My name is Giraffatitan, king of kings
April 30, 2015
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!
[Giraffatitan brancai paralectotype MB.R.2181 (formerly HMN S II), mounted skeleton in left anteroventrolateral view. Presacral vertebrae sculpted, skull scaled and 3d-printed from specimen T1. Round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away.]
Richard Poynder on the need for transparency in publishing
April 28, 2015
[This is a guest-post by Richard Poynder, a long-time observer and analyst of academic publishing now perhaps best known for the very detailed posts on his Open and Shut blog. It was originally part of a much longer post on that blog, the introduction to an interview with the publisher MDPI. I’m pleased to reproduce it here with Richard’s kind permission — Mike.]
In light of the current lack of information available to enable us to adequately judge the activities of scholarly publishers, or to evaluate the rigour of the publication process that research papers undergo, should not both scholarly publishers and the research community be committing themselves to much greater transparency than we see today?
For instance, should not open peer review now be the norm? Should not the reviews and the names of reviewers be routinely published alongside papers? Should not the eligibility criteria and application procedures for obtaining APC waivers be routinely published on a journal’s web site, along with regularly updated data on how many waivers are being granted? Should not publishers be willing to declare the nature and extent of the unsolicited email campaigns they engage in in order to recruit submissions?
Should not the full details of “big deals” and hybrid OA “offsetting agreements” be made publicly available? Should not publishers be more transparent about why they charge what they charge for APCs? Should not publishers be more transparent about their revenues and profits? For instance, should not privately owned publishers make their accounts available online (even where there is no legal obligation to do so), and should not public companies provide more detailed information about the money they earn from publicly-funded research and exactly how it was earned? And should not publishers whose revenue comes primarily from the public purse be entirely open about who owns the company, and where it is based?
Should not the research community refuse to deal with publishers unwilling to do all the above? Did not US Justice Louis D. Brandeis have a point when he said, “Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman.”
Roadside dinos of Yermo, California
April 27, 2015
A couple of weekends ago, London and I went camping and stargazing at Afton Canyon, a nice dark spot about 40 miles east of Barstow. On the way home, we took the exit off I-15 at Ghost Town Road, initially because we wanted to visit the old Calico Ghost Town. But then we saw big metal dinosaurs south of the highway, and that’s how we came to Peggy Sue’s Diner and in particular the Diner-saur Park.
The Diner-saur Park is out behind the diner and admission is free. There are pools with red-eared sliders, paved walkways, grass, trees, a small gift shop, and dinosaurs. Here’s a Spinosaurus – curiously popular in the Mojave Desert, those spinosaurs.
Ornithischians are represented by two stegosaurs, this big metal one and a smaller concrete one under a tree.
The turtles are entertaining. They paddle around placidly and crawl out to bask on the banks of the pools, and on little islands in the centers.
The gift shop is tiny and the selection of paleo paraphernalia is not going to blow away any hard-core dinophiles. But it is not without its charm. And, hey, when you find a dinosaur gift shop in the middle of nowhere, you don’t quibble about size. London got some little plastic turtles and I got some cheap and horribly inaccurate plastic dinosaur skeletons to make a NecroDinoMechaLaser Squad for our Dinosaur Island D&D campaign.
Now, about that sauropod. The identification sign on the side of the gift shop notwithstanding, this is not a Brachiosaurus. With the short forelimbs and big back end, this is clearly a diplodocid. The neck is too skinny for Apatosaurus or the newly-resurrected Brontosaurus, and too long for Diplodocus. I lean toward Barosaurus, although I noticed in going back through these photos that with the mostly-straight, roughly-45-degree-angle neck, it is doing a good impression of the Supersaurus from my 2012 dinosaur nerve paper. Compare this:
to this:
If I had noticed it sooner, I would have maneuvered for a better, more comparable shot.
Guess I’ll just have to go back.
Reference
What are we going to call PLOS ONE-style peer-review?
April 24, 2015
When a paper goes for peer-review at PLOS ONE, the reviewers are told not to make any judgement about how important or sexy or “impacty” the paper is — to judge it only on methodical soundness. All papers that are judged sound are to be published without making guesses about which will and won’t improve the journal’s reputation through being influential down the line. (Such guesses are hopelessly inaccurate anyway.)
When PLOS ONE was new, this approach drew scorn from established publishers, but now those publishers all have their own journals that use similar editorial criteria (Nature’s Scientific Reports, AAAS‘s Science Advances, Elsevier’s first attempt, Elsevier’s second attempt, the Royal Society’s Royal Society Open Science). Those editorial criteria have proved their worth.
But what are we going to call this style of peer-review?
It’s not a new problem. I discussed it with with David Crotty three years ago without reaching any very satisfactory conclusion. But three years have not really helped us much as we try to agree on a term for this increasingly important and prevalent model.
What are the options on the table?
PLOS ONE-style peer-review. It’s a cumbersome term, and it privileges PLOS ONE when that is now far from the only journal to use this approach to peer-review (and may not even have been first).
Peer-review Lite. A snide term coined by people who wanted PLOS ONE to fail. It’s not a good description, and it carries baggage.
Scientific peer-review. This one came up in the discussion with David Crotty, but it’s not really acceptable because it would leave us still needing a term for what the Open Library of Humanities does.
Objective peer-review. This is the term that was used at the Royal Society meeting at the start of this week — the idea being that you review objectively for the quality of the research, but don’t make a subjective judgement of its importance. Several people didn’t like this on the grounds that even the “objective” half is inevitably subjective.
Any others that I missed?
I don’t have a good solution to propose to this problem; but I think it’s getting more urgent that we do solve it. We have to have a simple, unambiguous, universally understood term to understand a model of peer-review that is becoming increasingly pervasive and may well end up as the dominant form of peer-review.
Plough in — comments are open!
Update, 6pm
Liz Wager asked a very similar question four years ago, over on the BMJ blog: what to call the journals that use this approach to peer-review. Terms that she mentions include:
- “bias to publish” (from BioMed Central)
- “non-selective” (her own coinage, which she doesn’t like)
- “bumboat” (I can’t explain this one, you’ll have to read the article)
- “author-driver” or “author-focused” publication (AFP for short)
- “search-located” (which she coins, the dismisses as tautologous)
- “unconventional” or “non-traditional” (discarded as disparaging)
- “non-discriminatory”, “impartial” or “unprejudiced”
- “general” (dismissed as a non-starter)
- “broad-spectrum” (inapplicable to specialised journals)
And then in the comments various people proposed:
- “below the fold” journals
- “omnivorous” (I quite like that one)
- “alternative”
- “Voldermortian journals”, which I don’t understand at all.
- “Unfiltered”, contrasted with “filtered”
- “inclusive”, contrasted with “exclusive” (I quite like this, too)
- “high volume low hassle”
But there’s no conclusion or preferred term.
Copied from an email exchange.
Mike:
Did we know about the Royal Society’s PLOS ONE-clone?
http://rsos.royalsocietypublishing.org/about
I am in favour of this. I might well send them my next paper while the universal waiver is still in place.
Matt:
Did not know about it. Their post-waiver APC is insane. How can they possibly justify $1600?
Mike:
Well, I am obviously not a big fan of a $1600 APC; but it’s not a great deal more than PLOS ONE, and much less than PLOS Biology/Medicine.
But I think we’re converging on the idea that you can make a living running journals that charge $500 — see Ubiquity Press at http://www.ubiquitypress.com/site/publish/ – so I think anyone charging more than that has to explain why. In the case of the Royal Society, I assume it’s to fund their other activities; I am assured that I could get a waiver anyway, since I lack funding.
But are you saying you definitely won’t publish there even during the $0 phase?
Matt (with Mike’s previous post quoted):
Well, I am obviously not a big fan of a $1600 APC; but it’s not a great deal more than PLOS ONE
and much less than PLOS Biology/Medicine.
But I think we’re converging on the idea that you can make a living running journals that charge $500 – see Ubiquity Press at http://www.ubiquitypress.com/site/publish/ – so I think anyone charging more than that has to explain why. In the case of the Royal Society, I assume it’s to fund their other activities;
I am assured that I could get a waiver anyway, since I lack funding.
But are you saying you definitely won’t publish there even during the $0 phase?
Mike:
Yes, APCs should be pushing downwards all the time now. I agree that the Royal Society coming in at a level above PLOS ONE doesn’t look good — indeed PLOS ONE’s own $1350 is also looking increasingly unfashionable in the light of (A) Ubiquity providing essentially the same service for 37% of the price, and (B) the fact that PLOS now runs at an operating surplus of 27%. To my mind, it’s well past time that PLOS ONE found a way to wind its APC down — really, down into triple figures ($999 would do), though even a nominal reduction of say $50 would send a good message.
You’re absolutely right that Royal Society Open Science is, by design, a PLOS ONE rather than a PLOS Biology: it reviews on correctness alone, not on guesswork about likely impact. So, yes, it’s PLOS ONE’s price-point that’s the correct comparison here.
Where you’re mistaken, though, is in assuming that the Royal Society has shareholders who might be skimming off the cream from the APC. There are none: the Society has nothing else to spend publishing profits on but furthering its scientific mission. (Of course, it doesn’t follow from this that is ought to be seeking to make a profit from publishing at all. It has other sources of income, and presently only 8% of its income is from publishing profits.)
But I hear you on the message sent by acquiescing to a $1600-APC journal, even if that APC is waived. We both want to shift towards a world where there are no journals that charge that kind of money — or at least, that if they do, it’s because they’re the kind of “selective” journal that thinks there’s something praiseworthy about rejecting most scientifically sound submissions. Journals of that kind don’t concern me one way or another, because I just don’t play that game.
Measure the thing you’re interested in
April 23, 2015
The REF (Research Excellence Framework) is a time-consuming exercise that UK universities have to go through every few years to assess and demonstrate the value of their research to the government; the way funding is allocated between universities is largely dependent on the results of the REF. The exercise is widely resented, in part because the processes of preparing and reviewing the submissions are so time-consuming.
Dorothy Bishop has noted that results of REF assessments correlate strongly with departmental H-indexes (and suggested that we could save on the cost of future REFs by just using that H-index instead of the time-consuming peer-review process).
But it’s also been shown that H-index is strongly correlated with the simple number of publications. A seductive but naive conclusion would be: “we could just count publications for the next REF!”
But of course if we simply allocated research funding across universities on the basis of how many papers they produce, they would — they would have to — respond by simply racing to write more and more papers. Our already overloaded ability to assimilate new information would be further flooded. It’s a perverse incentive.
So this is a classic example of a very important general dictum: measure the thing you’re actually interested in, not a proxy. I don’t know if this dictum has been given a name yet, but it ought to be.
Measuring the thing we’re interested in is often difficult and time-consuming. But since only the thing we measure will ever be optimised for, we must measure the thing we want optimised — in this case, quality of research rather than quantity. That would still be true even if the correlation between REF assessments and departmental H-indexes was absolutely perfect. Because that correlation is an accident (in the philosophical sense); changing the circumstances will break that correlation.
No doubt all this reasoning is very familiar and painfully basic to people who have been working on the problem of metrics in assessment for years; to them, I apologise. For everyone else, I hope this comment provides some grains of insight.
[I originally wrote the initial form of this post as a comment on the Royal Society blog how should research and impact be assessed?, but I’m still waiting for it to be approved, so here it is.]
Live-blog: the Future of Scholarly Scientific Communication
April 20, 2015
I’m at the Royal Society today and tomorrow as part of the Future of Scholarly Scientific Communication conference. Here’s the programme.
I’m making some notes for my own benefit, and I thought I might as well do them in the form of a blog-post, which I will continuously update, in case anyone else is interested.
I stupidly didn’t make notes on the first two speakers, but let’s pick up from the third:
Deborah Shorley, ex-librarian of Imperial College London
Started out by saying that she feels her opinion, as a librarian, is irrelevant, because librarians are becoming irrelevant. A pretty incendiary opening!
Important observations:
“Scientific communication in itself doesn’t matter; what matters is that good science be communicated well.”
And regarding the model of giving papers to publishers gratis, then paying them for the privilege of reading them:
“I can’t think of any other area where such a dopey business model pertains.”
(On which, see Scott Aaronson’s brilliant take on this in his review of The Access Principle — the article that first woke me up to the importance of open access.)
Shorey wants to bring publishing skills back in-house, to the universities and their libraries, and do it all themselves. As far as I can make out, she simply sees no need for specialist publishers. (Note: I do not necessarily endorse all these views.)
“If we don’t seize the opportunity, market forces will prevail. And market forces in this case are not pretty.”
Robert Parker, ex-head of publishing, Royal Society of Chemistry
Feels that society publishers allowed themselves to be overtaken by commercial publishers. Notes that when he started working for the RSC’s publishing arm, it was “positively dickensian”, using technology that would mostly have been familiar to Gutenberg. Failure to engage with authors and with technology allowed the commercial publishers to get ahead — something that is only now being redressed.
He’s talking an awful lot about the impact factors of their various journals.
My overall impression is that his perspective is much less radical than that of Deborah Shorley, wanting learned-society publishers to be better able to compete with the commercial publishers.
Gary Evoniuk, policy director at Glaxo Smith Klein
GSK submits 300-400 scientific studies for publication each year.
Although the rise of online-only journals means there is no good reason to not publish any finding, they still find that negative results are harder to get published.
“The paper journal, and the paper article, will soon be dead. This makes me a little bit sad.”
He goes further and wonders whether we need journal articles at all? When actual results are often available long before the article, is the context and interpretation that it provides valuable enough to be worth all the effort that’s expended on it? [My answer: yes — Ed.]
—
Discussion now follows. I probably won’t attempt to blog it (not least because I will want to participate). Better check out the twitter stream.
—
Nigel Shadbolt, Open Data Institute
Begin by reflecting on a meeting ten years ago, convened at Southampton by Stevan Harnad, on … the future of scholarly scientific communication.
Still optimistic about the Semantic Web, as I guess we more or less have to be. [At least, about many separate small-sw semantic webs — Ed.] We’re starting to see regular search-engines like Google taking advantage of available machine-readable data to return better results.
Archiving data is important, of course; but it’s also going to be increasingly important to archive algorithms. github is a useful prototype of this.
David Lambert, president/CEO, internet2
Given how the digital revolution has transformed so many fields (shopping, auctions, newspapers, movies) why has scholarly communication been so slow to follow? [Because the incumbents with a vested interesting in keeping things as they are have disproportionate influence due to their monopoly ownership of content and brands — Ed.]
Current publication models are not good at handling data. So we have to build a new model to handle data. In which case, why not build a new model to handle everything?
New “born-digital” researchers are influenced by the models of social networks: that is going to push them towards SN-like approaches of communicating more stuff, more often, in smaller unit. This is going to affect how scholarly communication is done.
Along with this goes an increasing level of comfort with collaboration. [I’m not sure I see that — Ed.]
Bonus section: tweets from Stephen Curry
He posted these during the previous talk. Very important:
Ritu Dhand, Nature
[A disappointing and unconvincing apologia for the continuing existence and importance of traditional publishers, and especially Nature. You would think that they, and they alone, guard the gates of academia from the barbarians. *sigh*. — Ed.]
Lunch
Georgina Mace, UCL
[A defence of classical peer-review. Largely an overview of how peer-review is supposed to work.]
“It’s not perfect, it has its challenges, but it’s not broken yet.”
Richard Smith, ex-editor of BMJ
[An attack on classical peer-review.]
“Peer review is faith-, not evidence-based; ineffective; a lottery; slow; expensive; wasteful; ineffective; easily abused; biased; doesn’t detect fraud; irrelevant.
Apart from that, it’s perfect.”
He doesn’t want to reform peer-review, he wants to get rid of it. Publish, let the world decide. That’s the real peer-review.
He cites studies supporting his assertions. Cochrane review concluded there is no evidence that peer-review is effective. The Ioannidis paper shows that most published findings are false.
Someone should be recording this talk. It’s solid gold.
Annual cost of peer-review is $1.9 billion.
[There is much, much more. I can’t get it down quickly enough.]
Georgina Mace’s rebuttal
… amounts to contradicting Richard Smith’s evidence-supported statements, but she provides no evidence in support of her position.
Richard Smith’s counter-counter rebuttal
… cites a bunch more studies. This is solid. Solid.
For those who missed out, see Smith’s equally brutal paper Classical peer review: an empty gun. I find his conclusion (that we should just dump peer-review) emotionally hard to accept, but extremely compelling based on actual, you know, evidence.
Fascinating to hear the level of denial in the room. People really, really want to keep believing in peer-review, in spite of evidence. I understand that impulse, but I think it’s unbecoming in scientists.
The challenge for peer-review advocates is: produce evidence that it has value. No-one has responded to that.
Richard Sever, Cold Spring Harbour Press
Richard presents the BiorXive preprint server. Turns out it’s pronounced “bio-archive”, not “bye-orx-ive”.
Nothing in this talk will be new to regular SV-POW! readers, but he makes good, compelling points in favour of preprinting (which we of course agree with!)
Elizabeth Marincola, CEO, PLOS
PLOS is taking steps towards improving peer-review:
- Use of article-level metrics
- Moves towards open review
- Move toward papers evolving over time, not being frozen at the point of publication
- Better recognition of different kinds of contribution to papers
- Intention to make submitted paper available to view before peer-review has been carried out, subject only to checks on ethical and technical standard: they aim to make papers available in “a matter of days”.
She notes that much of this is not original: elements of these approaches are in F1000 Research, BiorXiv, etc.
Jan Velterop, science publisher with everyone at some point.
“I’m basically with Richard Smith when it comes to abolishing peer review, but I have a feeling it won’t happen in the next few weeks.”
The situation of publishers:
“Academia throws money at you. What do you do? You pick it up.”
Velterop gets a BIG laugh for this:
“Does peer-review benefit science? I think it does; and it also benefits many other journals.”
He quotes a Scholarly Kitchen blog-post[citation needed] as saying that the cost of technical preparation at PubMed Central — translating from an MS-Word manuscript to valid JATS XML — at $47. So why do we pay $3000 APCs? Surely the peer-review phase doesn’t cost $2953?
Update: here is that Scholarly Kitchen article.
Velterop’s plan is to streamline the review-and-publish process as follows:
- Author writes manuscript.
- She solicits reviews from two experts, using her own knowledge of the field to determine who is suitably skilled.
- They eventually sign off (perhaps after multiple rounds of revisions)
- The author submits the manuscript, along with the endorsements.
- The editor checks with the endorsers that they really have given endorsement.
- The article is posted.
Bam, done!
…
And at that point in the proceedings, my battery was running dangerously low. I typed a tweet: “low battery may finally force me to shut up! #RSSC”, but literally between typing at and hitting the Tweet button, my laptop shut down. So that’s it for day 1. I’ll do a separate post for the second and final day.
[Hi folks, Matt here. I’m just popping in to introduce this guest post by Adam Marsh (UT Austin page, LinkedIn, ResearchGate). Adam is a PhD student at UT Austin’s Jackson School of Geosciences, currently working for a semester as a Visiting Student Researcher at my old stomping ground, Berkeley’s UCMP. Adam’s been working at Petrified Forest National Park in the summers and most of his research is on the Navajo Nation in Arizona. His major interest is in how we perceive extinctions in the fossil record. Specifically, he’s exploring the geochronology of the Glen Canyon Group to look at the biotic response to the end-Triassic mass extinction. He’s also working on an overhaul of the early saurischian dinosaurs of western North America – hence this post. It’s timely because I was just talking in the last post about putting together infographics to spread your ideas; here Adam’s very nice diagram serves as a quick guide and pointer to several papers by Jeff Wilson and colleagues. Many thanks to Sarah Werning for suggesting that Adam and I get acquainted over vertebrae. Update the next day: both the diagram above and the PDF linked below have been updated to fix a couple of typos. Also, there are now black and white versions – see below.]
– – – – – – – – – –
If you’re like me, you don’t count sheep when you fall asleep, you count laminae. These struts of bone and their affiliated fossae connect and span between major structural features on vertebral neural arches such as prezygapophyses, postzygapophyses, parapophyses, diapophyses, hyposphenes, hypantra, and the neural spine. Presumably, laminae bracket and fossae house outgrowths of pneumatic diverticula from the respiratory system, which has been covered extensively on this blog in sauropodomorph dinosaurs.
Talking about these complicated structures is cumbersome; they’ve been called buttresses, ridges, struts, etc. throughout descriptive skeletal literature. But what we call things is important, especially when we introduce laminae and other vertebral structures to the rigors of phylogenetic systematics, where homologous apomorphies reign supreme. In order to avoid arguing about whether one structure is called the potato or the tomato, Jeff Wilson and others introduced a strategy of naming vertebral laminae (Wilson, 1999) and the fossae (Wilson et al., 2011) that they surround using the same vertebral landmarks that most tetrapod anatomists agree upon (see the parade of –apophyses above). The process is very simple. Vertebral laminae are named for the two structures that they connect; the prezygodiapophyseal lamina (prdl) connects the prezygapophysis and the diapophysis, so each neural arch will have two prdls. Vertebral fossae are named for the two major laminae that constrain them; the prezygocentrodiapophyseal fossa (prcdf) opens anterolaterally and is delineated dorsally by the prezygodiapophyseal lamina and ventrally by the anterior centrodiapophyseal lamina. Again, each neural arch will have two prcdfs. Those of you who are black belt vertebral anatomists, to borrow a favorite phrase from my advisor, might be interested in serial variation and how these structures change up and down the vertebral column. Until I get my act together and publish some cool new saurischian data, I will refer you to Wilson (2012). [We’ve also touched on serial variation in laminae in this post and this one. – MJW]
Same thing in black and white, with labels
You might have noticed that the names are a mouthful and take up their fair share of typed characters. In my research of early saurischian dinosaurs, I’ve run across quite a few of these laminae everywhere from herrerasaurids to sauropodomorphs to coelophysoids to Dilophosaurus. Even though I’ve drawn, photographed, and written about various laminae and fossae, I still need to remind myself of what goes where and what it’s called. Believe me, vertebral lamina nomenclature does not lend itself well to Dem Bones covers. As a result, I’ve put together a reference figure that might be useful for those of you who are dealing with this or even teaching it to students. At the very least, you can put it on the ceiling above your bed so that it’s the first thing you see when you open your eyes in the morning.
Four main vertebral laminae are present plesiomorphically in archosaurs: the anterior and posterior centrodiapophyseal laminae, the prezygodiapophyseal lamina, and the postzygodiapophyseal lamina. This means that the prezygocentrodiapophyseal, postzygocentrodiapophyseal, and centrodiapophyseal fossae are present, and sometimes the top of the transverse process is concave between the neural spine and the zygapophyses to form the spinodiapophyseal fossa. I know that a certain sister group of Sauropodomorpha can get disparaged around these parts, but the truth is that theropods build long necks, too, and sometimes in very different ways than sauropodomorphs. When you are writing about the various vertebral buttresses and chonoses, don’t get frustrated with the names, because Wilson and his colleagues have actually made it much easier for us to talk to one another about presumably homologous structures without needing an additional degree in civil engineering.
– – – – – – – – – –
Here’s the figure again in PDF form: Marsh, Adam 2015 saurischian laminae and fossae diagram v2
And in black and white for those who prefer it that way: Marsh, Adam 2015 saurischian laminae and fossae diagram v2 bw
References
- Wilson, J. A. 1999. A nomenclature for vertebral laminae in sauropods and other saurischian dinosaurs. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology 19(4): 639-653. DOI: 10.1080/02724634.1999.10011178
- Wilson, J. A., Michael, D. D., T. Ikejiri, E. M. Moacdieh, and J. A. Whitlock. 2011. A nomenclature for vertebral fossae in sauropods and other saurischian dinosaurs. PLoS One 6(2): e17114. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0017114
- Wilson, J. A. 2012. New vertebral laminae and patterns of serial variation in vertebral laminae of sauropod dinosaurs. Contributions From The Museum of Paleontology, University of Michigan 32(7): 91-110. ISSN 0097-3556
How conveniently can you package your results?
April 13, 2015
A couple of weeks ago, Mike sent me a link to this interview with ecologist James O’Hanlon, who made this poster (borrowed from this post on O’Hanlon’s blog):
We had a short email exchange which quickly converged on, “This would work well for some projects, but not for others.” That’s the same conclusion I came to in my recent review of my own paper titles: I am increasingly enamored of titles that are full sentences, because then if all someone reads is your title, they still know what you found. But not every paper can be summarized so neatly.
Beginning a tight little internet eddy that will be complete at the end of this post, Andy Farke posted my paper title review post on Facebook and it fired some discussion in the comments. Victoria Arbour wrote, “I’m trying to move more towards ‘sentence’ titles, but it’s difficult to come up with something that’s concise, accurate and nuanced sometimes!” I responded, “Totally agreed. There’s no one size fits all solution. I have no idea how John Foster and I could have turned the Snowmass Haplocanthosaurus title into a sentence that wouldn’t have been a disaster. ‘Concise, accurate, and nuanced’ are all good goals, but they pull in different directions.”
But it got me thinking about the different ways that we can craft our results for effective delivery. The default package is long-form: the paper. Not just long, but narrowly targeted: just about every sub-sub-subfield has a core of diehards who will read your paper because it’s right in their wheelhouse and they basically have to, to stay caught up. You were going to reach them anyway. The real question – the question that, iterated over all of your papers, will decide the shape of your career – is who else are you going to reach? The answer is going to depend a lot on serendipity, but you can improve your chances by building something easily digestible – scattering the seeds of your results over as many brains as possible, to increase the number of successful germinations (which in this metaphor could be anything from citations to one-off collaborations to life-long friendships). Here’s what I have so far.
Four ways to efficiently package your results
I almost wrote, “four ways to weaponize and aerosolize your science”. You’re trying to infect people with your ideas. Here are some potential delivery mechanisms.
First, and already mentioned: a good title. Not “Aspects of the history, anatomy, taxonomy and palaeobiology of good heavens I have lost feeling in my extremities” but, whenever possible, something that either tells people what you found (the sentence title) or at least indicates that you found something interesting (the question title, some ‘hook’ titles – “Why giraffes have short necks”). See these three posts for more.
Congratulations, now you’ve read Wedel and Taylor 2013a (to a first approximation). What are you going to do with all the time we just saved you?
Second, a summary figure. Discussed here. Nice because once people have seen that figure, they basically have your results in one convenient, portable, easily-digestible package. Downside: figures are usually entombed in papers, so this doesn’t count as an outreach maneuver unless you let the figure out into the wild some other way. Blog it, put it on Facebook, do something with it so that it functions as a funnel, catching people and pointing them toward your work.
Third, a punchy poster, like O’Hanlon’s. This has a similar caveat as the summary figure: if the only place people can see it is in its native environment (the paper, the scientific meeting), it’s still only preaching to the converted. Get it out where other people can see it. Second caveat: if the poster doesn’t point to something outside of itself, it doesn’t really count as outreach material. The best part of O’Hanlon’s poster is the QR code. If anyone is unhappy with how brief the poster is, they can follow the link and go down the rabbit hole. The depth of the engagement is in the user’s hands. Corollary: if your poster doesn’t have a QR code or a (tiny)URL, it’s a dead end. Why not make it into a gateway? It’s not a question of either/or, it’s an opportunity for yes/and.
Fourth, an infographic, like this one Victoria Arbour made to summarize some of the results from her big 2013 paper on Alberta ankylosaurs (borrowed from here). I thought it was ingenious when I first saw it (on Facebook), and I still do. You know why? Because I know jack about ankylosaurs, but this thing makes them seem both cool and tractable. Victoria is conveying, “There is structure here, and it makes sense. Let me guide you through it.” I instantly wanted something like this for every group of dinosaurs. You know who will appreciate you building something like this? Every other person besides the half-dozen grognards who work on the exact same thing you do (and maybe them, too). Gratitude leads to citations – people will go out of their way to cite your work just because they want other people to know about it.
Conclusions: give people a destination, give them choices, give them something
Three final points about all of this. First, none of these things work if there’s nowhere for interested parties to go, or nothing for them to find when they get there. If there’s a paper already, it had better justify the interest that made people look at it. Don’t let your catchy title be like the trailer for that movie that was 2 minutes of awesome and 1:58 of zzzzzzz. If there’s no paper yet, what are you pointing people to – a blog, a research website, a PeerJ preprint, some files on FigShare, a YouTube video, your open notebook, what? Give them somewhere to go. Immediate implication: if there’s nowhere else for interested people to go, why are you presenting now? Again: don’t build dead-ends, build gateways.
Next, if you think that crafting a second, tighter package strictly for the purposes of promotion is a bit gauche, here’s another perspective: you’re giving people more choices about how to engage with your work. A paper alone presents a very limited set of options. Read me (or skim me, or look at my figures), or don’t. Some people don’t have the activation energy that requires, and by ‘some people’ I mean everyone outside of your little niche. Most of them will never know that your work even exists. Craft something that will reach those people and give them an easy way in. Even for those closer to home, it may still make their lives easier. Have I actually read Arbour and Currie (2013)? No, but I looked at the pretty figures, because I saw the infographic on Facebook. So when I do need to know something about ankylosaurs (hey, stranger things have happened), I know where to turn – and who to cite. I, the user, have options. Give your users more options, and you may find that you get more users.
Third, it pays to stop and think about how people who aren’t in your narrow sub-sub-subfield are going to find out about your work. Do you have a blog? A Facebook account? Active on a mailing list or a forum? As long as that figure or poster or infographic sits in its native habitat, it’s only reaching the converted. Put it on your blog or on Facebook, now it’s something else, carrying your ideas out into the world: a missive, a missile, a missionary – all from the Latin mittere, ‘to send’. You’re already doing the work. Package it, neatly and tightly, and send it.
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Many thanks to Victoria Arbour for permission to post her diagram, and for her patience over the 23 months that it has taken me to get around to doing so. You really should go check out Arbour and Currie (2013) – the figures are stunning – and Victoria’s extensive and entertaining series of blog posts that followed. That rabbit hole starts here.
References
- Arbour VM, Currie PJ (2013) Euoplocephalus tutus and the Diversity of Ankylosaurid Dinosaurs in the Late Cretaceous of Alberta, Canada, and Montana, USA. PLoS ONE 8(5): e62421. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0062421
- Wedel, M.J., and Taylor, M.P. 2013. Neural spine bifurcation in sauropod dinosaurs of the Morrison Formation: ontogenetic and phylogenetic implications. Palarch’s Journal of Vertebrate Palaeontology 10(1): 1-34. ISSN 1567-2158.
YPM 1980: Brontosaurus excelsus, the animal formerly known as Apatosaurus excelsus, the animal formerly known as Brontosaurus excelsus.
Today is a good day for sauropod science. Since we’re not getting this up until the afternoon, you’ve probably already seen that Emanuel Tschopp and colleagues have published a monstrous specimen-level phylogenetic analysis of Diplodocidae and, among other things, resurrected Brontosaurus as a valid genus. The paper is in PeerJ so you can read it for free (here).
I’ve already been pinged by lots of folks asking for my thoughts on this. I know that the return of Brontosaurus is what’s going to catapult this paper into the spotlight, but I hope what everyone takes away from it is just what a thorough piece of work it is. I’ve never seen so many phylogenetic characters illustrated so well. It sets a new standard, and anyone who wants to overturn this had better roll up their sleeves and bring a boatload of data. I’m also very, very happy that it’s open-access so everyone in the world can see it, use it, question it, tear it apart or build on it. Getting Brontosaurus back is just gravy. Although, being pro-brontosaur enough to have named a dinosaur in honor of Brontosaurus, I’m also pretty happy about that. If you need a quick guide to who’s who now, A. ajax and A. louisae are still Apatosaurus, and B. excelsus, B. yahnahpin (formerly Eobrontosaurus), and B. parvus (originally Elosaurus) are all Brontosaurus. For more details, go read the paper.
Apatosaurus lousiae CM 3018: still Apatosaurus. Photo from Wikipedia.
My personal feelings aside, a lot of people are asking how solid is this generic re-separation. I haven’t read the entire paper yet – it’s 299 pages long, for crying out loud – but the separation of Brontosaurus and Apatosaurus seems solid enough. Tschopp et al. didn’t do it lightly, they justify their decision in detail. I don’t hold with the idea that just because two taxa are sisters, means that they cannot be separated generically. As usual in phylogenetic taxonomy, it comes down to what we decide as a community constitutes “diagnosably distinct”. Tschopp et al. have actually put some thought into what that might mean here, and whether you agree with them or not, they’ve at least made all of their evidence and reasoning explicit. That’s both an opportunity and a challenge for critics: an opportunity to pin down exactly where and why you may disagree, and a challenge to do exactly that. You can’t just sit back and say, “I think the analysis is flawed” or “I wouldn’t have coded that character that way” (well, you can, but if that’s all you say, no-one is obliged to take that kind of lazy, drive-by criticism seriously). There are 477 characters here, most of them illustrated, for 81 OTUs, and a lot of post-hoc discussion of the results. So whether you agree with the authors or not, in whole or in part, both fans and critics should dig in and build on this work. Is it the last word on diplodocid taxonomy? Of course not. But it does move the field forward significantly, and the Tschopp et al. should be applauded for that.
There’s a lot more in there than just bringing back Brontosaurus. “Diplodocus” hayi is elevated to its own genus, Galeamopus. Neither of those things are super surprising. There have been rumors since the 90s at least that Brontosaurus might be coming back, and everyone has known for a while that D. hayi was a bit wonky. I was also not surprised to see Australodocus returned to Diplodocidae – when I saw the type material in 2011, it looked diplodocid to me (based on some characters I’ll have to unpack in some other post). More surprising to me are the sinking of Dinheirosaurus into Supersaurus, the finding that Tornieria is not particularly close to Diplodocus, and the uncertain positions of AMNH 460, the American Museum mount, which is an indeterminate apatosaurine pending further study, of FMNH 25112, the Field Museum “Apatosaurus”, which might not even be an apatosaurine at all(!). In several cases, Tschopp et al. come right out and say that X is going to need further study, so if you want to work on sauropods and you’re stuck for project ideas, go see what needs doing.
AMNH 460: we don’t know who this is anymore.
As I was scanning the paper again while composing the last paragraph, I almost fell down the rabbit hole. So much interesting stuff in this paper. Even if all you care about is morphology, the hundred or so figures illustrating the phylogenetic characters ought to keep you happy for a very long time. I look forward to reading through the vertebral characters in detail and seeing what I’ve been missing all these years.
I’m contractually obliged to point out that the authors chose to publish the complete peer-review history of the paper, so you can see what the editor (Andy Farke) and reviewers had to say. As always, I think this transparency (and credit for the reviewers) is great for science, and I can’t wait until it’s the norm at more journals.
FMNH 25112: what even IS that thing?
In addition to the paper, there’s also an interview with lead author Emanuel Tschopp on the PeerJ blog, and a nice shout-out for SV-POW!
Parting shot: why did Tschopp et al. get different results than anyone had previously? Because they used more specimens and more taxa – more data full stop. That’s also why their paper warrants serious consideration. It’s serious work. Let’s go stand on their shoulders.
Reference
(2015) A specimen-level phylogenetic analysis and taxonomic revision of Diplodocidae (Dinosauria, Sauropoda) PeerJ 3:e857 https://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj.857
Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week 