A permanent home for the SVP’s Aetogate documents
February 17, 2015
It’s hard to believe it’s been nearly seven years since the “resolution”, if you want to call it that, of Aetogate, the aetosaur plagiarism-and-claim-jumping scandal.
I was contacted privately today by someone wanting to know if I had copies of the SVP’s documents published in response to this. I didn’t — and the documents are hard to find since they have been moved at least twice from their original addresses on the SVP site. They can no longer be found by navigating that site — at least, not by me or my correspondent. (Searching doesn’t help either.)
But by suitable application of Google-fu I did manage to dig out the documents, in their third (at least) home. So I thought it would be useful to make permanent copies here, in case they vanish completely next time the SVP changes things around. Here they are:
- Statement from the Executive Committee about the allegations of unethical conduct from J. Martz, W. Parker, M. Taylor and M. Wedel against S. Lucas, A. Hunt, A. Heckert, and J. Spielmann.
[SVP copy] [local copy] - Best practices from the Ethics Education Committee regarding research, publication, and museum work.
[SVP copy] [local copy] - Addendum to Executive Committee’s Final Statement Concerning Allegations From Martz, Parker, Wedel and Taylor.
[SVP copy] [local copy]
(In case anyone’s forgotten, I was not impressed by these documents. At all.)
Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week 
February 17, 2015 at 5:54 pm
Its always good to have an easily locatable record of (attempted) transparency and ethical considerations.
I wasn’t exactly thrilled with the findings either, and as a masters student currently working in the Dockum and very regularly cross-referencing the Chinle this issue has always been a nagging itch in the back of my mind when working on undescribed taxa.
October 13, 2015 at 11:01 pm
[…] July 2013: it’s changed again, and this link is now a 404.] [Update 2, October 2015: I made my own copies of the SVP documents, in case they vanish permanently] For brevity’s sake, I’m going to […]
February 18, 2019 at 11:33 pm
I notice that all my links to the documents on the SVP website have once again broken, which means that either they’ve now been moved to a fourth location or (more likely) simply deleted and forgotten about. I consider that very poor stewardship on the SVP’s part.
November 26, 2020 at 12:27 am
[…] my links again. By October 2015 they had moved for a third time: I both updated my links, and made my own copy in case they vanished. Sure enough, by February 2019 they had gone again — either moved for a fourth time or just […]