Last time, we looked briefly at my new paper Almost all known sauropod necks are incomplete and distorted (Taylor 2022). As hinted at in that post, this paper had a difficult and protracted genesis. I thought it might be interesting to watch the story of a published paper through its various stages of prehistory and history.

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Two days ago, I wrote about what seemed to be an instance of peer review gone very wrong. I’ve now heard from two of the four authors of the paper and from the reviewer in question — both by email, and in comments on the original post — and it’s apparent that I misinterpreted the situation.

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.

Since I posted my preprint “Almost all known sauropod necks are incomplete and distorted” and asked in the comments for people to let me know if I missed any good necks, the candidates have been absolutely rolling in: The Kaatedocus siberi holotype SMA 0004 (thanks to Oliver Demuth for pointing this out) The Futalognkosaurus dukei holotype MUCPv-323 (thanks to Matt Lamanna) The referred Rapetosaurus

Well, I’m a moron again.

Here I am at SVPCA in 2015. I am haunted by the fact that ten years ago at SVPCA 2005, I gave a talk about the NHM’s Tendaguru brachiosaurid, NHMUK R5937. And the description is still not done and submitted a full decade later.

Last October, Mike posted a tutorial on how to choose a paper title, then followed it up by evaluating the titles of his own papers. He invited me to do the same for my papers. I waited a few days to allow myself to forget Mike’s comments on our joint papers – not too hard during my fall anatomy teaching – and then wrote down my thoughts. And then did nothing with them for three and a half months.

In light of yesterday’s tutorial on choosing titles, here are the titles of all my own published papers (including co-authored ones), in chronological order, with my own sense of whether I’m happy with them now I look back. All the full references are on my publications page (along with the PDFs). I’ll mark the good ones in green, the bad ones in red and the merely OK in blue.

[NOTE: see the updates at the bottom. In summary, there’s nothing to see here and I was mistaken in posting this in the first place.] Elsevier’s War On Access was stepped up last year when they started contacting individual universities to prevent them from letting the world read their research.