My new article is up at the Guardian . This time, I have taken off the Conciliatory Hat, and I’m saying it how I honestly believe it is: publishing your science behind a paywall is immoral.

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 (arXiv, etc.), my enthusiasm for sending stuff to journals is flagging.

I’ve recently written about my increasing disillusionment with the traditional pre-publication peer-review process [post 1, post 2, post 3]. By coincidence, it was in between writing the second and third in that series of posts that I had another negative peer-review experience — this time from the other side of the fence — which has left me even more ambivalent about the way we do things.

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 we’d love to be talking about the science. We did choose arXiv with our eyes open, knowing that there’s no tradition of palaeontology being published there, and wanting to start a new tradition of palaeontology being routinely published there.

Let me begin with a digression. (Hey, we may as well start as we mean to go on.) Citations in scientific writing are used for two very different reasons, but because the two cases have the same form we often confuse them.

Last time I argued that traditional pre-publication peer-review isn’t necessarily worth the heavy burden it imposes. I guess no-one who’s been involved in the review process — as an author, editor or reviewer — will deny that it imposes significant costs, both in the time of all the participants, and in the delay in getting new work to press. Where I expected more pushback was in the claim that the benefits are not great.

[Note: this post is by Mike. Matt hasn’t seen it, may not agree with it, and would probably have advised me not to post it if I’d asked him.] The magic is going out of my love-affair with peer-review.