Back in the first post about our recent paper on bifurcated cervical ribs in apatosaurines, I noted: This has been much on my mind of late, especially as the majority of talks at SVPCA 2023 and many new papers involve numerical methods.

Here’s an odd thing. Over and over again, when a researcher is mistreated by a journal or publisher, we see them telling their story but redacting the name of the journal or publisher involved. Here are a couple of recent examples.

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.

An important paper is out today: Carpenter (2018) names Maraapunisaurus , a new genus to contain the species “ Amphicoelias ” fragillimus , on the basis that it’s actually a rebbachisaurid rather than being closely related to the type species Amphicoelias altus . {.size-full .wp-image-15433 aria-describedby=“caption-attachment-15433” loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“15433”

Yesterday, Alex Holcome’s tweet drew my attention to Shahar Avin’s paper “Centralised Funding and Epistemic Exploration”, currently in press at The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science . You can read the accepted manuscript on PhilSci Archive. My colleague Filip Jakobsen asked me to explain in layman’s terms what the paper was saying. Here’s what I told him.

Out today: a new Turiasaurian sauropod, Mierasaurus bobyoungi , from the Early Cretaceous Cedar Mountain formation in Utah.

It’s now been widely discussed that Jeffrey Beall’s list of predatory and questionable open-access publishers — Beall’s List for short — has suddenly and abruptly gone away. No-one really knows why, but there are rumblings that he has been hit with a legal threat that he doesn’t want to defend. To get this out of the way: it’s always a bad thing when legal threats make information quietly disappear;

I have before me the reviews for a submission of mine, and the handling editor has provided an additional stipulation: In other words, the first time I mention Diplodocus , I should say “ Diplodocus Marsh 1878″; and I should add the corresponding reference to my bibliography.

I got back this lunchtime from something a bit different in my academic career. I attended Court and Spark: an International Symposium on Joni Mitchell, hosted by the university of Lincoln and organised by Ruth Charnock.

As noted a few days ago, I recently had an article published on the Guardian site entitled Hiding your research behind a paywall is immoral . The reaction to that article was fascinating, exhilarating and distressing in fairly equal parts. Fascinating because it generated a fertile stream of 156 comments, most of them substantial. Exhilarating because of some very positive responses.