Crocomodiles vs. Allimogators
December 1, 2014
I just got off a chat with Matt. Here is the whole thing, all but unedited, for your enjoyment. All you need to know is that my wife, Fiona, built a symphony, which Matt refers to as a boxomophone in tribute to Homer Simpson refering to Lisa’s instrument as a saxomophone.
Mathew: Hey, how is Fiona’s boxomophone working out?
me: O HAI.
As it happens, her boxomophone was in use as you wrote that. Rehearsal for the medieval group’s Christmas set.
BTW., we should start referring to extant crurotarsans as crocomodiles.
Mathew: LLOL
me: And I suppose their sister taxon would be the allimogator.
Mathew: And of course the sister lineage to Cruromotarsi is Ornithomodira.
me: Nice.
Mathew: Laughing so hard over here. Allimogator FTW!
me: I believe we have hit on a foolproof humour template. We need to start using it routinely, without comment, on SV-POW.
Macromonaria. Diplomodocidae.
Mathew: Yes, definitely. Sauromopods.
Dinomosaurs.
me: Amazing, we have yet to find a taxon name it doesn’t work for.
Neomosauropods.
Or is it neomosauromopods?
Mathew: Tyrannomosaurus.
me: Ah, but I think Triceratops is immune.
Mathew: I dunno, Triceramotops, maybe?
me: It doesn’t really fly, though.
Mathew: Opisthomocoelicaudia.
me: Nice one
me: Although I believe Opisthocoelimocaudia is better.
Mathew: Yes, you’re right.
It turns out to be more more about the placement of the ‘mo’ than whether it joins an existing ‘o’. Hence Opisthocoelimocaudia trumps Opisthomocoelicaudia.
me: I double-donkey dare you to give your next SCPCA talk, straight-faced, doing this for all taxon names.
Mathew: Sooo tempting.
me: I don’t believe you’d get close to finishing without laughing.
Mathew: Dude, I don’t think I’d get close to starting without laughing. I’d be down on the floor after the first couple of sentences, having a coromonary.
me: Or a pulmonary embomolism.
AutoLLOL
Mathew: Oh, that is perfect.
me: Horrible thought: perhaps the pervasive use of “Anatatotitan” throughout When Dinosaurs Roamed America was the result of as similar bet, rather than a simple screw-up?
Mathew: Funny. Maybe. Anatomotitan would be killer.
me: I really should not be laughing this much as something so dumb.
Mathew: I feel like we should just walk away from this chat while it’s still standing tall. Let it live in our memories as the perfect jewel that it has been.
me: Yes!
Mathew: Okay, I’m out.
me: It will never be surpassed.
Mathew: Catch you in the future.
me: Seriously, let’s drop it right now, and I’ll SV-POW! it as it stands.
Mathew: Rock on.
me: Consider it done.
I only hope we’re not the only ones who find this funny.
Crocodiles vs. elephants
November 18, 2014
I’ve been reading The Guinness Book of Animal Facts and Feats (Wood 1982) again. Here’s what he says on pages 98-99 about the strength of crocodiles, and what happens when they bite off more than they can chew.
The strength of the crocodile is quite appalling. Deraniyalga (1939) mentions a crocodile in N. Australia which seized and dragged into the river a magnificent 1 tonne Suffolk stallion which had recently been imported from England, despite the fact that this breed of horse can exert a pull of more than 2 tonnes, and there is at least one record of a full-grown black rhinoceros losing a tug-of-war with a big crocodile. Sometimes, however, even crocodiles over-estimate their strength. One day in the 1860s a hunter named Lesley was a witness when a saurian seized the hind-leg of a large bull African elephant while it was bathing in a river in Natal. The crocodile was promptly dragged up the bank by the enraged tusker and then squashed flat by one of its companions who had hurried to the rescue. The victorious elephant then picked up the bloody carcase with its trunk and lodged it in the fork of a nearby tree (Stokes, 1953). Oswell (1894) says he twice found the skeletons of crocodiles 15 ft 4.6 m up in trees by the river’s bank where they had been thrown by angry elephants. On another occasion a surprised crocodile suddenly found itself dangling 15 ft 4.6 m in mid-air when it foolishly seized a drinking giraffe by the head.
The idea of elephants lodging crocodile corpses up in trees seems too bizarre to be true, but seeing it independently attested by two witnesses makes me more ready to accept it. There’s plenty of Internet chatter about this happening, but I’ve not been able to find photos — or better yet, video — proving that it happens.
References
- Deraniyalga, P. 1939. The tetrapod reptiles of Ceylon, vol. 1: Testudinates and crocodilians. Colombo Nat. Mus., Ceylon.
- Oswell, W. Cotton. 1894. South Africa fifty years ago. Badminton Library of Sports and Pastimes (Big Game Shooting), London.
- Stokes, C. W. 1953. Sanctuary. Cape Town.
- Wood, Gerald L. 1982. The Guinness Book of Animals Facts & Feats (3rd edition). Guinness Superlatives Ltd., Enfield, Middlesex. 252 pp.
Sauropods’ neutral neck postures were really weird
November 5, 2014
Last night, I submitted a paper for publication — for the first time since April 2013. I’d almost forgotten what it felt like. But, because we’re living in the Shiny Digital Future, you don’t have to wait till it’s been through review and formal publication to read it. I submitted to PeerJ, and at the same time, made it available as a preprint (Taylor 2014).
It’s called “Quantifying the effect of intervertebral cartilage on neutral posture in the necks of sauropod dinosaurs”, and frankly the results are weird. Here’s a taste:
Taylor (2014:figure 3). Effect of adding cartilage to the neutral pose of the neck of Apatosaurus louisae CM 3018. Images of vertebra from Gilmore (1936:plate XXIV). At the bottom, the vertebrae are composed in a horizontal posture. Superimposed, the same vertebrae are shown inclined by the additional extension angles indicated in Table 1. If the slightly sub-horizontal osteological neutral pose of Stevens and Parrish (1999) is correct, then the cartilaginous neutral pose would be correspondingly slightly lower than depicted here, but still much closer to the elevated posture than to horizontal. (Note that the posture shown here would not have been the habitual posture in life: see discussion.)
A year back, as I was composing a blog-post about our neck-cartilage paper in PLOS ONE (Taylor and Wedel 2013c), I found myself writing down the rather trivial formula for the additional angle of extension at an intervertebral joint once the cartilage is taken into account. In that post, I finished with the promise “I guess that will have to go in a followup now”. Amazingly it’s taken me a year to get that one-pager written and submitted. (Although in the usual way of things, the manuscript ended up being 13 pages long.)
To summarise the main point of the paper: when you insert cartilage of thickness t between two vertebrae whose zygapophyses articulate at height h above the centra, the more anterior vertebra is forced upwards by t/h radians. Our best guess for how much cartilage is between the adjacent vertebrae in an Apatosaurus neck is about 10% of centrum length: the image above shows the effect of inserting that much cartilage at each joint.
And yes, it’s weird. But it’s where the data leads me, so I think it would be dishonest not to publish it.
I’ll be interested to see what the reviewers make of this. You are all of course welcome to leave comments on the preprint itself; but because this is going through conventional peer-review straight away (unlike our Barosaurus preprint), there’s no need to offer the kind of detailed and comprehensive comment that several people did with the previous one. Of course feel free if you wish, but I’m not depending on it.
References
Gilmore Charles W. 1936. Osteology of Apatosaurus, with special reference to specimens in the Carnegie Museum. Memoirs of the Carnegie Museum 11:175–300 and plates XXI–XXXIV.
Stevens, Kent A., and J. Michael Parrish. 1999. Neck posture and feeding habits of two Jurassic sauropod dinosaurs. Science 284(5415):798–800. doi:10.1126/science.284.5415.798
Actually we had the Jurassic talks today, but I can’t show you any of the slides*, so instead you’re getting some brief, sauropod-centric highlighs from the museum.
* I had originally written that the technical content of the talks is embargoed, but that’s not true–as ReBecca Hunt-Foster pointed out in a comment, the conference guidebook with all of the abstracts is freely available online here.
Like this Camarasaurus that greets visitors at the entrance.
And this Apatosaurus ilium ischium with bite marks on the distal end, indicating that a big Morrison theropod literally ate the butt of this dead apatosaur. Gnaw, dude, just gnaw.
And the shrine to Elmer S. Riggs.
One of Elmer’s field assistants apparently napping next to the humerus of the Brachiosaurus alithorax holotype. This may be the earliest photographic evidence of someone “pulling a Jensen“.
Here’s the reconstructed forelimb of B. altithorax, with Cary Woodruff and me for scale. The humerus and coracoid (and maybe the sternal?) are cast from the B.a. holotype, the rest of the bits are either sculpted or filled in from Giraffatitan. The scap is very obviously Giraffatitan.
Cary took this photo of me playing with a fiberglass 100% original bone Apatosaurus femur upstairs in the museum office, and he totally passed up the opportunity to push me down the stairs afterward. I kid, I kid–actually Cary and I get along just fine. It’s no secret that we disagree about some things, but we do so respectfully. Each of us expects to be vindicated by better data in the future, but there’s no reason we can’t hang out and jaw about sauropods in the meantime.
Finally, in the museum gift shop (which is quite lovely), I found this:
You had one job, Nova. ONE JOB!
So, this is a grossly inadequate post that barely scratches the surface of the flarkjillion or so cool exhibits at the museum. I only got about halfway through the sauropods, fer cryin’ out loud. If you ever get a chance to come, do it–you won’t be disappointed.
Behold, the SV-POW! mole!
March 21, 2014
When Fiona checked her email this morning, she found this note from our next-door neighbour Jenny:
Hi
I seem to remember Mike wanting a mole – I do hope so because I’ve left you a body on your patio in a cereal box!Cheers Jen x
What a delightful surprise! And here it is:
The SV-POW! mole, intact
And a close-up of that awesome digging hand:
The SV-POW! mole, right manus
I don’t have time to deal with it properly right now, so it’s gone into a plastic box with some small holes in the lid, where I will trust invertebrates to do my work for me — as they did to great effect with the juvenile baby rabbit whose skeleton I must show you some time.
The end-game here is of course to obtain a complete skeleton; but if not that, then at least the upper-arm bones. I’m on record as saying that next to sauropod vertebrae, mole humeri are the bones that move me most; and elsewhere I nominated mole humeri in response to John Hutchinson’s question, “what are the strangest animal bones (in form & function etc) that have ever been discovered?”
Here’s why:
Left: rat humerus (for comparison), Right: mole humerus. The rat humerus is unfused on top, which is why there is a visible gap between the two parts.
I stole this picture from an Ossamenta post, The strangest animal bone?. Get yourself over there for more wacky rat-vs.-mole comparisons!
The case of the bandy-legged Diplodocus
March 1, 2014
Christine Argot of the MNHN, Paris, drew our attention to this wonderful old photo (from here, original caption reproduced below):
© Paleontological Museum, Moscow
In the beginning of XX century, the Severo-Dvinskaya gallery (named after prof. Amalitsky) became the gold basis of the exhibition hall of ancient life in the Geological Museum of St-Petersburg. The museum hall was completed with a cast of the Diplodicus carnegii skeleton presented by E.Carnegy fund in 1913, at the 300-th anniversary of the Romanovs dynasty.
I found a different version of what seems to be the same photo (greyscaled, lower resolution, but showing more of the surrounding area) here:
What we have here is a truly bizarre mount of Diplodocus — almost certainly one of the casts of the D. carnegii holotype CM 84 — with perfectly erect, parasagittal hind-limbs, but bizarrely everted elbows.
There are a few mysteries here.
First, where and when was this photo taken? Christine’s email described this as a “picture of a Diplodocus cast taken in St. Petersburg around 1920″, and the caption above seems to confirm that location; but then why is it copyright the Paleontological Museum, Moscow? Since the web-site in question is for a Swedish museum, it’s not forthcoming.
The second photo is from the web-site of the Borisyak Paleontological Institute in Moscow, but that site unfortunately provides no caption. The juxtaposition with two more modern Diplodocus-skeleton photos that are from its own gallery perhaps suggest that the modern mount shown in the more recent photographs is a re-pose of the old mount in the black-and white photo. If so, that might mean that the skeleton was actually in Moscow all along rather than St. Petersburg, or perhaps that it was moved from St. Petersburg to Moscow and remounted there.
Does anyone know? Has anyone out there visited the St. Petersburg museum recently and seen whether there is still a Diplodocus skeleton there? If so, is it still mounted in this bizarre way? Better yet, do you have photos?
Tornier’s sprawling, disarticulated reconstruction of Diplodocus, modified from Tornier (1909, plate II).
The second question of course is why was this posture used? This pose makes no sense for several reasons — one of which is that even if Diplodocus could attain this posture it would only serve to leave the forefeet under the torso in the same position as erect forelimbs would have them. The pose only makes any kind of sense at all if you imagine the animal lowering its torso to drink; but given that it had a flexible six-meter-long neck, that hardly seems necessary.
Of course Diplodocus does have a history of odd postures: because of the completeness of the D. carnegii holotype, it became the subject of the Sauropod Posture Wars between Tornier, Hay and Holland in the early 20th Century. Both Tornier (1909) and Hay (1910) favoured a sprawling posture like that of lizards (see images above and below), and were soundly refuted by Holland
The form and attitudes of Diplodocus. Hay (1910: plate 1)
But the Tornier and Hay postures bear no relation to that of the mounted skeleton in the photographs above: they position the forefeet far lateral to the torso, and affect the hindlimbs as well as the forelimbs. So whatever the Russian mount was doing, I don’t think it can have been intended as a representation of the Tornier/Hay hypothesis.
But it gets even weirder. Christine tells me that “I’m aware of […] the tests that Holland performed on the Russian cast to get rid of the hypothesis suggesting a potential lizard-like posture. So I think that he would have never allowed such a posture for one of the casts he mounted himself.” Now I didn’t know that Holland had executed the mounting of this cast. Assuming that’s right, it makes it even more inexplicable that he would have allowed such a posture.
Or did he?
Christine’s email finishes by asking: “What do you think? do you think that somebody could have come behind Holland to change the position? do you know any colleague or publication who could mention this peculiar cast and comment its posture?”
Can anyone help?
References
- Hay, Oliver. P. 1910. On the manner of locomotion of the dinosaurs, especially Diplodocus, with remarks on the origin of birds. Proceedings of the Washington Academy of Sciences 12(1):1-25.
- Holland, W. J. 1910. A review of some recent criticisms of the restorations of sauropod dinosaurs existing in the museums of the United States, with special reference to that of Diplodocus carnegiei in the Carnegie museum. American Naturalist 44:259-283.
- Nieuwland, Ilja. 2010. The colossal stranger. Andrew Carnegie and Diplodocus intrude European Culture, 1904–1912. Endeavour 34(2):61-68.
- Tornier, Gustav. 1909. Wie war der Diplodocus carnegii wirklich gebaut? Sitzungsbericht der Gesellschaft naturforschender Freunde zu Berlin 4:193– 209.
If Harry Potter was an academic work
February 3, 2014
From the files of J. K. Rowling.
Publisher #1
Dear Ms. Rowling,
Thank you for submitting your manuscript Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. We will be happy to consider it for publication. However we have some concerns about the excessive length of this manuscript. We usually handle works of 5-20 pages, sometimes as much as 30 pages. Your 1337-page manuscript exceeds these limits, and requires some trimming.
We suggest that this rather wide-ranging work could usefully be split into a number of smaller, more tightly focussed, papers. In particular, we feel that the “magic” theme is not appropriate for our venue, and should be excised from the current submission.
Assuming you are happy to make these changes, we will be pleased to work with you on this project.
Correspondence ends.
Publisher #2
Esteemed Joenne Kay Rowling,
We are delightful to recieve your manuscript Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and we look forword to publish it in our highly prestigious International Journal of Story Peer Reviewed which in 2013 is awarded an impact factor of 0.024.
Before we can progression this mutually benefit work, we require you to send a cheque for $5,000 US Dollars to the above address.
Correspondence ends.
Publisher #3
Dear J.R.R. Rowling,
We are in receipt of your manuscript Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Unfortunately, after a discussion with the editorial board, we concluded that it is insufficiently novel to warrant publication in our journal, which is one of the leading venues in its field. Although your work is well executed, it does not represent a significant advance in scholarship.
That is not to say that minor studies such as yours are of no value, however! Have you considered one of the smaller society journals?
Correspondence ends.
Publisher #4
Dear Dr. Rowling
Your submission Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince has passed initial editorial checks and will now be sent to two peer-reviewers. We will contact you when we have their reports and are able to make a decision.
Dear Dr. Rowling
Re: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.
We agree that eighteen months is too long for a manuscript to spend in review. On making inquiries, we find that we are unfortunately no longer able to contact the editor who was handling your submission.
We have appointed a new handling editor, who will send your submission to two new reviewers. We will contact you as soon as the new editor has made a decision.
Dear Dr. Rowling
Re: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.
Your complaint is quite justified. We will chase the reviewers.
Dear Dr. Rowling
I am pleased to say that the reviewers have returned their reports on your submission Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and we are able to make an editiorial decision, which is ACCEPT WITH MAJOR REVISION.
Reviewer 1 felt that the core point of your contribution could be made much more succinctly, and recommended that you remove the characters of Ron, Hermione, Draco, Hagrid and Snape. I concur with his assessment that the final version will be tighter and stronger for these cuts, and am confident that you can make them in a way that does not compromise the plot.
Reviewer 2 was positive over all, but did not like being surprised by the ending, and felt that it should have been outlined in the abstract. She also felt that citation of earlier works including Lewis (1950, 1951, 1952, 1953, 1954, 1955, 1956) and Pullman (1995, 1997, 2000) would be appropriate, and noted an over-use of constructions such as “… said Hermione, warningly”.
Dear Dr. Rowling
Thank you for your revised manuscript of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, which it is our pleasure to accept. We now ask you to sign the attached copyright transfer form, so we can proceed with publication.
Dear Dr. Rowling
I am sorry that you are unhappy about this, but transfer of copyright is our standard procedure, and we must insist on it as a prerequisite for publication. None of our other authors have complained.
Dear Dr. Rowling
Thank you for the signed copyright transfer form.
In answer to your query, no, we do not pay royalties.
Dear Dr. Rowling
Sadly, no, we are unable to make an exception in the matter of royalties.
Dear Dr. Rowling
Your book has now been formatted. We attach a proof PDF. Please read this very carefully as this is the last chance to spot errors.
You will readily appreciate that publishing is an expensive business. In order to remain competitive we have had to reduce costs, and as a result we are no longer able to offer proof-reading or copy-editing. Therefore you are responsible for ensuring the copy is clean.
At this stage, changes should be kept as small as possible, otherwise a charge may be incurred for re-typesetting.
Dear Dr. Rowling
Many thanks for returning the corrected proofs of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. We will proceed with publication.
Now that the final length of your contribution is known, we are able to assess page charges. At 607 pages, this work exceeds our standard twenty free pages by 587. At $140 US per page, this comes to $82,180. We would be grateful if you would forward us a cheque for this amount at your convenience.
Dear Dr. Rowling
Thank you for you prompt payment of the page charges. We agree that these are regrettable, but sadly they are part of the reality of the publishing business.
We are delighted to inform you that Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is now published online, and has been assigned the DOI 10.123.45678.
We thank you for working on this fine contribution with us, and hope you will consider us for your future publications.
Dear Dr. Rowling
You are correct, your book is not freely downloadable. As we explained earlier in this correspondence, publishing is an expensive business. We recover our substantial costs by means of subscriptions and paid downloads.
In our experience, those with the most need to read your book will probably have institutional access. As for those who do not: if your readers are as keen as you say, they will no doubt find the customary download fee of $37.95 more than reasonable. Alternatively, readers can rent online access at the convenient price of $9.95 per 24 hours.
Dear Dr. Rowling
I am sorry that you feel the need to take that tone. I must reiterate, as already stated, that the revenues from download charges are not sufficient for us to be able to pay royalties. The $37.95 goes to cover our own costs.
If you wish for your book to be available as “open access”, then you may take advantage of our Freedom Through Slavery option. This will attract a further charge of $3,000, which can be paid by cheque as previously.
Dr. Rowling
Your attitude is really quite difficult to understand. All of this was quite clearly set out on our web-site, and should have been understood by you before you made your submission.
As stated in the copyright transfer form that you signed, you do not retain the right to post freely downloadable copies of your work, since you are no longer the copyright holder.
Dr. Rowling
We must ask you not to contact your handling editor directly. He was quite shaken by your latest outburst. If you feel you must write to us again, we must ask you to moderate your language, which is quite unsuitable for a lady. Meanwhile, we remind you that our publishing agreement follows industry best practice. It’s too late to complain about it now.
Correspondence ends.
IP Lawyer #1
Dear Pyramid Web-Hosting,
Copyright claim
We write on behalf of our client, Ancient Monolith Scholarly Publishing, who we assert are the copyright holders of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. It has come to our attention that a copy of this copyrighted work has been posted on a site hosted by you at the URL below.
This letter is official notification under the provisions of Section 512(c) of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (“DMCA”) to effect removal of the above-reported infringement. We request that you immediately issue a cancellation message as specified in RFC 1036 for the specified posting and prevent the infringer, Ms. J. K. Rowling, from posting the infringing material to your servers in the future. Please be advised that law requires you, as a service provider, to “expeditiously remove or disable access to” the infringing material upon receiving this notice. Noncompliance may result in a loss of immunity for liability under the DMCA.
Please send us at the address above a prompt response indicating the actions you have taken to resolve this matter.
Correspondence ends.
Historical Note
Examination of Ms. Rowling’s personal effects established that she had written most of a seventh book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. However, Rowling never sought to publish this final book in the series.
Can The Scholarly Kitchen save itself?
January 3, 2014
The Scholarly Kitchen is the blog of the Society of Scholarly Publishers, and as such discusses lots of issues that are of interest to us. But a while back, I gave up commenting there two reasons. First, it seemed rare that fruitful discussions emerged, rather than mere echo-chamberism; and second, my comments would often be deliberately delayed for several hours “to let others get in first”, and randomly discarded completely for reasons that I found completely opaque.
But since June, when David Crotty took over as Editor-in-Chief from Kent Anderson, I’ve sensed a change in the wind: more thoughtful pieces, less head-in-the-sandism over the inevitable coming changes in scholarly publishing, and even genuinely fruitful back-and-forth in the comments. I was optimistic that the Kitchen could become a genuine hub of cross-fertilisation.
But then, this: The Jack Andraka Story — Uncovering the Hidden Contradictions Behind a Science Folk Hero [cached copy]. Ex-editor Kent Anderson has risen from the grave to give us this attack piece on a fifteen-year-old.
I’m frankly astonished that David Crotty allowed this spiteful piece on the blog he edits. Is Kent Anderson so big that no-one can tell him “no”? Embarrassingly, he is currently president of the SSP, which maybe gives him leverage over the blog. But I’m completely baffled over how Crotty, Anderson or anyone else can think this piece will achieve anything other than to destroy the reputation of the Kitchen.
As Eva Amsen says, “I got as far as the part where he says Jack is not a “layperson” because his parents are middle class. (What?) Then closed tab.” I could do a paragraph-by-paragraph takedown of Anderson’s article, as Michael Eisen did for Jeffrey Beall’s anti-OA coming-out letter; but it really doesn’t deserve that level of attention.
So why am I even mentioning it? Because Jack Andraka doesn’t deserve to be hunted by a troll. I’m not going to be the only one finally giving up on The Scholarly Kitchen if David Crotty doesn’t do something to control his attack dog.
Seriously, David. You’re better than that. You have to be.
Reference
Anderson, Kent. 2014. The Jack Andraka Story — Uncovering the Hidden Contradictions Behind a Science Folk Hero. Society of Scholarly Publishers. The Scholarly Kitchen, Society of Scholarly Publishers. URL:http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2014/01/03/the-jack-andraka-story-uncovering-the-hidden-contradictions-of-an-oa-paragon/. Accessed: 2014-01-03. (Archived by WebCite® at http://www.webcitation.org/6MLiAaC9o)
As we all know, University libraries have to pay expensive subscription fees to scholarly publishers such as Elsevier, Springer, Wiley and Informa, so that their researchers can read articles written by their colleagues and donated to those publishers. Controversially (and maybe illegally), when negotiating contracts with libraries, publishers often insist on confidentiality clauses — so that librarians are not allowed to disclose how much they are paying. The result is an opaque market with no downward pressure on prices, hence the current outrageously high prices, which are rising much more quickly than inflation even as publishers’ costs shrink due to the transition to electronic publishing.
On Thursday 11 April 2013, Oxford University hosted a conference called Rigour and Openness in 21st Century Science. The evening event was a debate on the subject Evolution or Revolution In Science Communication. During this debate, Stephen Curry of Imperial College noted that his librarian isn’t allowed to tell him how much they pay for Elsevier journals. This is the response of David Tempest, Elsevier’s Deputy Director of Universal Sustainable Research Access.
Heres’ a transcript
Curry [in reference to the previous answer]: I’m glad David Tempest is so interested in librarians being able to make costs transparent to their users, because at my university, Imperial College, my chief librarian can not tell me how much she pays for Elsevier journals because she’s bound by a confidentiality clause. Would you like to address that?
[Loud applause for the question]
Tempest: Well, indeed there are confidentiality clauses inherent in the system, in our Freedom Collections. The Freedom Collections do give a lot of choice and there is a lot of discount in there to the librarians. And the use, and the cost per use has been dropping dramatically, year on year. And so we have to ensure that, in order to have fair competition between different countries, that we have this level of confidentiality to make that work. Otherwise everybody would drive down, drive down, drive drive drive, and that would mean that …
[The last part is drowned in the laughter of the audience.]
So there you have it: confidentiality clauses exist because otherwise everybody would drive down prices. And we can’t have that, can we?
(Is this extracted segment of video unfairly misrepresenting Tempest? No. To see that for yourself, I highly recommend that you watch the video of the whole debate. It’s long — nearly two hours — but well worth the time. The section I used here starts at 1:09:50.)
Walk-in access? Seriously?
November 26, 2013
Reading the Government’s comments on the recent BIS hearing on open access, I see this:
As a result of the Finch Group’s work, a programme devised by publishers, through the Publishers Licensing Society, and without funding from Government, will culminate in a Public Library Initiative. A technical pilot was successfully started on 9 September 2013
Following the link provided, I read:
The Report recommended that the existing proposal to make the majority of journals available for free to walk-in users at public libraries throughout the UK should be supported and pursued vigorously.
I’m completely, completely baffled by this. The idea that people should get in a car and drive to a special magic building in order to read papers that their own computers are perfectly capable of downloading is so utterly wrong-headed I struggle to find words for it. It’s a nineteenth-century solution to a twentieth-century problem. In 2013.
Who thought this was a good idea?
And what were they smoking at the time?
I can tell you now that the take-up for this misbegotten initiative will be zero. Because although it’s a painful waste of time to negotiate the paywalls erected by those corporations we laughably call “publishers”, this “solution” will be more of a waste of time still. (Not to mention a waste of petrol).
I can only assume that was always the intention of the barrier-based publishers on the Finch committee that came up with this initiative: to deliver a stillborn access initiative that they can point to and say “See, no-one wants open access”. Meanwhile, everyone will be over on Twitter using #icanhazpdf and other such 21st-century workarounds.
Sheesh.
Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week 