Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week

If you check out the Shiny Digital Future page on this site, where we write about scholarly publishing, open access, open data and other such matters, you will see the following:

• 2009: 9 posts
• 2010: 5 posts
• 2011: 9 posts
• 2012: 116 posts! Woah!
• 2013: 75 posts
• 2014: 34 posts
• 2015: 31 posts
• 2016, up until the end of June: 34 posts
• 2016, July onwards: 8 posts
• 2017: 12 posts
• 2018: 6 posts
• 2019: 4 posts
• 2020: nothing yet.

In four and a half years up to the end of June, Matt and I (but mostly I) posted 290 times in the Shiny Digital Future, for an average of 64.4 posts a year (one every 5.6 days). Since then we’ve posted 30 times in a bit more than three and a half years, for an average of 8.6 posts a year (one every 42.6 days).

Shiny Digital Future posts by year (2016 split into halves)

Something happened half way through 2016 that cut my Shiny Digital Future productivity to 13% of what it was before. (And, no, I wasn’t bought off by Elsevier.)

Here’s another funny thing. My eldest son was taking his A-levels in the summer of 2016. He had got so good at the Core 4 paper in maths that he was reliably scoring 95–100% on every past paper. He took the actual exam on the morning of 24th June, and scored 65% — a mark so low that it prevented him getting an A* grade.

Well, we all know what happened on the 23rd of June 2016: the Brexit referendum. I know that opinions differ on the desirability of Brexit, but for our family it was emotionally devastating. It’s the reason Dan was so knocked sideways that he botched his Core 4 paper. It’s hung over us all to a greater or lesser extent ever since, and it’s only with the recent triumph of the “Conservative” Party¹ in the 2019 General Election that I’ve finally attained the ability to think of it as Somebody Else’s Problem. There is something gloriously liberating about being so comprehensively beaten that you can just give up.

I’m not going to rehearse all the reasons why Brexit is awful — not now, not ever again. (If you have a taste for that kind of thing, I recommend Chris Grey’s Brexit Blog, which is dispassionate, informed and forensic.) I’m not going to follow Brexit commentators on Twitter, and read all the desperately depressing analysis they highlight. I’m certainly not going to blog about it myself any more. More importantly, I’m not going to let the ongoing disintegration of my country dominate my mind or my emotions. I’m walking away: because obviously absolutely nothing I say or do about it can make the slightest bit of difference.

But there is an area of policy where I can hope to make some small difference, and that is of course open science — including but not limited to open access, open data, open reviewing and how research is evaluated. That’s where my political energy should have been going for the last three years, and it’s where that energy will be going from now on.

Because so much is happening in this space right now, and we need to be thinking about it and writing about it! Ludicrously, we’ve never even written anything about Plan S even though it’s nearly eighteen months old. But so much more is going on:

• Just today, I heard the extraordinary news that the whole massive country of China is upending its famously short-sighted evaluation system for researchers, doing away with bonuses for publishing in specific journals.
• And just today the Smithsonian has released 2.8 million images and other resources into the public domain with free metadata (including this 3D model of a Triceratops skeleton).
• And just today I read the details of how Florida State University cancelled its Big Deal subscriptions with Elsevier.
• And just this moment, while writing this post, I learned that UKRI (which is ultimately responsible for pretty much all public funding for scientific research in the UK) has launched a consultation on open access which any of us can submit to.

Each of these developments merits its own post and discussion, and I’m sorry I don’t have the energy to do that right now.

What I offer instead is an apology for letting my energy by stolen for so long by such a stupid issue; and a promise to refocus in 2020. I’ll start shortly by writing up the R2R debate that I was involved in on Monday, on the proposition “The venue of its publication tells us nothing useful about the quality of a paper”.

¹The more right-wing of the two large political parties in the UK is called the Conservative party, and traditionally it has adhered to small-c conservative ideals. But at the moment, it’s the exact opposite of what it says on the tin: it’s been hijacked by a radical movement that, contra Chesterton’s Fence, wants to smash everything up in the hope that whatever emerges from the chaos will be better than what we have now. It may be exciting; it may even (who knows?) prove to be right, in the end². What it ain’t, is conversative.

²Spoiler: it won’t.