University College London

Mike Taylor

We've been running SV-POW! for three and half years now; in all that
time we've never featured a guest post, because we think it's better to
keep a blog tight and focussed.  In general, that remains our policy.

But today, first the first and maybe only time, we present a guest
post.  This article, *What should everyone know about paleontology?*,
was first posted on the [Dinosaur Mailing
List](http://dinosaurmailinglist.org/), by Tom Holtz, in response to [a
question from Robert
Takata](http://dml.cmnh.org/2011Feb/msg00020.html).  We are now pleased
to present it, in revised and expanded form.

Tom is best known for his work on those vulgar, overstudied theropods,
the tyrannosaurs --- their phylogenetic position (he was the first to
demonstrate that they are coelurosaurs, a position now universally
accepted), ecology (he gently but emphatically rebutted Jack Horner's
bafflingly popular Obligate Scavenger hypothesis), and much more.  But
Tom is more than a tyrannosaur jockey: he's one of the most natural
teachers I've even known, and it's largely due to his seeming
inexhaustible stream of helpful explanations on the dinosaur mailing
list that I ever made it past the Dino-Fanboy level into the world of
actual science --- in fact, I mentioned him in the acknowledgements of
my dissertation for that very reason.  So it's fitting that he, of all
people, should be the first ever SV-POW! guest writer.

[![](https://svpow.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/t-rex-skull-large-0239.jpg?w=300&h=280 "T Rex Skull Large 0239"){.size-medium
.wp-image-3352 .aligncenter attachment-id="3352"
permalink="http://svpow.com/2011/02/07/guest-post-what-should-everyone-know-about-paleontology-by-tom-holtz/t-rex-skull-large-0239/"
orig-file="https://svpow.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/t-rex-skull-large-0239.jpg"
orig-size="1322,1235" comments-opened="1"
image-meta="{\"aperture\":\"0\",\"credit\":\"\",\"camera\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"created_timestamp\":\"0\",\"copyright\":\"\",\"focal_length\":\"0\",\"iso\":\"0\",\"shutter_speed\":\"0\",\"title\":\"\"}"
image-title="T Rex Skull Large 0239" image-description=""
image-caption=""
medium-file="https://svpow.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/t-rex-skull-large-0239.jpg?w=300"
large-file="https://svpow.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/t-rex-skull-large-0239.jpg?w=1024"
loading="lazy" width="300" height="280"
srcset="https://svpow.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/t-rex-skull-large-0239.jpg?w=300 300w, https://svpow.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/t-rex-skull-large-0239.jpg?w=600 600w, https://svpow.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/t-rex-skull-large-0239.jpg?w=150 150w"
sizes="(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px"}](http://svpow.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/t-rex-skull-large-0239.jpg)

Take it away, Tom!

---

# "What Should Everyone Know About Paleontology?"

Thomas R. Holtz, Jr.

The title question was recently asked by Roberto Takata on the Dinosaur
Mailing List (<http://dml.cmnh.org/2011Feb/msg00020.html>).

I think that is a good question. What really are the most important
elements of paleontology that the general public should understand? I
took a shot at coming up with a list of key concepts
(<http://dml.cmnh.org/2011Feb/msg00027.html> and
<http://dml.cmnh.org/2011Feb/msg00029.html>), based on experiences with
teaching paleontology and historical geology and with less-formally
structured outreach to the public. I have offered this list (cross
posted at the
[*Superoceras*](http://superoceras.blogspot.com/2011/02/guest-cross-post-dr-thomas-r-holtz-jr.html)
and [*Archosaur
Musings*](http://archosaurmusings.wordpress.com/2011/0a2/07/not-exactly-a-guest-post-what-should-everyone-know-about-paleontology/)
blogs) as a way for it to reach a wider audience. That this is Darwin
Week makes it even more appropriate, as we should use this occasion to
encourage a better understanding of the changes of Earth and Life
through Time for the public at large.

Much as I might like to think otherwise, the specific details of the
hindlimb function of *Tyrannosaurus rex* or the pneumatic features of
brachiosaurid vertebrae really are not the most important elements of
the field. Understanding and appreciating the nitty gritty details of
the phylogeny and anatomy of any particular branch of the Tree of Life
are not really necessary for everyone to know, any more than we would
regard detailed knowledge of bacterial biochemistry or the partitioning
of minerals in a magma chamber to be significant general knowledge.
(Indeed, these latter two items are actually far more critical for human
society than any specific aspect of paleontology, and so from a certain
point of view really more important for people to know than the History
of Life.)

That said, all human societies and many individuals have wondered about
where we have come from and how the world came to be the way it is. This
is, in my opinion, the greatest contribution of paleontology: it gives
us the Story of Earth and Life, and especially our own story.

I have divided this list into two sections. The first is a list of
general topics of paleontology, touching on the main elements of geology
that someone would need to know for fossils to make any sense. The
second is the more specific list of key points in the history of life.

(NOTE: as the idea of this list is that it should be aimed at the
general public, I have tried to avoid technical terminology where
possible.)

## General

- That rocks are produced by various factors (erosion -\> sedimentation;
 metamorphism; volcanic activity; etc.)
- That rocks did not form at a single moment in time, but instead have
 been and continue to be generated throughout the history of the
 planet.
- That fossils are remains of organisms or traces of their behavior
 recorded in those rocks.
- That rocks (and the organisms that made the fossils) can be thousands,
 millions, or even billions of years old.
- That the species discovered as fossils, and the communities of
 organisms at each place and time, are different from the same in the
 modern world and from each other.
- That despite these differences that there is continuity between life
 in the past and life in the present: this continuity is a record of
 the evolution of life.
- That we can use fossils, in conjunction with anatomical, molecular,
 and developmental data of living forms, to reconstruct the
 evolutionary pattern of life through time.
- That fossils are incomplete remains of once-living things, and that in
 order to reconstruct how the organisms that produced them actually
 lived, we can:
 - Document their anatomy (both gross external and with the use of CT
 scanning internal), and compare them to the anatomy of living
 creatures in order to estimate their function;
 - Examine their chemical composition, which can reveal aspects of
 their biochemistry;
 - Examine their microstructure to estimate patterns of growth;
 - Model their biomechanical functions using computers and other
 engineering techniques;
 - Investigate their footprints, burrows, and other traces to reveal
 the motion and other actions of the species while they were alive;
 - And collect information of the various species that lived together
 in order to reconstruct past communities.
- However, with all that, fossils are necessarily incomplete, and there
 will always be information about past life which we might very much
 want to know, but which has been forever lost. Accepting this is very
 important when working with paleontology.
- That environments of the past were different from the present.
- That there have been episodes of time when major fractions of the
 living world were extinguished in a very short period of time: such
 data could not be known without the fossil record.
- That entire branches of the tree of life have perished (sometimes in
 these mass extinction events, sometimes more gradually).
- That certain modes of life (reef formers, fast-swimming marine
 predators, large-bodied terrestrial browsers, etc.) have been occupied
 by very different groups of organisms at different periods of Earth
 History.
- That every living species, and every living individual, has a common
 ancestor with all other species and individuals at some point in the
 History of Life.

## Specific

Honestly, despite the fact the specific issues about specific parts of
the Tree of Life are the ones that paleontologists, the news media, the
average citizen, etc., are more concerned with, they really are much
less significant for the general public to know than the points above.
Sadly, documentary companies and the like keep on forgetting that, and
keep on forgetting that a lot of the public does not **know** the above
points.

Really, in the big picture, the distinction between dinosaurs,
pterosaurs, and crurotarsans are trivialities compared to a basic
understanding that the fossil record is our document of Life's history
and Earth's changes.

Summarizing the key points of the history of life over nearly 4 billion
years of evolutionary history is a big task. After all, there is a
tendency to focus on the spectacular and sensationalized rather than the
ordinary and humdrum. As Stephen Jay Gould and others often remarked,
from a purely objective external standpoint we have always lived in the
Age of Bacteria, and the changing panoply of animals and plants during
the last half-billion years have only been superficial changes.

But the question wasn't "what should a dispassionate outsider regard as
the modal aspect of the History of Life?"; it was "What should everyone
know about paleontology?" Since we are terrestrial mammals of the latest
Cenozoic, we have a natural interest in events on the land and during
the most recent parts of Earth History. That is a fair bias: it does
focus on who *[**WE**]{style="text-decoration:underline;"}* are and
where **[*WE*]{style="text-decoration:underline;"}** come from.

That said, here is a list of key concepts in the history of life. Other
researchers might pick other moments, and not include some that I have
here. Still, I believe most such lists would have many of the same key
points within them.

- Life first developed in the seas, and for nearly all of its history
 was confined there.
- For most of Life's history, organisms were single-celled only. (And
 today, most of the diversity remains single-celled).
- The evolution of photosynthesis was a critical event in the history of
 Earth and Life; living things were able to affect the planet and its
 chemistry on a global scale.
- Multicellular life evolved independently several times.
- Early animals were all marine forms.
- The major groups of animals diverged from each other before they had
 the ability to make complex hard parts.
- About 540 million years ago, the ability to make hard parts became
 possible across a wide swath of the animal tree of life, and a much
 better fossil record happened.
- Plants colonized land in a series of stages and adaptations. This
 transformed the surface of the land, and allowed for animals of
 various groups to follow afterwards.
- For the first 100 million years or so of skeletonized animals, our own
 group (the vertebrates) were relatively rare and primarily suspension
 feeders. The evolution of jaws allowed our group to greatly diversify,
 and from that point onward vertebrates of some form or other have
 remained apex predators in most marine environments.
- Complex forests of plants (mostly related to small swampland plants of
 today's world) covered wide regions of the lowlands of the
 Carboniferous.
- Burial of this vegetation before it could decay led to the formation
 of much of the coal that powered the Industrial Revolution and
 continues to power the modern world.
- While most of the coal swamp plants required a moist ground surface on
 which to propagate, one branch evolved a method of reproduction using
 a seed. This adaptation allowed them to colonize the interiors, and
 seed plants have long since become the dominant form of land plant.
- In the coal swamps, one group of arthropods (the insects) evolved the
 ability to fly. From this point onward insects were to be among the
 most common and diverse land animals.
- Early terrestrial vertebrates were often competent at moving around on
 land as adults, but typically had to go back to the water in order to
 reproduce. In the coal swamps one branch of these animals evolved a
 specialized egg that allowed them to reproduce on land, and thus avoid
 this "tadpole" stage.
- These new terrestrial vertebrates---the amniotes---diversified into
 many forms. Some included the ancestors of modern mammals; others the
 ancestors of today's reptiles (including birds).
- A tremendous extinction event, the largest in the age of animals,
 devastated the world about 252 million years ago. Caused by the
 effects and side-effects of tremendous volcanoes, it radically altered
 the composition of both marine and terrestrial communities.
- In the time after this Permo-Triassic extinction, reptiles (and
 especially a branch that includes the ancestors of crocodilians and
 dinosaurs) diversified and became ecologically dominant in most
 medium- to large-sized niches.
- During the Triassic many of the distinctive lineages of the modern
 terrestrial world (including turtles, mammals, crocodile-like forms,
 lizard-like forms, etc.) appeared. Other groups that would be very
 important in the Mesozoic but would later disappear (such as
 pterosaurs and (in the seas) ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs) evolved at
 this time.
- Dinosaurs were initially a minor component of these Triassic
 communities. Only the tall, long-necked sauropodomorphs were
 ecologically diverse during this time among the various dinosaur
 branches. However, a mass extinction event at the end of the Triassic
 (essentially the Permo-Triassic extinction in miniature) allowed for
 the dinosaurs to diversify as their competitors had vanished.
- During the Jurassic, dinosaurs diversified. Some grew to tremendous
 size; some evolved spectacular armor; some become the largest
 carnivorous land animals the world had seen by this point. Among
 smaller carnivorous dinosaurs, an insulating covering of feathers had
 evolved to cover the body (possibly from a more ancient form shared by
 all dinosaurs). Among the feathered dinosaurs were the ancestors of
 the birds.
- Other terrestrial groups such as pterosaurs, crocodile-ancestors,
 mammals, and insects continued to diversify into new habits.
- During the Jurassic and (especially) the Cretaceous, a major
 transformation of marine life occurred. Green-algae phytoplankton were
 displaced by red-algae phytoplankton (which continue to dominate
 modern marine ecosystems). A wide variety of new predators---advanced
 sharks and rays, teleost fish, predatory snails, crustaceans with
 powerful claws, specialized echinoids, etc.---appeared, and the
 sessile surface-dwelling suspension feeders that dominated the shallow
 marine communities since the Ordovician became far rarer. Instead,
 more mobile, swimming, or burrowing forms became more common.
- During the Cretaceous one group of land-plants evolved flowers and
 fruit and thus tied their reproduction very closely with animals.
 Although not immediately ecologically dominant, this type of plants
 would eventually come to be the major land plant group.
- The impact of a giant asteroid---coupled with other major on-going
 environmental changes---brought an end to the Mesozoic. Most
 large-bodied groups on land and sea, and many smaller bodied forms,
 disappeared. The only surviving dinosaurs were toothless birds.
- The beginning of the Cenozoic saw the establishment of mammals as the
 dominant group of large-bodied terrestrial vertebrates. Early on
 mammals colonized both the sea and the air as well.
- During its beginning the Cenozoic world was warm and wet, much like
 the Cretaceous. However, a number of changes of the position of the
 continents and the rise of mountain ranges caused the climates to cool
 and dry.
- As the world cooled and dried, great grasslands developed (first in
 South America, and later nearly all other continents).
- Various groups of animals adapted to the new grassland conditions.
 Herbivorous mammals became swift runners with deep-crowned teeth,
 often living in herds for protection. Mammalian predators became
 swifter as well, some becoming pack hunters.
- Other new plant communities evolved, and new animal communities which
 inhabited them. The rise of modern meadows (dominated by daisy-related
 plants and grasses) saw the diversification of mouse-and-rat type
 rodents, many frogs and toads, advanced snakes, songbirds, etc.
- A group of arboreal mammals with very big brains, complex social
 communities, and gripping hands---the primates---produced many forms.
 In Africa one branch of these evolved to live at mixed
 forest-grassland margins, and from this branch evolved some who became
 fully upright and moved out into the grasslands.
- This group of primates retained and advanced the ability to use stone
 tools that its forest-dwelling ancestors already had. Many branches
 evolved, and some developed even larger brains and more complex tools.
 It is from among these that the ancestors of modern humans and other
 close relatives evolved, and eventually spread out from Africa to
 other regions of the planet.
- About 2.6 million years ago a number of factors led to ice age
 conditions, where glaciers advanced and retreated. Various groups of
 animals evolved adaptations for these new cold climates.
- The early humans managed to colonize much of the planet; shortly after
 their arrival into new worlds, nearly all the large-bodied native
 species disappeared.
- At some point before the common ancestor of all modern humans spread
 across the planet, the ability to have very complex symbolic language
 evolved. This led to many, many technological and cultural
 diversifications which changed much faster than the biology of the
 humans themselves.
- In western Asia and northern Africa (and eventually in other regions),
 modern humans developed techniques to grow food under controlled
 circumstances, leading to true agriculture. (Other cultures are known
 to have independently evolved proto-agricultural techniques).
- This Neolithic revolution allowed for the development of more settled
 communities, specialization of individual skills within a community
 (including soldiers, metallurgists, potters, priests, rulers, and with
 the rise of writing, scribes).
- From this point we begin to get a written record, and so the
 historians can take up the story...

This list is obviously not comprehensive, and there are many elements
that I had to ignore to keep it relatively short. Still, I hope this
overview helps put where we as a species fit into the larger perspective
of Life's long voyage, a voyage that could only have been traced by the
study of fossils.

We’ve been running SV-POW! for three and half years now; in all that time we’ve never featured a guest post, because we think it’s better to keep a blog tight and focussed.  In general, that remains our policy. But today, first the first and maybe only time, we present a guest post.

Guest post: “What should everyone know about paleontology?”, by Tom Holtz

After posting about PubCreds I emailed the authors of the original article to invite a response because: 1) it’s only fair if you’re going to criticize someone’s idea to give them a chance to defend it; and 2) I think that the blogosphere is actually the ideal place to have these kinds of discussions because […]

Ethan White

*After [posting about
PubCreds](http://jabberwocky.weecology.org/2010/07/28/pubcreds-paying-for-journal-submissions-with-reviews-or-maybe-we-should-just-use-money/)*
*I emailed the authors of [the original
article](http://www.esajournals.org/doi/full/10.1890/0012-9623-91.3.325)*
*to invite a response because: 1) it's only fair if you're going to
criticize someone's idea to give them a chance to defend it; and 2) I
think that the blogosphere is actually the ideal place to have these
kinds of discussions because unlike journals it is actually designed to
allow for... well... discussions. Below follows a guest post by Jeremy
Fox & Owen Petchey. My thanks to Jeremy and Owen for taking the time to
respond. Enjoy.*

First, thanks to Ethan for a very thoughtful post on Pub Creds. This
kind of constructive criticism is actually more welcome and valuable
than unreserved praise. Thanks also to Ethan for inviting Owen and I to
respond. Owen and I have chatted about our response, and I've taken the
lead on actually writing it.

In his post, Ethan raised two major concerns about Pub Creds, who makes
the rules, and how to uniquely identify authors and reviewers. These
concerns motivated Ethan to suggest what he argues is a simpler and more
flexible system, based on real money rather than Pub Creds. I'll first
address both of Ethan's concerns, thereby alleviating the felt need to
consider a real money system. I'll then raise some concerns about an
alternative system based on real money. At the end I'll address some
minor points Ethan raised in passing.

The issue of who makes the rules, while undoubtedly challenging, doesn't
need to be as challenging as Ethan suggests. I certainly don't think we
need to elect representatives who will meet in some kind of Pub Cred
Constitutional Convention. The decision makers are the journal owners;
they're the ones who already control all other aspects of the operation
of their journals, including editorial policy and pricing. For the ESA's
journals, the starting point for this kind of discussion is the
Publications Committee, which makes recommendations to the Governing
Board. (Indeed, the ESA Publications Committee will be discussing Pub
Creds this week, at the suggestion of Ecological Monographs EiC Aaron
Ellison). Similarly, the BES has a Publications Committee, as do most
other scientific societies that sponsor journals. So while there's
undoubtedly a collective action problem here, it's not the problem of
getting thousands of individual scientists to act collectively, it's a
problem of getting a much smaller number of journal owners to act
collectively. I would make the analogy to the Dryad data-sharing and
archiving system that a number of scientific societies have just agreed
to support---we didn't need to have a "constitutional convention" to
make that happen. If and when one or more leading journal owners decide
that they want to seriously pursue Pub Creds, I imagine that they would
charge their existing Publications Committee, or else a new ad hoc
committee, to liase with other journal owners and build up a consensus
among them as to how to proceed. That's basically what happened with
Dryad, as I understand it. This seems to me both a practical and
appropriate way to proceed.

The technical issue of uniquely identifying authors and reviewers is one
that's been raised to Owen and I a few times. It never even occurred to
us that this might be an issue, which is why it's not mentioned in our
paper. Indeed, it was such a non-issue for me that, when it was first
raised, I continued to feel it was a non-issue but had trouble
articulating why! Then yesterday Owen put his finger on it: it's bank
accounts that need unique identifiers, not people. This is true in the
real-money banking system, and it's true of the Pub Cred Bank as well.
For instance, the Pub Cred Bank might work as follows:

1\) Authors sign up for an account at the Pub Cred Bank, and receive a
unique account number.  
2) In order to submit an article, the submitting person must enter the
Pub Cred Bank account number of all authors. At the same time, the
submitting person indicates which authors will bear the cost of
submission, including who will bear the cost of handling, and the
reviews.  
3) This information is passed to the Pub Cred Bank, which then emails
all authors, and also requires that authors whose account will be
debited click on a link to authorise this debit. One the PubCred Bank
has sufficient authorisation for debits, a communication is sent to the
journal submission web site and the ms submission is completed.  
4) If the ms is rejected without review, Pub Creds are debited for
handling. If it is reviewed, Pub Creds are debited according to the
distribution of debits already authorised.  
5) Reviewers will also need a Pub Cred account. Their unique account
number will be submitted with reviews. If the handling editor agrees
that the review is useful, they authorise credit to the reviewers
account.  
6)In fact, it's not even a problem if individuals have multiple accounts
at the Pub Cred Bank. After all, lots of people have multiple real-money
accounts (checking accounts, savings accounts, credit cards...) which
they use to take in and pay out funds. Authors with multiple accounts
would simply need to specify which of their accounts they wish to use to
pay for a particular submission, and reviewers with multiple accounts
would simply need to specify which of their accounts they wanted their
Pub Creds deposited into.

Obviously, we're skimming over security and other operational issues
here, but surely those are soluble, "engineering"-type issues that don't
impact the worthiness (or otherwise) of the Pub Cred proposal itself.

I hope I've addressed Ethan's major concerns about Pub Creds. So now I
get to turn the tables and raise some concerns about his proposed "real
money" alternative. 😉  In this alternative system, authors pay a fee to
submit, which is used to pay referees, and journals might be free to
compete by setting their own prices for reviews and submissions. This
idea has been proposed by various people in various versions. I first
heard about it a few years ago when I was told that it had been proposed
by Everett Fee at Limnology and Oceanography. I actually thought it was
a great idea when I first heard it, and pitched it informally to the
senior editors at Ecology Letters and Am Nat. The feedback I got was
largely negative, and upon reflection both Owen and I agree that it's
not the way to go. The major concerns, in no particular order:

1\. We respectfully disagree that currency exchange issues are
inconsequential. If they are inconsequential, we assume Ethan would have
no objection to using some currency other than USD as the standard in
which submissions and reviews are priced? Owen says that if it's all the
same to Ethan, he'd prefer to price everything in pounds sterling. 😉 We
also assume Ethan wouldn't mind if the USD depreciates against the
chosen Pub Cred currency, thereby increasing the real cost of his
submissions? And that he wouldn't mind paying transaction fees
associated with currency conversions and transfers?

2\. As Ethan notes, everyone starts off broke in Pub Cred land; the only
way to earn Pub Creds is to do reviews. The same is emphatically NOT
true of real money. Many authors have no research grants. While it's
true that these authors theoretically could pay for their submissions by
doing a proportionate amount of reviewing, there's no way to have a
real-money overdraft system to cut some slack to authors who haven't
been asked to review in a while, or at all. And while forgoing page
charges on one paper/year for authors who lack funds is one thing (many
journals do), forgoing submission charges while still continuing to pay
referees is a financial risk no journal would want to take, even for a
limited number of submissions/author/year. Plus, here's the flip side:
if you have a grant, or are simply willing to spend some personal funds,
you can buy your way out of having to review. Do we want a system where
those of us who have grants and/or sufficiently large salaries can
afford not to have to review, while those of us who don't have grants
are desperate to review because otherwise we can't afford to submit
anything?

3\. One side effect of point \#2 is that it isn't true that all that
matters is the ratio of submission costs to reviewer fees (i.e. that
their absolute values don't matter). For instance, someone who has a
grant to pay part or all of their submission costs is going to need to
be offered exorbitant amounts to be enticed to review. This isn't just
speculation on my part: I've had more than one person tell me that
they'd need to be hundreds or even \>\$1000 USD to agree to do a review
they otherwise wouldn't do.

4\. Many authors are going to be very reluctant to pay even a modest
real money fee in order to submit a paper that could well be rejected,
even if the paper is substantive and well-matched to the journal. That's
just the way it is, but that reluctance also has some rational
foundation. Since even rejection without review costs the author a bit
of money, but costs the journal little or nothing, journals will have a
financial incentive to reject papers without review and pocket the
portion of the submission fee that pays for this decision (and if you
forbid journals from charging anything for rejection without review, you
can't afford to pay editors, and you've removed much of the incentive
for authors to submit their papers to appropriate journals).

5\. If real money is involved, publishers will see it as a revenue
stream. Indeed, in conversations with a staff member at Wiley-Blackwell,
it was made clear to Owen and I that publishers are going to want to
know not just how to break even on the Pub Cred system, but how to make
money off it. And Pub Creds doesn't even involve real money! In a real
money sytem, publishers WILL want their cut of submission fees. After
all, they have to pay financial administration staff, there are overhead
costs, they have shareholders to feed...This issue is actually the
single biggest obstacle to implementing Pub Creds in practice. Making it
a real money system just makes this hurdle a hundred times taller.

6\. Is it REALLY a good idea to let journals compete on prices for
reviews and submission fees in a real money system? Remember that
everyone is not broke in "real money land". The mind boggles at what
publishers might try, and what effects it might have...

7\. For the reasons outlined above, and just because real money is a
really serious thing, I predict that it would be far harder to get a
significant number of journals to agree to a real money system than to
Pub Creds.

That's as much as Owen and I had to say on the big issues Ethan raised.
In response to some of Ethan's minor comments:

Ethan indicated his impression that journals are asking for multiple
rounds of review, which would indeed be a bad thing for all the reasons
Ethan lists. But as editors, authors, and reviewers ourselves, Owen and
I haven't noticed this. In my experience it's a very rare practice,
especially since journals compete to have short times-to-decision. This
leads many mss to be rejected without review, or else rejected for
trivial reasons after one round of review, forcing what's really a
revision to be resubmitted as a new ms.

As to whether journals should be given flexibility with regard to
credits or payments under the PubCred system, I don't think so (with one
specific exception to be noted). If flexibility were allowed, the system
would immediately break down because journals would start offering
reviewers large amounts of Pub Creds while charging authors few or no
Pub Creds (or even paying authors to submit!) If allowing journals to
compete on "price" for submissions and reviews really is a good idea
(and I don't think it is), it needs to be with real money. The only
pricing flexibility that could be possibly be allowed under the Pub Cred
system would be if journals wanted to charge X Pub Creds for a
submission, in order to pay X-1 reviewers plus the editor (e.g., Science
or Nature could charge 6 Pub Creds in order to pay for 5 reviewers plus
the editor). I've never before thought about allowing journals to charge
X Pub Creds in order to pay for X-1 reviews, but offhand I don't see a
huge obvious problem with it. This could open up an avenue for limited
competition among journals. One could imagine a journal charging as
little as 1 Pub Cred for submissions, and allowing its editors to make
all decisions unaided by external reviews. I'll need to think more about
how this limited flexibility would work in practice, and whether it
would create any perverse incentives or unwanted side effects.

Thanks again to Ethan for taking the time to offer his thoughts, and for
allowing Owen and I the chance to respond. It's always a pleasure when
one's ideas spark this kind of feedback.


After posting about PubCreds


 I emailed the authors of the original article


 to invite a response because: 1) it’s only fair if you’re going to criticize someone’s idea to give them a chance to defend it; and 2) I think that the blogosphere is actually the ideal place to have these kinds of discussions because unlike journals it is actually designed to allow for… well… discussions.

Postagens de Rogue Scholar

Guest post: “What should everyone know about paleontology?”, by Tom Holtz

Why PubCred is both easy to implement and better than real money [Guest post]