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.

Daniel Vidal et al.’s new paper in Scientific Reports (Vidal et al. 2020) has been out for a couple of days now. Dealing as it does with sauropod neck posture, it’s obviously of interest to me, and to Matt.

Non-unique organizations and acronyms can cause problems in ROR searches. Use supporting information if you have it to get better results. If not, beware of theses gotchas.

It’s been a while, but to be fair the world has caught fire since I first started posting about the Research to Reader conference. Stay safe, folks. Don’t meet people. Stay indoors; or go outdoors where there’s no-one else. You know how it’s done by now. This is not a drill.

One of the most popular cloud services for python / jupyter - based codes is binder (www.mybinder.org) which can transform an online repository into a running instance in the cloud with little effort on the part of the owner of that repository to set it up and no effort at all for the end user.

The ANU Research School of Earth Sciences is moving all seminars online for the duration of the corona virus emergency The Research School of Earth Sciences (RSES) at the Australian National University is one of the world’s premier research institutions in the Earth and Marine Sciences. The seminar series is the central focus of the School’s activities and typically attracts top researchers from Australia and around the world.

The Underworld 2.9 release is available from Github, as a docker container and via zenodo (doi:10.5281/zenodo.3964957) it is also available through pip install for the first time (see below). Underworld paper in the Journal of Open Source Software The paper of record for underworld 2 has been published. It does tie to the Underworld 2.9 release but is sufficiently broad to cite for all 2.x releases.

Probablemente sientes que estamos inundados con información sobre la evolución de la pandemia de COVID-19. Sin embargo, nada mejor que manejar los datos uno mismo y analizarlos desde distintos puntos de vista. Creo que siempre hay alguien que observará algo en los datos que se nos ha escapado a millones de observadores y creo que cualquier aporte en esta emergencia mundial es valioso.

Our old sparring partner Cary Woodruff is a big fan of Monarobot, a Mexican artist who does all of her pieces in a Maya artistic style.