EGU Blogs

Green Tea and Velociraptors

Continuing the battle for open access that’s good for science, not publishers’ profits

August 20, 2014

Two developments since the last post regarding open access things for anyone interested!

First, is a little interview I had with the Open Access Button folk about er, open access: http://blog.openaccessbutton.org/2014/08/19/every-time-you-hit-a-paywall-thats-a-publisher-announcing-that-their-role-is-to-prohibit-the-progress-of-science-as-much-as-possible/

Second, is that our open letter to the AAAS has spawned a second one addressed to the Society for Neuroscience, led by Erin McKiernan: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1TwsCrAvnpTx3ggF_QXD1i826ZbsOXNo4CNy2GKsHWWw/edit

It’s not too late to sign either (leave a comment on The Winnower for our original one), and we’ll be using these as the basis to address similar letters to other publishers regarding some of their more dodgy open access policies. Glad to see the community getting behind all this!

 

Swing and a miss by the AAAS for open access

August 15, 2014

The American Association for the Advancement of Science, the world’s largest scientific organisation, recently announced their latest journal, the fully open access ‘Science Advances‘. While superficially this seems like a good move for them, digging into the details reveals many inherent flaws with the journal, that at worst portray the AAAS as a money-grabbing organisation and enemies to the real progress of science, and at best naive about the current state of scholarly publishing and the direction that the open access movement is pushing it in.

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Grim reaper or gentle giants?

June 10, 2014

Therizinosaurs were some of the true freaks of the dinosaur world. I mean that in the nicest possible way for something that looked like the sick offspring of a giant chicken and Freddie Kruger. Perhaps the weirdest things about them were these long, scythe-like claws, that although may have seemed deadly, probably weren’t unless you were a particularly scrummy looking piece of foliage. That’s right, these cousins of tyrannosaurs and other theropods used their wicked sickle-claws for trimming hedges for food.

Flandersaurus?

Flandersaurus?

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Your bite or mine?

May 28, 2014

It rises from the dark waters like some behemoth from the deep, and lets out a blood-curdling roar. It’s feeding time. One of the most iconic scenes from Jurassic Park III is where the long-snouted, sail-backed giant theropod dinosaur Spinosaurus emerges from underwater to try, yet again, to eat our beleaguered rabble of misfortunates. It’s always been the way these dinosaurs have been portrayed, including one of Spinosaurus’ close cousins Baryonyx from the UK. With their long snouts, bulbous tips, and pointy teeth, it’s often been thought that spinosaurid dinosaurs were quite a lot like modern crocodiles. But how much of this is true?

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