Exaptation is just a ten-dollar word for unintended consequences.
The raison d’etre of the blog is, no surprise, sauropod vertebrae, but we also care very much about open access and are not above using the blog as our digital soapbox. Also, our paper-related blogging in the wake of Taylor et al. (2009) set off several rounds of discussion, both here and elsewhere online, about the role of blogs in science. Although the increasing overlap between blogs and journals is not precisely or only a matter of open-vs-closed access, neither is it unrelated. Both issues are part of the ongoing revolution in how science is communicated, both among researchers and with (with, not to) the general public.
The following SV-POW! articles deal with these subjects. They’re in chronological order, broken down by year. There are also a few specific sections within that chronology:
- How Elsevier can save itself
- Mike’s lengthy moral deliberations over Sci-Hub
- Moral dimensions of Open
2009
- Off-topic: non-open academic publishing is dead
- Choosing a journal for the neck-posture paper: why open access is important
- Blog posts, papers, and the brave new digital world: your thoughts are welcome
- Blogs, papers, and the brave new digital world: Matt’s thoughts
- Blogs, papers, etc.: some more random thoughts, from Mike this time
- Yet more uninformed noodling on the future of scientific publishing and that kind of thing
- Right, that’s it — time for the revolution
- Ornithischian Limb-Bone Project Of The Decade
- Electronic publishing is inevitable and even the ICZN is beginning to accept it
2010
- Notes on Early Mesozoic Theropods and the future of zoological nomenclature
- University of California vs. Nature
- I only just realised … the draft Phylocode does not recognise electronic publication!
- Tutorial 9: how to get copies of academic papers
- An open letter to Palaeontologia Electronica
2011
- An open letter to PLoS ONE — a pox on your numbered references!
- Please welcome the ICBN to the 21st Century
- Researchers! Stop doing free work for non-open journals!
- Authors versus publishers
- Nature and Elsevier on peer-reviewing
- Collateral damage of the non-open reviewing boycott
- Economics of open-access publishing
- “I do not see much changing.” Oh really?
- Now Elsevier starts a PLoS ONE clone
2012
This is where the Academic Spring really kicked off.
- Do your bit to oppose the evil Research Works Act
- The obscene profits of commercial scholarly publishers
- New in the Guardian: Academic publishers have become the enemies of science
- Nature and Science both oppose the RWA
- Publishers do not provide peer-review. We do.
- An astonishing new foolproof way to get funding for any science project
- It’s like rain on your wedding day
- Publishers invent a whole new form of evil: suing their customers
- What is a “private-sector research work”?
- What actually is Elsevier’s open-access license?
- Want free-to-use silhouettes of organisms? PhyloPic is here!
- Blog citations are better than pers. comms.
- “But researchers have the access they need”
- Biology Open journal uses not-quite-open CC-BY-NC-SA license
- Who is publishing how many open-access papers?
- Academic Spring and a declaration of independence
- D-Day: going on the offensive over public access
- Why isn’t anyone publishing open-access articles in Elsevier journals?
- A window of opportunity for Elsevier
- A response to one Elsevier employee, and an open letter to the rest
- Infographic: contribution and revenue for a typical scholarly paper
- All right then, so what are the alternatives?
- What if we just post PDFs on the open web?
- A new site: Who needs access? You need access!
- My new article is up at Discover Magazine‘s guest blog, The Crux
- A single, simple, direct question to publishers about the RWA
- Scientific reputations and clashing worldviews
- What have we learned about Elsevier’s open-access licence?
- Today is Copyright Transfer Agreement Day!
- Holy poop! They did it! Elsevier withdraws support for the Research Works Act
- This just in: the Research Works Act is dead!
- Can Elsevier save itself?
- Sign the White House’s public access petition!
- Five people every second are denied access to JSTOR
- Winkling licence information out of Elsevier, bit by bit
- Building Insights. Breaking Links.
- New at Times Higher Education: “Open, moral and pragmatic”
- It’s not all doom and gloom in academia: at least Elsevier are increasing their profits!
- Understanding Elsevier’s open-access licence, part 4: who owns copyright?
- French fries and academic publishing
- Pay to download Elsevier’s “open access” articles
- Elsevier are not evil
- Following up on Biology Open journal’s not-quite-open CC-BY-NC-SA licence
- Changes through growth in sauropods and ornithopods [skip down to PLoS ONE vs. Journal of Morphology]
- P.S.I.O.N podcast on open access and metrics
- Call for comments on RCUK’s new Open Access policy
- My RCUK submission
- A farewell to Nature Precedings
- The call for comments on RCUK’s draft open-access policy is open till Tuesday 10th April
- The tide is turning on Open Access
- Open access in the public eye
- Two new dispatches from the Shiny Digital Future
- How Elsevier can save itself:
- Also published during the Elsevier series:
- UK Government on open access: better than I could have hoped
- They said it would never happen — but it just has
- Filter-then-publish vs. publish-then-filter
- See, this is why publishers irritate me so much
- Publishers versus everyone
- Help the USA into the 21st century (even if you’re not American)
- Open access gathers pace — and you can make a difference
- I would like an explanation for why it costs $585 to email an open-access article
- The Publishers Association is hallucinating
- Scopus is useless
- My submission for the SSP annual meeting’s panel discussion
- Freeing digitised journal archives
- Great news! 44% of libraries will save money from Green OA!
- Springer has work to do to keep its open-access leadership
- Springer are digging themselves deeper into a hole
- My comments to Times Higher Education about the White House petition
- A completely pointless mini-rant on journal guidelines
- “But researchers have the access they need”, redux
- Belated thoughts on the Finch Report on achieving Open Access
- Positive signs from Wiley on open access
- Dear Wiley: please use Creative Commons Attribution for your open-access activities
- What should society journals do about open access?
- What does it cost to publish a paper with Elsevier?
- Thoughts on the Finch Report, part 2
- Front page of today’s Guardian: Free access to British scientific research within two years
- How to start a new open-access journal: practicalities
- What does it cost to publish a paywalled paper with anyone?
- Where peer-review went wrong
- Some more of peer-review’s greatest mistakes
- What is this peer-review process anyway?
- PeerJ: sorted
- The ICZN now recognises electronic publication!
- On the problem of “predatory open-access publishers”
- Posting palaeo papers on arXiv
- Elsevier allows free access to all articles over four years old in “primary math journals”
- Counting beans
- What is the difference between a paper and a blog post?
- Publish means “make public”. Paywalls are the opposite of publishing
- Do not moderate comments on your blog [partial repost of Tutorial 18]]
- Wiley has switched to Creative Commons licensing for its open-access journals
- Four Short Pieces: forging onward into the Shiny Digital Future
- What we at SV-POW! are doing for Open Access Week
- Tutorial 19a: Open Access definitions and clarifications, part 1: what actually is Open Access?
- Tutorial 19b: Open Access definitions and clarifications, part 2: Gold and Green
- Questions concerning Open Access research
- Tutorial 19c: Open Access definitions and clarifications, part 3: a brief note on Platinum/Diamond
- Tutorial 19d: Open Access definitions and clarifications, part 4: licences
- Tutorial 19e: Open Access definitions and clarifications, part 5: copyright
- Well, that about wraps it up for peer-review
- Tutorial 19f: Open Access definitions and clarifications, part 6: open access that comes and goes
- The single greatest thing that’s ever been said in author instructions
- Crowdsourcing a database of “predatory OA journals”
- What does it cost to publish a Gold Open Access article?
- Where do formatted references come from?
- What would happen if I placed my manuscripts in the Public Domain?
2013
- My submission to the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee
- Why did the UK government fund manure instead of apple trees?
- Giving it both barrels at the Guardian
- Is it immoral to hide your research behind a paywall?
- 3rd try: the choice of where to publish has a moral component
- What if an open-access publisher goes bankrupt?
- Open access books
- My submission to the House of Commons inquiry on Open Access
- What is a viral licence?
- PeerJ launches today! (and we’re in it!)
- Open peer-review at PeerJ
- Support this: the Fair Access to Science and Technology Research Act (FASTR)
- Publishers versus libraries
- Quick hits: theses on arXiv, teaching with PeerJ, Wedel talks this week
- How disruptive is PeerJ?
- The House of Lords’ terribly disappointing report on Open Access
- The progressive erosion of the RCUK open access policy
- What an amazing day for open access
- Publishers do not manage peer-review, either. We do.
- Can repositories solve the access problem?
- All Green-OA embargoes are iniquitous
- The only winning move is not to play
- Nature on choosing to publish in open-access journals
- Banned from commenting at Nature
- “I don’t think it’s appropriate”
- A short thought on Edwin Mellen Press
- A pox on your numbered references, redux
- Banned from commenting at Nature AGAIN
- A few words on Elsevier’s acquisition of Mendeley
- Idiot things that we we do in our papers out of sheer habit
- My opening statement at the Evolution Or Revolution debate
- The evolution-or-revolution debate at the Oxford Union
- Seriously, Mendeley people, what did you expect?
- Check your calculations. Submit your data. Replicate.
- Predatory publishers: a real problem
- Peer review does not mean we can trust a published paper
- The opportunity cost of paywalled research
- Of divorce lawyers and scholarly publishers
- Of course the serials crisis is not over, what the heck are you talking about?
- Biology and palaeontology papers in arXiv
- The SV-POW! open-access decision tree
- Who owns a peer-reviewed, revised, accepted manuscript? YOU DO!
- Dear PLOS ONE: time to sort out your multiple review tracks
- Dear legitimate open-access publishers: stop spamming!
- All joined with a single voice to praise CHORUS, thus: “meh.”
- Why open access is not socialism
- PeerJ is a year old tomorrow!
- Publishing is a button: what Clay Shirky didn’t say
- Some problems with hybrid open access
- Why did RCUK betray us to barrier-based publishers?
- Funders have all the power in OA negotiations. So why aren’t they using it?
- Why a NISO effort to standardise AltMetrics?
- MAKE MONEY FAST!!!
- A loophole in PLOS’s use of the CC By licence
- Why Robin Osborne makes no sense
- The Royal Society has taken some steps to improving reporting of submit/resubmit/accept times
- The SV-POW! journal finder
- Dear publishers: this is how to fix a bug in your platform
- Dear journals: communicate with your authors
- The Finch Group needs to grasp the nettle
- Plagiarism is nothing to do with copyright
- Reviews for our Barosaurus preprint
- Dear publishers: please get out of the way
- John Bohannon’s peer-review sting against Science
- Anti-tutorial: how to design and execute a really bad study, in which I stop being all Nice-Guy about the Science sting.
- Looking for a project? Analyse open-access involvement by career-stage
- The world’s most open-access dinosaur
- Mike will be speaking at the Berlin 11 conference next week
- Generations unite! Open Access can’t fail
- Mike’s talks at the Berlin 11 conference
- Walk-in access? Seriously?
- Elsevier is taking down papers from Academia.edu
- Correlation of impact factor and citations: a personal case-study
- Elsevier steps up its War On Access
- Elsevier’s David Tempest explains subscription-contract confidentiality clauses
2014
- Can The Scholarly Kitchen save itself?
- Will Elsevier have a Snowden Event?
- Great news on open access in the USA … and a long, long way to go
- Tutorial 27: how to publish an open-access paper in a paywalled journal
- The Paleontological Society’s new open access options
- Guest Post: Jan Velterop on open-access licences
- If Harry Potter was an academic work
- Stop what you’re doing and go read Cameron Neylon’s blog
- Can PeerJ really be only a year old?
- How is it possible that Elsevier are still charging for copies of open-access articles?
- A “nuanced” position isn’t always correct
- HEFCE’s new open-access policy for post-2014 outputs
- How to negotiate with Elsevier
- Now it’s NPG’s turn to send takedown notices [Note: this post is rubbish. I’m leaving it up only because I don’t like to change history.]
- Science paywalls as tragedy
- I’m speaking at ESOF2014 on “Should science always be open?”
- Mike Taylor’s ESOF2014 talk: should science always be open?
- How should I cite my old/new diversity preprint?
- Fumbling towards transparency: the Royal Society’s “reject & resubmit” and submitted/published dates
- Researchers: do your damned job
- Open Letter to the AAAS about Science Advances
- Come on, AAAS. You can do better than this
- The CC By licence does not let people distort and misrepresent your work
- Interview with Open Access Nigeria
- Publishers, where is the added value?
- CC-By documents cannot be re-enclosed if their publisher is acquired
- Is my new sauropod-neck cartilage paper “published”?
- We need clear policy on tweeting from academic conferences
- Have De Gruyters enclosed previously open-access Bepress journals?
- The most important essay on scholarly publication this week
- Is publishing “just a button”?
- Open-access megajournals reduce the peer-review burden
- On ReadCube, and Nature‘s give-away
- Why I feel horrible about Nature’s article-sharing initiative
2015
- Our thoughts on Elsevier’s newly announced, as-yet-untitled, PLOS ONE clone
- A permanent home for the SVP’s Aetogate documents
- Here comes VAMP, a new open-access journal of vertebrate palaeontology
- “PeerJ can’t possibly last because the numbers don’t add up.”
- Pay Scientific Reports extra to bypass peer-review altogether [Note: this is an April Fool post, based on real Scientific Reports behaviour.]
- Heaven protect us from a “UK National Licence”
- Live-blog: the Future of Scholarly Scientific Communication
- Measure the thing you’re interested in
- Why Mike is interested in Royal Society Open Science, and why Matt isn’t
- What are we going to call PLOS ONE-style peer-review?
- Richard Poynder on the need for transparency in publishing
- Live-blog: the Future of Scholarly Scientific Communication, part 2
- Live-blog: the Future of Scholarly Scientific Communication: Part 2, day 2 [guest-post by Yvonne Nobis]
- The Medical Journal of Australia vs Elsevier
- Copyright from the lens of reality
- A followup on Elsevier’s defence of scholarly copyright
- Two short observations on AAAS and open access
- Public access to results of NSF-funded research
- Green and Gold: the possible futures of Open Access
- Have we reached Peak Megajournal?
- Things to do when a paper comes out: a checklist
- How much does “typesetting” cost?
- Arrogance, elitism, paternalism
- Introducing The One Repo
- How can next REF more strongly emphasise the unimportance of Impact Factor?
- The 5 stages of PeerJ
- The University of Bristol’s new #OpenAccess policy
- Four different reasons to post preprints
- Copyright: promoting the Progress of Science and useful Arts by preventing access to 105-year-old quarry maps
- “The editor had requested a price of 400 euros, an APC that is not sustainable”
- #OpenCon 2015: absolutely, indisputably, the best conference ever
2016
- All right then, how should we evaluate research and researchers?
- The Less Wrong Metric (LWM): towards a not wholly inadequate way of quantifying the value of research
- Choosing parameters for the Less Wrong Metric (LWM)
- Simple metrics in a complex world: Matt’s pessimistic take on the LWM
- The Sci-Hub series:
- 1. Barbra Streisand, Elsevier, and Sci-Hub
- 2. What should we think about Sci-Hub?
- 3. Does Sci-Hub phish for credentials?
- 4. What is Alexandra Elbakyan’s motivation for creating and running Sci-Hub?
- 5. Sci-Hub is a scholarly litmus test
- 6. Thought-experiment #1: what will happen if Sci-Hub succeeds?
- 7. Thought-experiment #2: what will happen if Sci-Hub fails?
- 8. Copying content is not the same as theft
- Also published during the Sci-Hub series:
- Populating the European Commission’s Open Science Policy Platform
- Moral dimensions of Open:
- part 0: why this matters
- part 1: “marginal cost is zero, so price should be zero”
- part 2: “the public paid for it, so the public should have access”
- part 3: “legacy publishers make huge profits”
- part 4: “on the shoulders of giants”
- part 5: whose responsibility is this?
- (and later:) Our short paper on moral dimensions of open
- What would a Gold-OA world look like? Three issues briefly considered
- I did my research. Yes, I think academic publishers are greedy. (With notes on publishers’ rhetoric and creationism)
- Elsevier’s increasing control over scholarly infrastructure, and how funders should fix this
- The unquiet corpse of Ingelfinger is still shambling around, smashing up science
- That comment that was censored from the Scholarly Kitchen
- Legacy publishers are not our friends. Can’t we just admit it?
- Europe: “Let’s make everything better!” / STM Publishers: “No, let’s not.”
- “We don’t need OA in our field, everything is on arXiv”. Nope.
- Our short paper on moral dimensions of open
- Elsevier has started destroying SSRN
- I hold the copyright in my 2010 article on the history of sauropod research
- Another day, another Elsevier power-grab
- Should we still give taxonomic authorities?
- #OpenAccessWeek: my Jisc interview about designer labels
- #OpenAccessWeek: a bibliography on the impact of open access outside academia
- #OpenAccessWeek: DELETED SCENES from my Jisc interview
- Should universities accept Elsevier’s negotiation with Jisc? Who knows? It’s secret.
2017
- My talk on copyright, from the University of Manchester’s “Open Knowledge in Higher Education” course
- Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse
- Why do we manage academia so badly?
- Towards the long-overdue open graph of citations
- Declining a review request for a non-open journal
- What exactly is the problem with Elsevier and co?
- “But Elsevier bought Mendeley and SSRN, but they’re OK, aren’t they?”
- Who owns your favourite journal?
- Who owns the copyright in your research?
- Why publishers cannot be around the table when the scholarly community discusses its communication options
- Flipping subscription journals to OA: Journal of Algebraic Combinatorics
- Unpaid reviewing, community, and choice
2018
- Green open-access does NOT mean delayed or non-commercial
- Martin Grötschel’s opening address to the APE 2018 conference (Academic Publishing in Europe)
- Work on the Archbishop begins!
- How long would it take to buy Elsevier instead of APCs or subscriptions?
- Academic-Led Publishing: an interview in which I am somehow represented as an expert
- Writing the vertebral-orientation paper in the open
2019
- TODAY at 7pm! I’m on an Academic-Led Publishing panel
- Dear eLife: please give us eLife ONE
- There are more and more options for non-exploitative publishers
- On the philosophy of what research is for
2020
- I’ve been an idiot for three years; or, goodbye Brexit, hello Open Access!
- The R2R debate, part 1: opening statement in support
- The R2R debate, part 2: opening statement against the motion
- The R2R debate, part 3: my response for the motion
- The R2R debate, part 4: the video!
- Scientific Reports is an objectively bad journal
- Why do people publish in Scientific Reports?
- The R2R debate, part 5: what I actually think
- Introducing a new journal metric: the Objective Quality Factor (OQF)
- Name the journal. Shame the publisher.
- I support #OpenAccess because …
- Thoughts (three different ones) on Nature‘s €9,500 article-processing charge
- Please review our new paper on pneumatic variation in sauropod vertebrae!
2021
- A funny thing happened on the way to the Shiny Digital Future
- Good experiences of peer-review at Qeios
- When peer-review goes bad … really bad and I misconstrued the review history of the paper discussed in the last post: my apologies
- The cost, value and price of scientific publication
- Why the price of scholarly publishing is so much higher than the cost
Comments are open; let us know what you think.
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