TL;DR: This blog now has an ISSN (3033-3695), and each new post gets a DOI, usually a day or two after it’s published. Read on for the details. Over the years, we and others have cited a lot of SV-POW! posts in the formal literature.

Mike D’Emic’s new paper The evolution of maximum terrestrial body mass in sauropod dinosaurs is out! Yay! Relevant to our interests! Obviously I want to read this paper, so I simply … 1. Go to the paper’s page at Current Biology . 2. It’s paywalled. 3. There is a “Log in” option at top right, but it’s only for an account specific to … what? This journal? This publisher? 4. Find another copy at Science Direct.

I have a new article out in the Journal of Data and Information Science (Taylor 2022), on a subject that will be familiar to long-time readers.

As I was clearing out some old documents, I stumbled on this form from 2006: This was back when Paul Upchurch’s dissertation, then only 13 years old, contained much that still unpublished in more formal venues, notably the description of what was then “ Pelorosaurus ” becklesii . As a fresh young sauropod researcher I was keen to read this and other parts of what was then almost certainly the most important and comprehensive

Last time, we looked at the difference between cost, value and price, and applied those concepts to simple markets like the one for chairs, and the complex market that is scholarly publication. We finished with the observation that the price our community pays for the publication of a paper (about $3,333 on average) is about 3–7 times as much as its costs to publish ($500-$1000)? How is this possible?

We have a tendency to be sloppy about language in everyday usage, so that words like “cost”, “value” and “price” are used more or less interchangeably. But economists will tell you that the words have distinct meanings, and picking them apart is crucial to understand economic transaction. Suppose I am a carpenter and I make chairs: The cost of the chair is what it costs me to make it: raw materials, overheads, my own time, etc.

THIS POST IS RETRACTED. The reasons are explained in the next post. I wish I had never posted this, but you can’t undo what is done, especially on the Internet, so I am not deleting it but marking it as retracted. I suggest you don’t bother reading on, but it’s here if you want to.

I’m late to this party, but I want to say a few things about the recently announced €9,500 article-processing charge (APC) that Nature has introduced to make itself Plan-S compliant. The first thing is that a lot of people are quite understandably outraged by this very large fee.

If you check out the Shiny Digital Future page on this site, where we write about scholarly publishing, open access, open data and other such matters, you will see the following: 2009: 9 posts 2010: 5 posts 2011: 9 posts 2012: 116 posts! Woah! 2013: 75 posts 2014: 34 posts 2015: 31 posts 2016, up until the end of June: 34 posts 2016, July onwards: 8 posts 2017: 12 posts 2018: 6 posts 2019: 4 posts 2020: nothing yet.

I’m a bit shocked to find it’s now more than five years since Robert Harington’s Scholarly Kitchen post Open Access: Fundamentals to Fundamentalists. I wrote a response in the comments, meaning to also post it here, but got distracted, and then half a decade passed. Here it is, finally. The indented parts are quotes from Harington. It’s always a powerful rhetorical move to call your opponent a fundamentalist. It’s also a lazy one.