Garnett et al. recently published a paper in PLoS Biology that starts with the sentence "Lists of species matter": This paper (one of a forthcoming series) is pretty much the kind of paper I try and avoid reading.
In the last post, I catalogued some of the reasons why Scientific Reports , in its cargo-cult attempts to ape print journals such as its stablemate Nature , is an objectively bad journal that removes value from the papers submitted to it: the unnatural shortening that relagates important material into supplementary information, the downplaying of methods, the tiny figures that ram unrelated illustrations into compound images, the
As I was figuring out what I thought about the new paper on sauropod posture (Vidal et al. 2020) I found the paper uncommonly difficult to parse.
Holly Bik (@hollybik) has an opinion piece in PLoS Biology entitled "Let’s rise up to unite taxonomy and technology" https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.2002231 (thanks to @sjurdur for bringing this to my attention). It's a passionate plea for integrating taxonomic knowledge and "omics" data.
I got back on Tuesday from OpenCon 2015 — the most astonishing conference on open scholarship. Logistically, it works very different from most conferences: students have their expenses paid, but established scholars have to pay a registration fee and cover their own expenses. That inversion of how things are usually done captures much of what’s unique about OpenCon: its focus on the next generation is laser-sharp.
I've published a short note on my work on geophylogenies and GeoJSON in PLoS Currents Tree of Life : At the time of writing the DOI hasn't registered, so the direct link is here. There is a GitHub repository for the manuscript and code. I chose PLoS Currents Tree of Life because it is (supposedly) quick and cheap.
[I am using the term “megajournal” here to mean “journal that practices PLOS ONE -style peer-review for correctness only, ignoring guesses at possible impact”. It’s not a great term for this class of journals, but it seems to be becoming established as the default.] Bo-Christer Björk’s (2015) new paper in PeerJ asks the question “Have the “mega-journals” reached the limits to growth?”, and suggests that the answer may be yes.
This post is about my new preprint I’ve uploaded to PeerJ PrePrints: Mounce, R. (2015) Dark Research: information content in some paywalled research papers is not easily discoverable online. PeerJ PrePrints Needless to say, it’s not peer-reviewed yet but you can change that by commenting on it at the excellent PeerJ PrePrints website. All feedback is welcome.
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):
I’m proud to announce an interesting public output from my BBSRC-funded postdoc project: PLUTo: Phyloinformatic Literature Unlocking Tools. Software for making published phyloinformatic data discoverable, open, and reusable Screenshot of some of the PLOS ONE phylogeny figure collection on Flickr