Recently, I published an old manuscript of mine as a PeerJ Preprint. I wrote this paper in 2003-4, and it was rejected without review when I submitted it back then. (For, I think, specious reasons, but that’s a whole nother discussion. Forget I mentioned it.) I haven’t touched the manuscript since then (except to single-space it for submission as a preprint). It’s ten years old.

I was reading a rant on another site about how pretentious it is for intellectuals and pseudo-intellectuals to tell the world about their “media diets” and it got me thinking–well, angsting–about my scientific media diet.

As recently noted, it was my pleasure and privilege on 25 June to give a talk at the ESOF2014 conference in Copenhagen (the EuroScience Open Forum). My talk was one of four, followed by a panel discussion, in a session on the subject “Should science always be open?“. I had just ten minutes to lay out the background and the problem, so it was perhaps a bit rushed. But you can judge for yourself, because the whole session was recorded on video.

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 Preprint. It’s one of those papers that does exactly what it says on the tin — you should be able to find some interesting patterns in the diversity of your own favourite dinosaur group.

I just read this on Zen Faulkes’ NeuroDojo blog: How should scientists, and reporters, discuss work that has failed to replicate? The original Barr and colleagues article remains in the scientific literature; failed replication alone is not grounds for retraction.

Stop what you’re doing and go read Cameron Neylon’s blog. Specifically, read his new post, Improving on “Access to Research”. Regular readers of SV-POW! might legitimately complain that my so-called advocacy consists mostly of whining about how rubbish things are.

So, I’ve been thinking a lot about this interesting situation with Elsevier, which David Tempest’s remarks at the Oxford Evolution or Revolution debate highlighted: they can’t afford (literally or figuratively) to tell us how much they charge different institutions for the same stuff.

It shouldn’t come as a huge surprise to regular readers that PeerJ is Matt’s and my favourite journal. Reasons include its super-fast turnaround, beautiful formatting that doesn’t look like a facsimile of 1980s printed journals, and its responsiveness to authors and readers.

I just read Mick Watson’s post Why I resigned as PLOS ONE academic editor on his blog opiniomics. Turns out his frustration with PLOS ONE is not to do with his editorial work but with the long silences he faced as an author at that journal when trying to get a bad decision appealed. I can totally identify with that, though my most frustrating experiences along these lines have been with other journals.

I was really excited to get an invitation to the evolution-or-revolution debate in Oxford, partly for historical reasons. I thought the Oxford Union was where C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien and their friends held various debates. Sadly, it turns out I was mistaken, and it was merely the stomping ground for a bunch of lame politicians.