It shouldn’t come as a huge surprise to regular readers that PeerJ is Matt’s and my favourite journal. Reasons include its super-fast turnaround, beautiful formatting that doesn’t look like a facsimile of 1980s printed journals, and its responsiveness to authors and readers. But the top reason is undoubtedly its openness: not only are the article open access, but the peer-review process is also (optionally) open, and of course PeerJ preprints are inherently open science.

During open access week, PeerJ now publishes this paper (Farke et al. 2013), describing the most open-access dinosaur in the world.

It’s a baby Parasaurolophus, but despite being a stinkin’ ornithopod it’s a fascinating specimen for a lot of reasons. For one thing, it’s the most complete known Parasaurolophus. For another, its young age enables new insights into hadrosaur ontogeny. It’s really nicely preserved, with soft-tissue preservation of both the skin and the beak. The most important aspect of the preservation may be that C-scanning shows the cranial airways clearly:

This makes it possible for the new specimen to show us the ontogenetic trajectory of Parasaurolophus — specifically to see how its distinctive tubular crest grew.

But none of this goodness is the reason that we at SV-POW! Towers are excited about this paper. The special sauce is the ground-breaking degree of openness in how the specimen is presented. Not only is the paper itself open access (and the 28 beautiful illustrations correspondingly open, and available in high-resolution versions). But best of all, CT scan data, surface models and segmentation data are freely available on FigShare. That’s all the 3d data that the team produced: everything they used in writing the paper is free for us all. We can use it to verify or falsify their conclusions; we can use it to make new mechanical models; we can use it to make replicas of the bones on 3d printers. In short: we can do science on this specimen, to a degree that’s never been possible with any previously published dinosaur.

This is great, and it shows a generosity of spirit from Andy Farke and his co-authors.

But more than that: I think it’s a great career move. Not so long ago, I might have answered the question “should we release our data?” with a snarky answer: “it depends on why you have a science career: to advance science, or to advance your career”. I don’t see it that way any more. By giving away their data, Farke’s team are certainly not precluding using it themselves as the basis for more papers — and if others use it in their work, then Farke et al. will get cited more. Everyone wins.

Open it up, folks. Do work worthy of giants, and then let others stand freely on your shoulders. They won’t weigh you down; if anything, they’ll lift you up.

References

Farke, Andrew A., Derek J. Chok, Annisa Herrero, Brandon Scolieri, and Sarah Werning. 2013. Ontogeny in the tube-crested dinosaur Parasaurolophus (Hadrosauridae) and heterochrony in hadrosaurids. PeerJ 1:e182. http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj.182