Green Tea and Velociraptors

Getting into open science

Jon Tennant October 21, 2015

This was originally posted at: https://thewinnower.com/papers/2301-my-open-science-story

It never really occurred to me not to be open. From the moment I started my PhD, I made a promise to myself that everything I did would be open and transparent. By this, I don’t just mean access to published papers – I wanted the data, and the information that I was generating to be freely available, and understandable to everyone. Apparently, this makes you a ‘radical’, but to me the alternatives just didn’t appeal. I didn’t see the sense in paywalls, in not sharing, in doing things for any reason but the benefit of the commons.

I remember during my Masters, back in 2011, vowing that my first paper would be published in PLOS ONE – I couldn’t fathom the idea that research I’d spent so long on wouldn’t be freely available. It took 3 years, but I eventually made it happen. My next paper was in PeerJ – I wanted to show that publishing open access early on in your career doesn’t cost anything, and is the easiest approach that benefits the most people. That’s when I really started to get into open science. Hitting paywalls when trying to do your research, or not knowing where the data was to support the conclusions of papers – these are huge impediments to researchers at all levels, and frankly I didn’t understand why it was the norm.

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New species of ‘river dolphin’ reveals their ancient marine origins

Jon Tennant September 7, 2015

A new species of extinct dolphin closely related to modern Amazonian ‘river dolphins’, but which dwelled in ancient oceans, is helping to solve the mystery of how and when dolphins adapted for life away from the sea.

Freshwater dolphins are endangered, largely due to human activity. In modern ecosystems, only five or six species remain, and among these, the Yangtze ‘river dolphin’ was declared ‘functionally extinct’ in 2006.

These animals are truly remarkable, and show what scientists have interpreted as adaptations for helping to navigate the murky waters of the winding rivers they inhabit: broad, paddle-shaped flippers, and long narrow snouts – much longer than their modern, sea-dwelling cousins – and flexible necks for catching rapidly darting prey.

An artist’s recreation of Isthminia panamensis feeding on a flatfish. Many features of this new species appear similar to today’s ocean dolphins, yet the new fossil species is more closely related to the living Amazon River dolphin. Image: Julia Molnar / Smithsonian Institution

Scientists from the Smithsonian discovered a new genus and species of extinct ‘river dolphin’, hailing from the Caribbean Coast of Panama 6 million years ago during a time known as the Miocene. Based on a skull and parts of the right flipper, they estimate it could grow to more than 9 feet in length, just slightly larger than its modern relatives. The new animal is named Isthminia panamensis, as a dedication to the people of the Republic of Panama, and the many scientists who’ve studied the biology and geology of the region.

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Dwarf crocodiles are the cutest, even if they’ve been dead for 150 million years..

Jon Tennant December 27, 2014

Europe 150 million years ago must have been a brilliant place to go on holiday. Tropical islands, warm lagoons to bathe, a warm climate, and nine metre long crocodiles noshing on anything that couldn’t swim fast enough. Ok, so maybe not that great for humans, but if you were an ancient archosaur, living alongside dinosaurs and other now extinct animals, life must have been pretty sweet.

These giant crocodiles were known as metriorhynchids, and were fully adapted to swim in the seas. Living alongside them, though, were smaller but by no means less impressive crocodiles known as atoposaurids. These are the cute little, but unfortunately extinct, guys I’ve been studying as part of my PhD for the last couple of years, and they are some of the best preserved fossil crocodiles we’ve got.

Alligatorellus bavaricus, newly named from Bavaria, Germany. Tennant and Mannion (2014)

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“Open access wins all of the arguments all of the time.”

Laura Roberts-Artal November 25, 2014

One is rather inspired. OpenCon 2014 was a wonderful time bringing together the best minds in early career research and the ‘world of open’ to discuss how we make access to knowledge, data, and educational resources better for everyone. It wasn’t so much an event*, as a milestone. Here’s the story of its success.

I don’t want to run through the basics of each aspect of open access, data, and education. Let me instead tell you instead about how we just marked a revolutionary point in making the fundamental right to research a reality. When I use the word ‘publishers’ through this post, I’m talking primarily about legacy ones – those who operate on a paywall-based model and publicly declare themselves to be enemies of progressing research (I’m not going to name names, we all know who they are – PeerJ is clearly safe). This does not include many learned societies, which I think are an invaluable component of academic communities and are a completely separate discussion we need to have.

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