant surprise on the last day of the semester: Tito Aureliano, Aline M. Ghilardi, Bruno A. Navarro, Marcelo A. Fernandes, Fresia Ricardi-Branco, & Mathew J. Wedel. 2021. Exquisite air sac histological traces in a hyperpneumatized nanoid sauropod dinosaur from South America. Scientific Reports 11: 24207.
As I was clearing out some old documents, I stumbled on this form from 2006: This was back when Paul Upchurch’s dissertation, then only 13 years old, contained much that still unpublished in more formal venues, notably the description of what was then “ Pelorosaurus ” becklesii . As a fresh young sauropod researcher I was keen to read this and other parts of what was then almost certainly the most important and comprehensive
Last time, we looked at the difference between cost, value and price, and applied those concepts to simple markets like the one for chairs, and the complex market that is scholarly publication. We finished with the observation that the price our community pays for the publication of a paper (about $3,333 on average) is about 3–7 times as much as its costs to publish ($500-$1000)? How is this possible?
We have a tendency to be sloppy about language in everyday usage, so that words like “cost”, “value” and “price” are used more or less interchangeably. But economists will tell you that the words have distinct meanings, and picking them apart is crucial to understand economic transaction. Suppose I am a carpenter and I make chairs: The cost of the chair is what it costs me to make it: raw materials, overheads, my own time, etc.
A month after I and Matt published our paper “Why is vertebral pneumaticity in sauropod dinosaurs so variable?” at Qeios , we were bemoaning how difficult it was to get anyone to review it. But what a difference the last nineteen days have made!
We’re currently in open access week, and one of the things I’ve noticed has been a rash of tweets of the form “I support #OpenAccess because …”. Here is a random collection. We support #OpenAccess because #OpenScience needs good infrastructures. — @ZB_MED We support #OpenAccess because we believe that research results made possible by public funds should be accessible to everyone.