People, not clusters
Surveillance of people with infectious diseases is a public health measure, yet such surveillance can lead to serious injustice. In an editorial in the Amer...
All posts tagged with open access
Replicability and archiving of geological samples
In Nature this week, Noah Planavsky and coworkers, including the present director of the National Museum of Natural History, Kirk Johnson, have an opinion pi...
Supplementary data loss
My inbox this morning has an article by Diana Kwon in The Scientist, looking into the data decay from the supplementary materials of published scientific art...
How much do scientific societies fear Plan S?
An article in Science looks at some of the debate over a funder-driven initiative to require open access publication of the research they fund: “Scientific s...
Should authors pay to submit their papers?
An article by Tim Vines in The Scholarly Kitchen looks at the pay-to-submit model of open access publication: “Plan T: Scrap APCs and Fund Open Access with S...
Will science funders provoke a universal switch to open access publishing?
Tania Rabesandratana writes a long piece in Science describing the push for universal open access to the scientific literature: “Will the world embrace Plan ...
Rising Star open science profile
Ars Technica has a very nice long profile of the Rising Star project by Lydia Pyne: “Rising Star found a new species—now it wants to find a new way for paleo...
Time to publish peer referee comments?
A meeting at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute last week asked whether journals should start publishing the reviews they receive on papers. As reported by ...
Link: Sci-Hub profiled
Verge has a long article on Sci-Hub, focusing on its founder, Alexandra Elbakyan: “Science’s Pirate Queen”.
Why is open science important in archaeology?
Are you curious about open science, but don’t really know what it means? The September issue of The SAA Archaeological Record includes an article that review...
Is there a trade-off between publication impact and open approaches?
Two Dutch biomedical researchers discuss how they are trying to move their institution away from mere quantity of research and citations, and toward real cli...
Let’s make replicability a priority in human evolution research
Research on human evolution may have the worst history of data access for any field of science funded by the National Science Foundation. NSF has spent milli...
New footprints from Laetoli and improving the science of fossil context
I’m jazzed this morning because eLife has published a paper by Fidelis Masao and colleagues describing new footprint trails from the famous site of Laetoli, ...
Photo: Hadar reconstruction from the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics
The North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics (NCSSM) is a science-focused high school. They have put on Flickr a large series of Creative Commons (CC...
Link: Sustaining open access databases
Cameron Neylon considers some of the challenges in keeping open data access initiatives sustainable over the long term: “Squaring Circles: The economics and ...
Why the new Wellcome Trust open review journal may be the science publishing future
John Bohannan in Science writes one of many stories about the Wellcome Trust establishing a new open access journal, in which peer review follows the posting...
Link: Costs of scientific publishing
Jonathan Tennant and colleagues have a new review of the impacts of open access scientific publishing: “The academic, economic and societal impacts of Open A...
Australopithecus sediba fossils now on MorphoSource
Lee Berger gave the luncheon plenary lecture at the meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists last Saturday, covering the recent discov...
Link: Michael Eisen comments on open access and PLOS financials
Michael Eisen writes about the economics of running PLOS in two blog posts, both worth reading for those who care about the future of scientific publishing. ...
Link: Amy Harmon article on preprints in biology
Oh, look – I’m in the New York Times today, in this great article by Amy Harmon on the increasing adoption of preprints by biologists:
Quote: The National Research Council on data access
From chapter 2 of Sharing Publication-Related Data and Materials: Responsibilities of Authorship in the Life Sciences, a publication of the National Research...
How 3D printing fossils will change the way we look at human evolution
In September our team announced the discovery of the new species, Homo naledi. The species comes from the Dinaledi Chamber, deep within the Rising Star cave ...
Link: Open access and APC double-dipping
From Leti Kleyn, in the South African edition of The Conversation, a call for better institutional open access archives: “Why it’s getting harder to access f...
Homo naledi on Wellcome Trust 10 open access facts
The Wellcome Trust blog has a post celebrating 10 years of the Trust’s mandatory open access publication policy, with 10 facts about the impact of its open a...
Link: Homo naledi and digital convergence in paleoanthropology
Todd Hanson comments on whether the Rising Star project may be a sign of a future of digital convergence in paleoanthropology: “From Cave to Rave: What Digit...
Data sharing and the ‘gift culture’ of science
Some paleoanthropologists claim that they share data very widely, because they are exchanging datasets with other researchers to accomplish particular resear...
From The Conversation: ‘Homo naledi fossil discovery a triumph for open access and education’
This is a reblog of my current article on the Africa edition of The Conversation, “Homo naledi fossil discovery a triumph for open access and education”, whi...
A return for reviewers on open access
This interview came out in October of last year, but a reader only recently brought it to my attention: “A Pay-it-Forward Approach to Open Access Publishing:...
Thinking of preprints in biology
At the end of 2014, the arXiv preprint server published its one millionth article. Richard Van Noorden reports on the milestone for Nature News: “The arXiv p...
On a scandal in replication
Experimental psychology has recently become embroiled in a controversy about whether replication of high-profile findings should be a serious goal of new res...
Have Sahelanthropus and Orrorin been written out of existence?
Barbara King devoted a recent NPR blog post to highlighting some professional acrimony in Current Anthropology: “Did Humans Evolve On The Savanna? The Debate...
Rising Star Expedition: Into the collection
Rising Star team advance scientist Elen Feuerriegel has another new post on the Rising Star Expedition blog, discussing her work with the collection after th...
Rising Star: What we know and don't know
Today’s blog post on the Rising Star Expedition blog provides an FAQ about the expedition’s results so far: “What We Know and Don’t Know So Far”.
Rising Star: In the hot seat
My first Rising Star Expedition update has been posted on the expedition blog: “In the hot seat”.
Time to trash anonymous peer review?
This week’s Science magazine is organized on the theme of science communication. In addition to the John Bohannon “sting” operation I discussed in the last p...
"Open access spam" and how journals sell scientific reputation
John Bohannon is a reporter for science magazine, who has been engaged in an investigative report for the last year about “open access” journals: “Who’s afra...
Textbook troubles
A link from a reader: “‘Required reading’: As textbook prices soar, students try to cope”.
Marapo Stones and Bones project
I was on the road when this announcement came out, but now that I’m back to regular blogging I want to share it more broadly:
History dissertations under wraps
Via a reader, this article in the New York Times about the American Historical Association’s vote to recommend that newly-minted PhDs be allowed to hide thei...
Big data, little data
Jacquelyn Gill is a paleoecologist who writes at her blog, The Contemplative Mammoth. Today she ponders a paradox: at the same time that pollen data are more...
Quote: Stephen Downes on the value of open courses
Stephen Downes, widely recognized as one of the original inventors of the “MOOC” concept, on why courses should be open: “MOOC - The Resurgence of Community ...
MOOCs and disabilities
The Coursera blog today relates a remarkable story: “Not Impossible: The Story of Daniel, a 17 Year Old with Severe Autism & His 6 Completed Coursera Cou...
White House to recognize open science
The White House is looking to recognize people who are leading in open science efforts, either by providing free access to data or by using data that is alre...
Open 3-d archive of Kromdraai
A new paper in the Journal of Human Evolution by Matthew Skinner and colleagues Skinner:Kromdraai:2013 announces the new availability of an open archive of m...
Anthropology's online ecology
Jason Antrosio has composed a short report on the “Anthropology Blogosphere 2013 Ecology of Online Anthropology”. I appreciate his kind words about my work ...
What should be the shape of the science journal landscape?
Michael Eisen, one of the founders of the Public Library of Science, has thought a lot about how to make the system of scientific publishing better. He has p...
A new high-coverage Neandertal genome
Today, Svante Pääbo’s group at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology released high-coverage sequence data from a toe bone from Denisova Cave...
Cultural Anthropology, open access
From Brad Weiss: “Cultural Anthropology will go Open Access in 2014”.
California's online imposition
This is big education news, from the California legislature: “Measure Seeks Campus Credit For Web Study”.
Binge learning
From Eli Dourado at The mlaut: “Binge Learning is Online Educations Killer App”.
White House policy on data access
The White House this week announced a new policy on public access to results from federally funded research. The announcement has gotten
Do citation indices count in tenure review?
Amy Brand comments on journal citation metrics and tenure and promotion, from the viewpoint of a university administrator Brand:appointments:2013. The piece ...
Open access and Creative Commons
Cameron Neylon comments interestingly in Nature on the intellectual property drawbacks of publications that are free to access but not to reuse: “Science pub...
"We find it hard to see what publication would achieve at this stage"
Theoretical physicist Terry Rudolph shares a story about preprints and the editorial process at a top science journal: “Guest Post: Terry Rudolph on Nature v...
Spreading preprints in population biology
Ewen Callaway reports on the increasing use of the arXiv preprint server by geneticists and biologists: “Geneticists eye the potential of arXiv”. With the ne...
Live preparation of "Karabo" skeleton streaming worldwide
I’m in Java, and even though I’m ahead of most of the world’s time zones, I’m behind on the news. This news from the University of Witswatersrand is an excit...
PeerJ set to launch
PeerJ founder Peter Binfield answers questions for Publishers’ Weekly: “Scholarly Publishing 2012: Meet PeerJ “.
Mouse brain mapping
This merits some attention: “Neuroscientists reach major milestone in whole-brain circuit mapping project”.
Big data, no access, no replication possible
The New York Times has an article by John Markoff today, pointing to several disputes over the standards for data release with scientific papers. “Troves of ...
This is totally serial
Michael B. Eisen: “The solution to the serials crisis on campus”
Sit down and shut up
Carole McGranahan describes a memorable case where academics shut down public discussion of their work: “Dialogue with the Public: Adam Yauch and Academic Sn...
Turning around the profits
The absurdity of academic publishing is starting to get attention from the mainstream press. From The Economist: “Open sesame”.
Our plenary session gets coverage
I don’t have much time to come up for air this week, it’s been an incredibly busy and exciting meeting so far. But I wanted to take a moment to pass along th...
A plenary of plenty
I’ve arrived in Portland, Oregon today for the annual meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists. This is really a central highlight of ...
Quote: Alok Jha on the cost of journals
Alok Jha, in The Guardian: “Academic spring: how an angry maths blog sparked a scientific revolution”.
Wiki into journal
PLoS Computational Biology has started a new collaboration with Wikipedia, in which short review articles called “topic pages” will be peer-reviewed, given j...
Floating to the top of the data
The New York Times writes today about “Big Data” and its effects on disparate fields of science and public policy: “The Age of Big Data”.
American Anthropological Association keeps it from the people
Last month, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy solicited comments concerning open access publication policies for federally funded resea...
Open science interview
NPR’s Science Friday interviewed open science advocate Michael Nielsen last week: “Can science be done without secrecy?” I like the headline.
"Journals seem noticeably less important than 10 years ago."
As ScienceOnline2012 gets underway later this week, the New York Times is running an article about open science: “Cracking open the scientific process”. The ...
Public interests in data from federally funded research
I submitted the following essay in response to the Request for Information on Public Access to Digital Data Resulting from Federally Funded Research from the...
Open access op/ed in NY Times
Molecular biologist Michael Eisen, writing in the New York Times: “Research bought, then paid for”.
Ecologists against public access to peer reviewed publications
This seems incredible, from Jonathan Eisen: “YHGTBFKM: Ecological Society of America letter regarding #OpenAccess is disturbing”.
Tenured inertia on publishing
Danah Boyd rants “Save Scholarly Ideas, Not the Publishing Industry”. This is a well-worn topic here on my blog, but she hits on a useful theme: People with ...
How many scholars are copyright pirates of their own work?
Ryan Anderson has been interviewing anthropologist Jason Baird Jackson about open access publication (“Anthropology & Open Access: An Interview with Jaso...
Social texting
My essay in Anthropologies (“What’s wrong with anthropology”) is cited by Monalisa Gharavi in a review for Social Text of David Graeber’s new book, Debt: The...
Looking for pseudo-books
Jason Baird Jackson posts some insights on how traditional journals can turn to open access tools (if not become open access), and how a startup online journ...
Blogs, academic discourse in economics
Paul Krugman comments on how the growth in academic blogs in economics is a continuation of publication trends that long predate the World Wide Web: “Our blo...
3D printing, faster, please
Casts!
What's wrong with anthropology?
Anthropologies is an online project organized by Ryan Anderson that brings together voices reflecting the state of the discipline today. The current volume h...
Will monographs arise from the dead, or eat our brains?
Inside Higher Ed reviews and interviews an author who argues that the scholarly monograph shackles academics to an obsolete model of communication:
The great world CT-scanning tour
The international version of Der Spiegel is running an English-language profile of the traveling CT-scan project from Jean-Jacques Hublin and the Max-Planck ...
Agitating for open science
Cameron Neylon in New Scientist: “Time for total scientific openness”.
Are apps the evil twins of e-books?
I really like e-books quite a lot. It’s easy to take a device like the Kindle, load up books, and read them. It holds your place for you, and multiple device...
Open access barriers
Richard Poynder discusses how Open Access policies may be perversely costing universities even more money, in the lead-in to an interview about the Wellcome ...
Make journals work better
George Monbiot writes in the Guardian with some sobering statistics about academic publishing: “Academic publishers make Murdoch look like a socialist”
Mailbag: Textbook costs
Re: “Textbooks leaving students behind”
Textbooks leaving students behind
The Chronicle of Higher Education reports on a survey of nearly 2000 undergraduate students on 13 varied college campuses:
An academic journal copyright story
In a post from earlier this summer, info/library scientist Jeffrey Pomerantz describes his attempts to secure a less restrictive copyright agreement for a sc...
Open science radiocarbon databases
Last week I wrote a lot about the radiocarbon chronology of late Neandertals in Europe (“Neandertals didn’t disappear before 40,000 years ago”, “Neandertals ...
Open science link
David Dobbs writes about the structural barriers to more open science: “Free Science, One Paper at a Time”. Summing up a large collaboration on Alzheimer’s r...
Opening up paleontology
Ewen Callaway writes in Nature News this week on open access science in paleontology: “Fossil data enter the web period”. I write about this topic quite a lo...
Goodall record digitization
Jason Goldman covers the acquisition of Gombe chimpanzee records from the Jane Goodall Institute by Duke University (“Digitizing Jane Goodall’s legacy at Duk...
Mailbag: More on megajournals
Re: Megajournals
Open access megajournals
The Occasional Pamphlet reflects on the new megajournal trend in open access: “A ray of sunshine in the open-access future”. PLoS ONE is being joined by SAGE...
Open data genomics
Nature this week carries a story by Ewen Callaway titled, “The rise of the genome bloggers”. The main subject is Dienekes Pontikos, whose “Dodecad Ancestry P...
Public engagement
Nature’s Gene Russo has a nice article this week about scientists’ attitudes toward colleagues who do lots of public outreach: “Outreach: Meet the press”.
Genomes unzipped, ancestry revealed
Last week I linked to Genomes Unzipped participant Joe Pickrell (“Ancestry unzipped”), who was working through the ancestry calculations that made his genome...
Why don't universities cut out the middleman?
I’ve been reading several different conversations about the future of science (and social science) academic publishing.
The price of erudition
Did you know that the three-volume Handbook of Paleoanthropology is a thousand dollars from Amazon?
PubMed at 20 million
Twenty Million Papers in PubMed: A Triumph or a Tragedy?
AnthroSource sleeps furiously
Savage Minds’ crew has been discussing the future of publishing in the American Anthropological Association recently. Rex Golub compares Open Folklore to Ant...
Down with supplements
The editor of the Journal of Neuroscience, John Maunsell, has announced that the journal will no longer permit authors to add “supplementary” material to the...
Moon units
NPR has a story about public analysis of data from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter:
NSF to require data access plan
Science Insider reports that the National Science Foundation is going to make a “data management plan” a requirement of every grant application.
Meeting casts
I’m just back from the physical anthropology meetings. What a lot of interesting things there were – a few in the sessions, and many outside of them!
Online toolkits – the good and the frustrating
In pursuit of my DIY genomics posts, I’ve been playing around with the Galaxy bioinformatics web tools. The team responsible for the South African genomes pu...
The bugs will out
Following up on the editorial by Ralph Cicerone, calling for more effective data sharing, an editorial in the Guardian by computer scientist Darrel Ince rein...
NAS president calls for data sharing
Science has a one-page editorial by National Academy of Science President Ralph Cicerone. He alludes to the climate change scandals of the last few months, a...
Not in the library yet
Irritation of the day: Archaeology papers in $150 edited volumes. Why did you spend all that time writing the article that nobody is going to read who didn’t...
Supplementing PubMed
Another problem with “online methods supplements”:
"For the time being, Mr. Gretzky is still using his brain."
Benedict Carey describes the live online dissection of the brain of Henry Molaison (“Building a Search Engine of the Brain, Slice by Slice”). There’s a lot o...
Public access to federally funded research
The Obama Administration’s Office of Science and Technology Policy is running a forum on public access to federally funded research. There seem to be ongoing...
The trouble about Kenyanthropus and Ardi
There are three skulls from putative “hominins” that date to 3.5 million years or earlier. Every one of these skulls is known now from extensive reconstructi...
Online papers
A propos to the “open access” theme, reader Bram Hessels writes in with a link to his “People with Online Paleoanthropology Papers” page.
Open access and fossil reconstruction
I would love to be able to say that the Ardipithecus pelvic and cranial reconstructions were open access.
Whoa, who stole the data?
OK, as you know I do this thing where I read the supplementary information in papers. I hate doing it; think they should put the stuff in the actual paper wh...
Mailbag: Ardipithecus
thanks for your pellucid ardipithecus blognote--it was enormously helpful in digesting the reports.
What can you learn for free
I’m all in favor of self-educating – most of my genetics I learned on my own. So I was interested to see what you can really learn from free online sources l...
Academic publishing notes
On academic publishing, Jason Hoyt:
Free the trees
Further drawbacks of databases in anthropology, after my post mentioning the issues. I’ll point to Martin Rundkvist’s discussion of “Open Source Dendrochrono...
Congress to repeal open access science provisions?
Putting science back in its proper place, Congress has taken up a bill to eliminate the requirement that publicly-funded research be freely accessible by the...
NSF and data access
Mark Weiss from NSF appeared at the AAPA business meeting to discuss recent changes in the funding guidelines from the Physical Anthropology program. The mo...