New article in the Journal of Data and Information Science: I don’t peer-review for non-open journals, and neither should you
April 28, 2022
I have a new article out in the Journal of Data and Information Science (Taylor 2022), on a subject that will be familiar to long-time readers. It’s titled “I don’t peer-review for non-open journals, and neither should you”, and honestly if you’ve read the title, you’ve sort of read the paper :-)
But if you want the reasons why I don’t peer-review for non-open journals, and the reasons why you shouldn’t either, you can find them in the article, which is a quick and easy read of just three pages. I’ll be happy to discuss any disagreements in the comments (or indeed any agreements!).
Reference
Morphological variation in paramedullary airways; yellow = spinal cord, green = diverticula. The spectrum of variation is discretized into four groups: i, branches of intertransverse diverticula contact spinal cord at intervertebral joints; ii, branches of intertransverse diverticula extend partially into the vertebral canal, but remain discontinuous; iii, paramedullary diverticula form sets of tubes that are continuous through vertebral canals of at least two consecutive vertebrae; iv, continuous paramedullary diverticula anastomose with supravertebral diverticula. Each variant is depicted diagrammatically (A, dorsal view; B, E, H, & K, transverse view) and shown in two CT scans; images in each column correspond to the same morphology. Morphology i: C, cormorant; D, scrub jay. Morphology ii: F, bushtit; G, common murre. Morphology iii: I, red-tailed hawk; J, black-crowned night heron. Morphology iv: L, M, pelican. (Atterholt and Wedel 2022: figure 5)
New paper out:
Quick aside, which will soon be of historical interest only: so far, only the accepted-but-unformatted manuscript is available, with the final, fully-formatted ‘version of record’ due along at some point in the future. We’re not sure when that will be — could be next week, could be months from now — which is why I’m following my standard procedure and yapping about the new paper now. This has paid off in the past, when papers that were only available in accepted ms form were read and cited before the final version was published. UPDATE on April 9: the formatted version of record is out now, as an open-access article with a CC-BY license, and I swapped it for the ‘accepted ms’ version in the links above and at the end of this post.
This paper has had a weirdly drawn-out gestation. Jessie and I hatched the idea of it way back in 2017, when we were teaching in the summer anatomy course together. I learned that Jessie had a big war chest of CTs of dead birds, and I’d been obsessed with supramedullary diverticula in birds and sauropods for some time already (e.g., an SVPCA talk: Wedel et al. 2014). There were detailed published descriptions of the supramedullary diverticula in a handful of species — namely chickens, turkeys, and pigeons — but no broad survey of those diverticula across living birds. Jessie had the CT scans to do that big survey, which we got rolling on right away. She presented our preliminary results at SVPCA in 2018 (Atterholt and Wedel 2018), and by rights the paper should have been along shortly thereafter. More on that in a sec.
One thing that may seem odd: we use the term ‘paramedullary diverticula’ instead of the more familiar and established ‘supramedullary diverticula’. That’s because these diverticula are not always dorsal to the spinal cord; sometimes they’re lateral, sometimes they’re ventral, and sometimes they completely surround the spinal cord, like an inflated cuff. So we decided that the term ‘paramedullary’, or ‘next to the spinal cord’, was more accurate than ‘supramedullary’, or ‘above the spinal cord’, for describing this class of diverticula.
Observed variation in the shape, arrangement, and orientation of paramedullary diverticula relative to the spinal cord; yellow = spinal cord, green = diverticula. A, paired diverticula dorsal to spinal cord in an ostrich. B, paired diverticula lateral to spinal cord in a bushtit. C, paired diverticula ventral to spinal cord in a violet turaco. D, three diverticula dorsal to spinal cord in an ostrich. E, four diverticula dorsal to spinal cord in an eclectus parrot. F, single, c-shaped diverticulum dorsal to spinal cord in an ostrich. G, diverticula completely surrounding spinal cord and pneumatizing vertebra in a violet turaco. H, no paramedullary diverticula present in a Pacific loon. I, diverticula completely surrounding spinal cord in a pelican. (Atterholt and Wedel 2022: figure 6)
I will have more to say about the science in other posts, and you can get the scientific backstory in this post and this one and the abstracts cited above and linked below. The rest of this post is mostly about me, so if you stick around, buckle up for some advanced navel-gazing.
There’s no one reason why this paper didn’t come out sooner. In short, I hit a wall. We went through a curriculum change at work, and suddenly the annual schedule that I’d relied on for a decade was completely upended. I had some unexpected challenges in my personal life. But the biggest problem was that my attitude toward research and writing had changed, for the worse.
When I was fresh out of grad school I had this kinda snotty attitude that my research was MINE, and wherever I was teaching was just, like, a paycheck, man, but they don’t own me, or my research. And as my teaching and committee responsibilities ramped up I still felt like research and writing was something I did for myself, and that my mission was to steal however many hours I could away from the “day-job work” to get done the things that I really wanted to do. Like a guerilla insurgency. In retrospect, it was a pretty good attitude for getting stuff done.
But somewhere along the way, I stopped thinking about research as something that belonged to me, something that I did for myself, and started thinking about it as part of my job. (This also maybe is not so flattering in what it reveals about how I think, or at least thought, about my job.) Instead of using my research time as a source of energy and a wellspring of satisfaction and positivity, I starting thinking of it only as a sink. And it happened so insidiously that I didn’t even realize it. My productivity plummeted, and I didn’t understand why. I was restless and depressed, and I didn’t understand that either. At the level of my superficial thoughts I still wanted to get research done, but my subconscious was turned off to it, so I just spun my wheels.
Then the pandemic hit. I’d always been a pretty optimistic, upbeat person, but I found myself just staring off into space franticizing about all the horrible things going on in the world, or staying up too late doom-scrolling the news. I slept too little, and poorly, and by the end of 2020 I felt worn down to a nub.
Osteological evidence of paramedullary diverticula. A, pocked texturing inside the vertebral canal of a pelican (LACM 86262). B, pneumatic foramen on the roof of the vertebral canal of an albatross (Phoebastria nigripes, LACM 115139). C, pneumatic foramina in the floor of the vertebral canal of an ostrich (Struthio camelus, LACM 116205). D, deep pneumatic fossae in the roof of the vertebral canal of an Eastern moa (Emeus sp., LACM unnumbered). (Atterholt and Wedel 2022: figure 7)
Then a series of positive things happened:
- I received a long, heartfelt email from Jessie (fittingly!), asking after me and laying out a plan for getting the paper done and out. It was the kick I needed to look inside and start picking myself apart, to figure out what the heck was going on. Much of this post is cribbed from my reply to her.
- I got a little break from lecturing in the spring of 2021, and that gave me the space to get a couple of things finished and submitted — the pneumatic variation paper with Mike in January (Taylor and Wedel 2021), and the Haplocanthosaurus neural canal paper, which was submitted even earlier in January, although it came out much later (Wedel et al. 2021; more on that publication delay in a future post).
- Finally, I had young, energetic coauthors who were moving projects forward that required modest levels of effort from me, but which paid off with highly visible publications that I’m proud to be an author on, including the saltasaur pneumaticity paper (Aureliano et al. 2021) and the ‘Sauro-Throat’ paper (Woodruff et al. 2022).
It’s impossible to overstate how energizing it was to get new things done and out, and how much it helped to have collaborators who were putting wins on the board even when I was otherwise occupied. One of those collaborators was Jessie, who just kept pushing this thing forward — and, sometimes, pushing me forward — until it was done. So the paper you can read today is a testament not only to her acumen as a morphologist, but also to her tenacity as a scholar, and as a friend.
The part of the paper I’m happiest about is the “Conclusions and Directions for Future Research”, which points the way toward a LOT of further studies that need to be done, both on extant birds and on fossil archosaurs, ranging from bone histology to functional morphology to macroevolution. As we wrote in the concluding sentence of the paper, “We hope that this study serves as a foundation and an enticement for further studies of this most unusual anatomical system, in both extinct and extant archosaurs.”
I can’t wait to see what comes next.
References
- Atterholt, J., and Wedel, M. 2018. A CT-based survey of supramedullary diverticula in extant birds. 66th Symposium on Vertebrate Palaeontology and Comparative Anatomy, Programme and Abstracts, p. 30.
- Atterholt, Jessie, and Wedel, Mathew J. 2022. A computed tomography-based survey of paramedullary diverticula in extant Aves. The Anatomical Record, 1– 22. https://doi.org/10.1002/ar.24923
- Aureliano, Tito, Aline M. Ghilardi, Bruno A. Navarro, Marcelo A. Fernandes, Fresia Ricardi-Branco, & Mathew J. Wedel. 2021. Exquisite air sac histological traces in a hyperpneumatized nanoid sauropod dinosaur from South America. Scientific Reports 11: 24207.
- Taylor, Michael P., and Mathew J. Wedel. 2021. Why is vertebral pneumaticity in sauropod dinosaurs so variable? Qeios 1G6J3Q. doi:10.32388/1G6J3Q.5
- Wedel, M.J., Fiorillo, A., Maxwell, D., and Tykoski, R. 2014. Pneumatic diverticula associated with the spinal cord in birds, sauropod dinosaurs, and other ornithodiran archosaurs. 62nd Symposium on Vertebrate Palaeontology and Comparative Anatomy, Meeting Proceedings, p. 60.
- Wedel, Mathew; Atterholt, Jessie; Dooley, Jr., Alton C.; Farooq, Saad; Macalino, Jeff; Nalley, Thierra K.; Wisser, Gary; and Yasmer, John. 2021. Expanded neural canals in the caudal vertebrae of a specimen of Haplocanthosaurus. Academia Letters, Article 911, 10pp. DOI: 10.20935/AL911
- Woodruff, D. Cary, Wolff, Ewan D.S., Wedel, Mathew J., Dennison, Sophie, and Witmer, Lawrence M. 2022. The first occurrence of an avian-style respiratory infection in a non-avian dinosaur. Scientific Reports 12, 1954. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-05761-3
Case study: the conception, slooow gestation, and birth of the incomplete-necks paper
January 28, 2022
Last time, we looked briefly at my new paper Almost all known sauropod necks are incomplete and distorted (Taylor 2022). As hinted at in that post, this paper had a difficult and protracted genesis. I thought it might be interesting to watch the story of a published paper through its various stages of prehistory and history. Strap in, this is a long one — but hopefully of interest, especially to people who are just coming into academia and wonder how this stuff works in practice.
It’s never easy to identify when a thing started, but I suppose the first seeds of this paper were sown back in 2004, when Matt was planning a visit to London (to meet me in person for the first time, as it happens) and we were planning out what things we might do during the museum time we had booked. The Rutland cetiosaur was on our itinerary, and I wrote to Matt:
I also wondered about trying to measure the radius of curvature of any well-preserved condyles and cotyles. Are there any established procedures for doing this? (And is the material up to it?)
The answer, of course, is “no”. But that wasn’t apparent until I saw the material. That got me started thinking about all the kinds of mechanical analyses we’d like to do with fossil necks, and about how good we would need the material to be for the results to mean anything.
Those ideas percolated for some years.
May 19, 2011: I wrote How long was the neck of Diplodocus?, in which I considered some of the ways that the neck of the Carnegie Diplodocus is not quite so well established as we tend to assume, and went on to make similar observations about the Humboldt brachiosaur Giraffatitan “S II”.
September 18, 2011: I gave a talk (co-authored with Matt) at the Lyme Regis SVPCA, entitled Sauropod necks: how much do we really know?, the first half of which had grown out of the observations in that initial blog-post. (The second half was about the problems caused by the lack of preserved intervertebral cartilage in fossilised vertebrae, and that half became our 2013 PLOS ONE paper.)
September 20, 2013: I wrote Measuring the elongation of vertebrae, in which I discussed a problem with Elongation Index (EI): that crushing of cotyles makes both their vertical height and horizontal width unreliable to use in ratio with vertebral length.
June 4, 2014: I wrote The Field Museum’s photo-archives tumblr, featuring: airbrushing dorsals. Among other photos, I noted one of presacral 6 (probably D7) of the Brachiosaurus altithorax holotype, showing that before it was “restored” into its present state, it was a mosaic of bone fragments.
October 6, 2015: I submitted to PeerJ a manuscript based on these observations and others. At the same time, I published a preprint of the submitted manuscript, and briefly blogged about it under the title My most depressing paper. I expected that the paper would quickly be published in essentially its submitted form.
In the following days, the preprint and blogpost both quickly attracted many comments pointing out complete or near-complete sauropod necks that I had missed in the manuscript’s catalogue of such necks.
October 27, 2015 (only three weeks later!): I got back three reviews which were the very definition of “tough but fair”. They were written by three researchers whose sauropod work I hugely respect and admire — Paul Barrett, Paul Upchurch and Jeff Wilson — and they graciously acknowledged the strengths of the submission as well as bringing numerous justified criticisms. It’s traditional in acknowledgements sections to say nice things about the reviewers, but really these were everything one could hope for.
(I disagreed with only two of the many critical points made: one by Paul Upchurch, which we will come to later; and Paul Barrett’s recommendation that the illustrations should use only specimens in credentialled museums. For fossils, of course, that’s right. But the paper also contains numerous photos of extant-animal vertebrae from my own collection, and that’s OK — common — even, in the extant-animal literature. A house-cat is a house-cat, and the cervicals of one are not going to be meaningfully different from those of another.)
Because it had taken the journals and the reviewers only three weeks to get detailed, helpful, constructive reviews back to me, I was now in a position to make this paper a big success story: to turn the revisions around quickly, and maybe even get an acceptance within a month of submission. The time was right: the material was still fresh in my mind so soon after the initial submission, so it should have been the work of a few evenings to revise according to the reviewers’ requests and get this thing on the road.
That’s not what happened.
Instead, for reasons I can’t begin to fathom, I became downhearted at the prospect of going back to this manuscript and dealing with all the criticisms. I want to emphasize again that this is not in any way a complaint about the reviews, which were not unduly negative. I just looked at them and felt … weary. So I let it slide for a while.
The problem is, “a while” quickly became multiple months. And by then, the material was no longer fresh in my mind, so that doing the work I should have done half a year earlier would now have been a much bigger job. I would have had to load lots of stuff back into mental RAM before I could even get started. And there was always something more appealing to do. So I left it for a full year.
The problem is, “a year” quickly became multiple years. I have no excuse for this.
And for six years, this unconsummated project has been hanging over me, draining my motivation, whispering to me every time I try to work on something else. It’s been a drag on everything I’ve tried to do in palaeo, all because I didn’t summon the energy to drive a stake through its heart back in 2015.
Learn from my mistake, folks: don’t do this.
When you get the reviews back from a submission, give yourself a week to mourn that the reviewers didn’t recognise the pristine perfection of your initial submission, then get back on the horse and do the work. Just like I didn’t.
Seriously: be better than me. (That’s certainly what I plan to do.)
Anyway …
Early 2021: I finally got my act together, and got started on the big revision. And by this point it was a big revision because not only did I have to handle all those long-postponed reviews, and all the comments on the preprint and the blog-posts from 2015. I also had to handle five more years of developments. The biggest effect this had was that I needed to completely rewrite the woefully inadequate catalogue of complete necks, which in the original preprint listed only six species. The new version lists specimens rather than species, and very many more of them. To make the list as comprehensive as possible this time …
January 27, 2021: I created my initial draft of the new list as a Google Doc, and posted Towards a catalogue of complete sauropods necks asking readers on this blog to offer corrections and additions. They did. That resulted in a lot more work as I chased down details of candidate necks in published sources and sought personal communications about others. As a result …
March 24, 2021: I posted the draft list as The catalogue of complete sauropods necks nears completion. A few more comments came in as a result, but the list was apparently approaching a steady state.
March 27, 2021: Matt dropped me a line breaking down the listed necks across a basic phylogeny of sauropods, and counting the occurrences. I thought this was interesting enough to make up a new illustration, which I posted on the blog as Analysing the distribution of complete sauropod necks and added to the in progress revised manuscript.
May 11, 2021: I was working on finding a way to measure the variation of cotyle aspect ratios along preserved necks, so I could show qualitatively that they vary more in sauropod fossils than in bones of extant amniotes. I came up with a way of calculating this, but wondered if it already existed. In my post Help me, stats people! I asked if anyone knew of it, but it seemed no-one did. (In the end, the resubmitted paper offered two versions of this metric: one additive, the other multiplicative. To the best of my knowledge, these are novel, if simple, contributions.)
June 6, 2021: In one of the original reviews, Paul Upchurch had commented that a further confounding factor in understanding neck lengths is identifying the cervicodorsal junction. I started to put together a new manuscript section on that issue, and posted my initial thoughts as What’s the difference between a cervical and dorsal vertebra?. This post, too, generated some useful feedback that made its way into the version of the section that landed up in the revised paper.
At this point, I had put together much of the new material I needed for the resubmission. So I went back to the revised draft, integrated all the new and modified material, and …
July 12 2021: I submitted the new manuscript. Because it was the best part of six years since the old version had been touched, I asked PeerJ to handle it as a new submission, and invited the handling editor to solicit reviews either from the same people who’d done the first round or from different people, as they saw fit. This time I did not also post a pre-print — I really didn’t need yet more comments coming in at this point, I just needed to get the wretched thing over the line.
September 3 2021: the editorial decision was in, based on three reviews: major revisions. sigh. Again, though, the reviewers’ criticisms were mostly legitimate, and I could sympathise with the editor’s decision. One of the reviewers of the new version — Paul Upchurch — had previously reviewed the 2015 version, but the other two were new.
Needless to say, more work was required in response to these new reviews, but it was much more tractable than the big revision had been. I added a brief discussion of retrodeformation. I wrote about how we can use phylogenetic bracketing to estimate cervical counts, and three reasons why this doesn’t work as well as we’d like. I discussed how explicit documentation of articulation and damage mitigates their misleading effects. I removed a sideswipe at the journal Science, which I have to admit was out of place. I added a discussion of different definitions of the elongation index. I clarified the prose to make it clearer that my goal was not to criticise how others had done things, but to lay out for new researchers what pitfalls they will have to deal with.
But the most fundamental issue that arose in this round of review was whether the paper should be published at all. I will quote from Paul Upchurch’s review (since it is freely available, along with all the other reviews and my responses):
I have [a] fundamental, and I fear fatal, [problem] with this paper. First, and most importantly, I think it attempts to address a problem that does not really exist. It sets up a strawman with regard to the need to tell researchers that sauropod necks are less complete than we previously thought. However, I would argue that we are well aware of these issues and that the current paper does not provide convincing evidence that there is a problem with the way we are doing things now. To be clear, I am not saying that the incompleteness of sauropod necks is not a problem – it definitely is. What I’m saying is that there is little value in a paper whose main message is to tell us what we already know and take into account.
(Let me emphasize again that this criticism came in the context of a review that was careful, detailed and in many ways positive. There was absolutely nothing malicious about it — it was just Paul’s honest opinion.)
The interesting thing about this criticism is that there was absolutely nothing I could do to remedy it. A paper criticised for lacking a phylogenetic analysis can be made acceptable to the reviewers by adding a phylogenetic analysis. But a paper criticised for not needing to exist can only stand or fall by the handling editor’s agreement with either the author or the reviewer. So all I could do was write a response in the letter than accompanied my revision:
We now come to Paul’s fundamental issue with this paper: he does not believe it is necessary. He writes “The scientific community working on these issues does not need to be reminded of the general importance of understanding the limitations on the data we use”. Here I suggest he is misled by his own unique perspective as the person who quite possibly knows more about sauropods than anyone else alive. Labouring under “The curse of knowledge”, he charitably assumes other palaeontologists are as well-read and experienced as he is — but almost no-one is. I know that I, for one, desperately needed a paper along these lines when I was new to the field.
Happily, the handling editor agreed with me — as did the other two reviewers, which surely helped: “in a time of ever more sophisticated methods, it is good to be made aware of the general imperfections of the fossil record […] I thus recommend the article for publication”. So:
November 11 2021: I submitted the revised revision, along with the response letter quoted in part above.
December 15 2021: The editor requested some more minor changes. I made some of them and pushed back on a few others, then:
December 20 2021: I submitted a third version of this second attempt at the paper.
December 28 2021 (a welcome belated Christmas present): the paper was finally accepted. From here on, it was just a matter of turning handles.
January 4 2022: The proof PDF arrived, looking lovely but riven with mistakes — some of them my own, having survived multiple rounds of revision; others introduced by the typesetting process, including some unwelcome “corrections” that created new errors.
January 13 2022: I sent back a list of 56 errors that needed correcting.
January 24 2022: The paper was published at PeerJ!
Being of a pedantic turn of mind, I went through the final typeset version to check that all the proofing errors had been fixed. Most had, of course. But one in being fixed had introduced another; another was partially corrected but is still missing an apostrophe in the final version. Small stuff.
And then I went through the “things to do when a paper comes out” checklist: posting an SV-POW! article that I had prepared in the days leading up to publication; updating the SV-POW! sidebar page for this paper; adding the new paper to my publications list (and removing the separate entry for the 2015 preprint); adding it to my univeristy’s IR; adding it to my ORCiD page (though if you omit this, it seems to figure it out on its own after a while — kudos!); and skipping LinkedIn, Mendeley, ResearchGate, Academia.edu and Facebook, none of which I do.
And with that, the quest really is at an end, barring this post and any others that might occur to me to write (I have nothing more planned at this point).
Now it’s time to get that vertebral orientation paper revised and resubmitted!
References
A six-year quest is finally complete! Almost all known sauropod necks are incomplete and distorted
January 24, 2022
Today finally sees the publication of a paper (Taylor 2022) that’s been longer in gestation than most (although, yes, all right, not as long as the Archbishop). I guess the first seeds were sown almost a full decade ago when I posted How long was the neck of Diplodocus? in May 2011, but it was submitted as a preprint in 2015. Since then it’s taken far longer than it should have done to get it across the line, and it is primarily with a feeling of relief that I see the paper now published.
In this quarry map for the Carnegie Diplodocus, does it seem to you that the vertebrae of the neck (in purple) are drawn unconvincingly, compared with the fairly detailed drawings of the dorsals? Does that suggest that maybe Reed — who drew this diagram years after the excavation was complete — didn’t really remember how the neck was laid out? How well does the textual description of the skeleton in situ match this map? These are the kinds of questions I was asking myself as I started thinking about what has become the paper published today.
In some ways it’s a really simple paper, pretty much summarised by its title: almost all known sauropod necks are incomplete and distorted. It started out as a formalised version of three posts on this blog (How long was the neck of Diplodocus?, Measuring the elongation of vertebrae and The Field Museum’s photo-archives tumblr, featuring: airbrushing dorsals), but somewhere along the line the tale grew in the telling and it’s ended up as 35 pages of goodness. In the process of review it acquired a lot of new material, including: a discussion of how to locate the cevicodorsal junction (summary: it’s complicated); a couple of ways to numerically quantify the degree of distortion along a neck; and a brief discussion of retrodeformation (summary: it’s complicated).
I hope this paper will be of use, especially to people coming into the field with the same unrealistic assumptions I had back in the early 2000s. Back then, I had in mind a project to determine the thickness of intervertebral cartilage in the neck of Diplodocus by measuring the radii of curvature of the condyles and cotyles of successive vertebrae — an idea that distortion makes unrealistic. I took the DinoMorph work at face value — something that seems incredible to me knowing what know now. The paper that came out today is basically the one I wish I’d been able to read in 2000 (but updated!)
By the way, when I was fine-tooth-combing the proof PDF a few days ago, I was delighted to be reminded that I got the phrase “rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty” into the paper — a reference of course, to the words of the philosopher Vroomfondel in The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I’ll file this alongside the Monty Python reference in my history-of-sauropod-research book chapter and the Star Wars paraphrase that opens a computer-science paper I lead-authored in 2005.
References
New paper out today: Aureliano et al. (2021) on exquisite pneumaticity in a tiny titanosaur
December 17, 2021
Posterior dorsal vertebra of the Upper Cretaceous nanoid saltasaurid LPP-PV-0200. Three-dimensional reconstruction from CT scan in left lateral view (A). Circle and rectangle show sampling planes and the respective thin sections are in (B,C). ce centrum, ns neural spine, pn pneumatopore, poz postzygaphophysis, prz prezygapophysis. Scale bar in (A) 10 cm; in (B,C) 1 cm. Computed tomography data processed with 3D Slicer version 4.10.
Well, this is a very pleasant surprise on the last day of the semester:
You may justly be wondering what I’m doing on a paper on a South American titanosaur. It came about like this:
- I wrote to Tito Aureliano back in March to congratulate him on his 2019 paper, “Influence of taphonomy on histological evidence for vertebral pneumaticity in an Upper Cretaceous titanosaur from South America”, which I’d just reread, and was impressed by;
- he told me he was working on a manuscript on saltasaur pneumaticity and would be grateful for my thoughts;
- I sent him said thoughts, with no strings attached;
- he asked me if I’d be willing to come on the project as a junior author;
- I said yes;
and a few months later, here we are.
Dorsal vertebra internal structures of LPP-PV-0200. Reconstructed tomography model in distal (A) and right lateral (B) views illustrating subvertical tangential CT scan slices in false color (1–9). Images show that only a few structures had survived diagenesis which restricted the assessment of the internal architecture to limited spaces. Lighter blue and green indicate lower densities (e.g., pneumatic cavities). Purple and darker blue demonstrate denser structures (e.g., camellate bone). Dashed lines indicate internal plates of bone that sustain radial camellae. ce centrum, cc circumferential chambers, cml camellae, hc-cml ‘honeycomb’ camellae, ns neural spine, pf pneumatic foramen, pn pneumatopore, pacdf parapophyseal-centrodiapophyseal fossa, pocdf postzygapophyseal-centrodiapophyseal fossa, rad radial camellae. Computed tomography data processed with 3D Slicer version 4.10.
My correspondence to Tito basically boiled down to, “All the things you’ve identified in your CT scans are there, but there are also a few more exciting things that you might want to draw attention to” — specifically circumferential and radial camellae near the ends and edges of the centrum, and pneumatic chambers communicating with the neural canal, which were previously only published in Giraffatitan (Schwarz and Fritsch 2006; see Atterholt and Wedel 2018 and this post for more). The internal plates of bone inside the cotyle, which help frame the radial camellae, were first noted by Woodward and Lehman (2009), and discussed in this post.
I can’t think of any reason not to just post the notes I sent to Tito back in March, so here you go:
Wedel suggestions for Aureliano et al Saltasauridae dorsal
I may have more to say about this in the coming days, but at the moment I have two extant dinosaurs — ducks, to be precise — smoking on the grill, and I need to get back to them. The new paper is open access, free to the world (link), so go have fun with it.
UPDATE the next day: here’s another post on the new paper:
References
- Atterholt, J., and Wedel, M. 2018. A CT-based survey of supramedullary diverticula in extant birds. 66th Symposium on Vertebrate Palaeontology and Comparative Anatomy, Programme and Abstracts, p. 30 / PeerJ Preprints 6:e27201v1
- Aureliano, T., Ghilardi, A.M., Silva-Junior, J.C., Martinelli, A.G., Ribeiro, L.C.B., Marinho, T., Fernandes, M.A., Ricardi-Branco, F. and Sander, P.M. 2020. Influence of taphonomy on histological evidence for vertebral pneumaticity in an Upper Cretaceous titanosaur from South America. Cretaceous Research 108: 104337.
- Schwarz D, and Fritsch G. 2006. Pneumatic structures in the cervical vertebrae of the Late Jurassic Tendaguru sauropods Brachiosaurus brancai and Dicraeosaurus. Eclogae Geologicae Helvetiae 99:65–78.
- Woodward, H.N., and Lehman, T.M. 2009. Bone histology and microanatomy of Alamosaurus sanjuanensis (Sauropoda: Titanosauria) from the Maastrichtian of Big Bend National Park, Texas. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology 29(3):807-821.
A. Recovered skeletal elements of Haplocanthosaurus specimen MWC 8028. B. Caudal vertebra 3 in right lateral view. C. The same vertebra in posterior view. Lines show the location of sections for D and E. D. Midsagittal CT slice. The arrow indicates the ventral expansion of the neural canal into the centrum. E. Horizontal CT slice at the level of the neural arch pedicles, with anterior toward the top. Arrows indicate the lateral expansions of the neural canal into the pedicles. B-E are shown at the same scale. Wedel et al. (2021: fig. 1).
New paper out today:
Wedel, Mathew; Atterholt, Jessie; Dooley, Jr., Alton C.; Farooq, Saad; Macalino, Jeff; Nalley, Thierra K.; Wisser, Gary; and Yasmer, John. 2021. Expanded neural canals in the caudal vertebrae of a specimen of Haplocanthosaurus. Academia Letters, Article 911, 10pp. DOI: 10.20935/AL911 (link)
The paper is new, but the findings aren’t, particularly. They’re essentially identical to what we reported in our 1st Paleo Virtual Conference slide deck and preprint, and in the “Tiny Titan” exhibit at the Western Science Center, just finally out in a peer-reviewed journal, with better figures. The paper is open access and free to the world, and it’s short, about 1600 words, so this recap will be short, too.
A. Photograph of a 3D-printed model of the first three caudal vertebrae of Haplocanthosaurus specimen MWC 8028, including endocasts of the neural canal (yellow) and intervertebral joints (blue), in right lateral view, and with the neural canal horizontal. B. Diagram of the same vertebrae in midsagittal section, emphasizing the volumes of the neural canal (yellow) and intervertebral joint spaces (blue). Anterior is to the right. Wedel et al. (2021: fig. 2).
John Foster and I described Museum of Western Colorado (MWC) specimen 8028, a partial skeleton of Haplocanthosaurus from Snowmass, Colorado, in late 2014. One weird thing about that specimen (although not the only weird thing) is that the neural canals of the tail vertebrae are bizarrely expanded. In most vertebrae of most critters, the neural canal is a cylindrical tunnel, but in these vertebrae the neural canals are more like spherical vacuities.
John and I didn’t know what to make of that back in 2014. But a few years later I started working with Jessie Atterholt on bird anatomy, which led me to do a little project on the whole freaking zoo of weird stuff that birds and other dinosaurs do with their neural canals, which led to the 1PVC presentation, which led to this.
Caudal vertebra 3 of Haplocanthosaurus specimen MWC 8028 in left posterolateral (A), posterior (B), and right posterolateral (C) views, with close-ups (D and E). In A and B, a paintbrush is inserted into one of the lateral recesses, showing that the neural canal is wider internally than at either end. Wedel et al. (2021: fig. 3).
Of course there will be more posts and more yapping, as signaled by the ‘Part 1’ in the post title. Although I am extremely satisfied with the streamlined, 1600-word missile of information and reasoning that just dropped, there are parts that I want to unpack, that haven’t been unpacked before. But the paper launched at midnight-thirty, Pacific Daylight Time, I’m up way too late finishing this first post, and I reckon the rest will keep for a few hours at least.
Anatomical features of the neural canal in birds and other dinosaurs. A. MWC 9698, a mid caudal vertebra of Apatosaurus in posterodorsal view. Arrows highlight probable vascular foramina in the ventral floor of the neural canal. B. LACM 97479, a dorsal vertebra of Rhea americana in left anterolateral view. Arrows highlight pneumatic foramina inside the neural canal. C. A hemisected partial synsacrum of a chicken, Gallus domesticus, obtained from a grocery store. Anterior is to the right. The bracket shows the extent of the dorsal recess for the glycogen body, which only spans four vertebrae. Arrows highlight the transverse grooves in the roof of the neural canal for the lumbosacral organ. D. Sagittal (left) and transverse (right) CT slices through the sacrum of a juvenile ostrich, Struthio camelus. The bracket shows the extent of the lumbosacral expansion of the spinal cord. Indentations in the roof of the neural canal house the lumbosacral organ. In contrast to the chicken, the ostrich has a small glycogen body that does not leave a distinct osteological trace. Yellow arrows show the longitudinal troughs in the ventral floor of the neural canal that house the ventral eminences of the spinal cord. Wedel et al. (2021: fig. 4).
I have a ton of people to thank. John Foster, obviously, for initiating the line of research that led here. Julia McHugh for access to the MWC collections, and for being an excellent sounding board regarding the Morrison Formation, sauropod dinosaurs, and crafting ambitious but tractable research projects. Anne Weil for helping me be methodical in thinking through the logic of the paper, and Mike Taylor for helping me get it polished. Niels Bonde, Steven Jasinski, and David Martill for constructive reviews, which were published alongside the paper. We couldn’t take all of their suggestions because of space limitations, but figures 3 and 4 were born because they asked for them, and that’s not a small thing. Vicki and London Wedel for putting up with me at various points in this project, especially in the last few days as I’ve been going bonkers correcting page proofs. And finally, because I’m the one writing this blog post, my coauthors: Jessie Atterholt, Alton Dooley, Saad Farooq, Jeff Macalino, Thierra Nalley, Gary Wisser, and John Yasmer, for their contributions and for their patience during the unusually long gestation of this very short paper.
More to say about all that in the future. For now, yay, new paper. Have fun with it. Here’s the link again.
References
- Foster, J.R., and Wedel, M.J. 2014. Haplocanthosaurus (Saurischia: Sauropoda) from the lower Morrison Formation (Upper Jurassic) near Snowmass, Colorado. Volumina Jurassica 12(2): 197–210. DOI: 10.5604/17313708 .1130144
- Wedel, Mathew, Atterholt, Jessie, Dooley, Jr., Alton C., Farooq, Saad, Macalino, Jeff, Nalley, Thierra K., Wisser, Gary, Yasmer, John. 2021. Expanded neural canals in the caudal vertebrae of a specimen of Haplocanthosaurus. Academia Letters, Article 911, 10pp. DOI: 10.20935/AL911
The catalogue of complete sauropods necks nears completion
March 24, 2021
A couple of months ago, I asked for your help in compiling a list of all known complete sauropods necks. This has gone really well, and I want to thank everyone who chipped in, and all the various authors I have contacted for details as a result.
My next step is to take the raw data in the Google spreadsheet that I have been maintaining, and write it up as prose for the paper that I am shortly going to resubmit, having first done so back in 2015. And I thought it would make sense to draft that section here on SV-POW!, so I can get any further feedback before I finalize it for the manuscript.
Young and Zhao (1972:figure 3). Mamenchisaurus hochuanensis holotype CCG V 20401 as is occurred in the field.
So here goes: any additional comments at this stage will be welcome!
Unambiguously complete necks are known from published accounts of only a few sauropod specimens. In chronological order of description, the following specimens were found with their necks complete and articulated, and have been adequately described:
- CM 11338, a referred specimen of Camarasaurus lentus described by Gilmore (1925). This is a juvenile specimen, and thus does not fully represent the adult morphology. (McIntosh et al. 1996:76 claim that this specimen is the holotype, but this is not correct: YPM 1910 is the holotype — see below.)
- CM 3018, the holotype of Apatosaurus louisae, described by Gilmore (1936). The neck was separated from the torso but articulated from C1–C15, though the last three cervicals were badly crushed: see below for details.
- CCG V 20401, the Mamenchisaurus hochuanensis holotype, described by Young and Zhao (1972). Each vertebra is broken in half at mid-length, with the posterior part of each adhering to the anterior part of the its successor; and all the vertebrae are badly crushed in an oblique plane.
- ZDM T5402, a Shunosaurus lii referred specimen, described in Chinese by Zhang (1988), with English figure captions. Figure 22 depicts the atlas. Unlike the holotype T5401, this specimen is mature.
- BYU 9047, the Cathetosaurus lewisi holotype, described by Jensen (1988). (Jensen incorrectly gives the specimen number as BYU 974.) This specimen was redescribed, and the species referred to Camarasaurus, by McIntosh et al. (1996). Although all 12 cervicals are present, “10–12, particularly 12, have suffered such severe damage that it is impossible to restore them” (McIntosh et al. 1996:76).
- MACN-N 15, the holotype of Amargasaurus cazaui MACN-N 15, described by Salgado and Bonaparte (1991) who desribed “22 presacral vertebrae articulated with each other and attached to the skull and sacrum, relatively complete” (Salgado & Bonaparte 1991:335, translated.
- ZDM 0083, the holotype of Mamenchisaurus youngi, described in Chinese by Ouyang and Ye (2002) with English figure captions. Figure 14 depicts the atlas and axis.
- MUCPv-323, the holotype of Futalognkosaurus dukei, initially described by Calvo et al. 2007a and redescribed by Calvo et al. 2007b. The neck was found in two articulated sections which fit together without needing additional vertebrae in between (Jorge O. Calvo, pers. comm., 2021).
- SSV12001, the holotype of Xinjiangtitan shanshanesis, described by Zhang et al. (2018). The original description of this specimen by Wu et al. 2013 included only the last two cervicals, which were the only ones that had been excavated at that time.
A few additional specimens are known to have complete and articulated necks, but have not yet been described:
- USNM 13786, a referred subadult specimen of Camarasaurus lentus recently mounted at the Smithsonian. The specimen “was almost completely buried before the sinews had allowed the bones to separate” (letter from Earl Douglass to William J. Holland, 22 August 1918), and photographs kindly supplied by Andrew Moore show that the atlas was preserved.
- MNBH TIG3, the holotype of Jobaria tiguidensis. Sereno et al. (1999:1343) assert that this species has 12 cervicals in all and say “One articulated neck was preserved in a fully dorsiflexed, C-shaped posture”. Sereno (pers. comm., 2021) confirms that the articulated neck is MNBH TIG3
- SMA 002, referred to Camarasaurus sp. Tschopp et al. (2016), in a description of its feet, say that this specimen “lacks only the vomers, the splenial bones, the distal end of the tail, and one terminal phalanx of the right pes. The bones are preserved in three dimensions and in almost perfect articulation”.
- MAU-Pv-LI-595, the “La Invernada” Titanosaur. Filippi et al. (2016) give a very brief account in an abstract. Filippi, pers. comm, 2021) says that the entire preserved specimen was articulated.
- MAU-Pv-AC-01, an unnamed titanosaur mentioned in abstracts by Calvo et al. (1997) and Coria and Salgado (1999). The specimen was found in perfect articulation from skull down to the last caudal vertebrae (Rodolfo Coria, pers. comm., 2021).
The first cervical (the atlas) in sauropods is very different in form from the other vertebrae, and small and fragile. Consequently it is easily lost. Some further specimens have necks that are complete and articulated from C2 (the axis) backwards:
- MB.R.4886, the holotype of Dicraeosaurus hansemanni, described by Janensch (1929), has a neck that complete and well preserved from C2 to C12 (the last cervical). Janensch referred to this as “specimen m” and writes “It was found articulated from the 19th caudal vertebra to the 9th cervical vertebra inclusive. The proximal part of the neck from the 8th cervical vertebra up to the axis was bent ventrally and lay at right angles to the distal part of the neck.” (Janensch 1929:41).
- PMU 233, the holotype of Euhelopus zdanskyi, described by Wiman (1929) as “exemplar a” and redescribed by Wilson and Upchurch (2009).
- ZDM T5401, the subadult holoype of Shunosaurus lii, described in Chinese by Zhang et al 1984. The quarry map (Zhang et al. 1984:figure 1) suggests that the atlas is missing.
- MCT 1487-R, informally known as “DGM Series A”, described by Powell (2003). Gomani (2005:9) summarises as “12 cervical vertebrae, except the atlas, preserved in articulation with three proximal dorsal vertebrae”.
- GCP-CV-4229, the holotype of Spinophorosaurus nigerensis, described by Remes et al. (2009). The specimen was found in very good condition and well articulated from C2 to C13, the last cervical. The atlas seems to be missing (Remes, pers. comm., 2021.
One other sauropod is complete from the first cervical, but probably not to the last:
- MOZ-Pv1232, the holotype of Lavocatisaurus agrioensis, described by Canudo et al. (2018). This is complete from C1-C11. Canudo’s guess is that this is complete neck (Canudo, pers. comm, 2021), but the specimen doesn’t demand that conclusion and no known eusauropod has fewer than 12 cervicals.
Other sauropod specimens have necks that are complete and articulated from further back in the cervical sequence:
- YPM 1910, Camarasaurus lentus, a mounted specimen described by Lull (1930). The neck is complete from C2 or C3, Lull was uncertain which.
- SMA 0004, Kaatedocus siberi, described by Tschopp and Mateus (2012). Cervicals 3-14 are preserved.
- AODF 888 (informally “Judy”), probably referrable to Diamantinasaurus, briefly described by Poropat et al. (2019). Preserved from C3 or maybe C4. “One posterior cervical (XIII or XIV) found several metres from articulated series, but appears to slot nicely into the gap between the articulated cervical series and the unprepared thoracic section, which might include at least one additional cervical (XIV or XV)” (Poropat, pers. comm. 2021).
Several necks are probably nearly complete, but it is not possible to knew due to their not being found in articulation:
- CM 84, the holotype of Diplodocus carnegii, described by Hatcher (1901). C2–C15 are preserved, though not all in articulation; C11 may be an intrusion: see below for details.
- ZDM T5701, the holotype of Omeisaurus tianfuensis, described by He et al. (1988). The neck was not articulated (He et al. 1988:figure 1), and was missing “two elements or so” (He et al. 1988:120).
- QJGPM 1001, the holotype of Qijianglong guokr, described by Xing et al. (2015). On page 8, the authors say “The axis to the 11th cervical vertebra were fully articulated in the quarry. The atlas intercentrum and the 12th–17th cervical vertebrae were closely associated with the series.”
- MNBH TIG9, a referred specimen of Jobaria tiguidensis. Wilson (2012:103) writes that this specimen “includes a partially articulated series of 19 vertebrae starting from the axis and extending through the mid-dorsal vertebrae.”
- MNBH TIG6, another referred specimen of Jobaria tiguidensus, which has not been mentioned in the literature. Sereno (pers. comm., 2021) says that it is “a subadult partial skeleton with excellent neck” and that “the sequence was articulated from C2–11. Most of the ribs were attached as well.”
At the time of writing, the Paleobiology Database (https://paleobiodb.org/) lists more than 270 sauropod species. The nine unambigously complete and articulated necks therefore represent only one in 30 known sauropod species.
Note. The Jobaria tiguidensis individuals previously had specimen numbers beginning MNN, but the Musee National du Niger changed its name to Musée National Boubou Hama and the specimen numbers have changed with it.
Amazing things are out there waiting to be noticed
March 22, 2021
It is said that, some time around 1590 AD, Galileo Galilei dropped two spheres of different masses from the Leaning Tower of Pisa[1], thereby demonstrating that they fell at the same rate. This was a big deal because it contradicted Aristotle’s theory of gravity, in which objects are supposed to fall at a speed proportional to their mass.
Aristotle lived from 384–322 BC, which means his observably incorrect theory had been scientific orthodoxy for more than 1,900 years before being overturned[2].
How did this happen? For nearly two millennia, every scientist had it in his power to hold a little stone in one hand and a rock in the other, drop them both, and see with his own eyes that they fell at the same speed. Aristotle’s theory was obviously wrong, yet that obviously wrong theory remained orthodox for eighty generations.
My take is that it happened because people — even scientists — have a strong tendency to trust respected predecessors, and not even to look to see whether their observations and theories are correct. I am guessing that in that 1,900 years, plenty of scientists did indeed do the stone-and-rock experiment, but discounted their own observations because they had too much respect for Aristotle.
But even truly great scientists can be wrong.
Now, here is the same story, told on a much much smaller scale.
Well into the 2010s, it was well known that in sauropods, caudal vertebrae past the first handful are pneumatized only in diplodocines and in saltasaurine titanosaurs. As a bright young sauropod researcher, for example, I knew this from the codings in important and respected phylogenetic analysis such as those of Wilson (2002) and Upchurch et al. (2004).
Until the day I visited the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin and actually, you know, looked at the big mounted Giraffatitan skeleton in the atrium. And this is what I saw:
That’s caudal vertebrae 24–26 in left lateral view, and you could not wish to see a nicer, clearer pneumatic feature than the double foramen in caudal 25.
That observation led directly to Matt’s and my 2013 paper on caudal pneumaticity in Giraffatitan and Apatosaurus (Wedel and Taylor 2013) and clued us into how much more common pneumatic hiatuses are then we’d realised. It also birthed the notion of “cryptic diverticula” — those whose traces are not directly recorded in the fossils, but whose presence can be inferred by traces on other vertebrae. And that led to our most recent paper on pneumatic variation in sauropods (Taylor and Wedel 2021) — from which you might recognise the photo above, since a cleaned-up version of it appears there as Figure 5.
The moral
Just because “everyone knows” something is true, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it actually is true. Verify. Use your own eyes. Even Aristotle can be wrong about gravity. Even Jeff Wilson and Paul Upchurch can be wrong about caudal pneumaticity in non-diplodocines. That shouldn’t in any way undermine the rightly excellent reputations they have built. But we sometimes need to look past reputations, however well earned, to see what’s right in front of us.
Go and look at fossils. Does what you see contradict what “everyone knows”? Good! You’ve discovered something!
References
- Taylor, Michael P., and Mathew J. Wedel. 2021. Why is vertebral pneumaticity in sauropod dinosaurs so variable? (version 5) Qeios 1G6J3Q.5. doi:10.32388/1G6J3Q.5
- Upchurch, Paul, Paul M. Barrett and Peter Dodson. 2004. Sauropoda. pp. 259–322 in D. B. Weishampel, P. Dodson and H. Osmólska (eds.), The Dinosauria, 2nd edition. University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles. 861 pp.
- Wedel, Mathew J., and Michael P. Taylor 2013. Caudal pneumaticity and pneumatic hiatuses in the sauropod dinosaurs Giraffatitan and Apatosaurus. PLOS ONE 8(10):e78213. 14 pages. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0078213
- Wilson, Jeffrey A. 2002. Sauropod dinosaur phylogeny: critique and cladistic analysis. Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society 136:217–276.
Notes
1. There is some skepticism about whether Galileo’s experiment really took place, or was merely a thought experiment. But since the experiment was described by Galileo’s pupil Vincenzo Viviani in a biography written in 1654, I am inclined to trust the contemporary account ahead of the unfounded scepticism of moderns. Also, Viviani’s wording, translated as “Galileo showed this by repeated experiments made from the height of the Leaning Tower of Pisa in the presence of other professors and all the students” reads like a documentary account rather than a romanticization. And a thought experiment, with no observable result, would not have demonstrated anything.
2. Earlier experiments had similarly shown that Aristotle’s gravitational theory was wrong, including in the works of John Philoponus in the sixth century — but Aristotle’s orthodoxy nevertheless survived until Galileo.
Good experiences of peer-review at Qeios
March 9, 2021
A month after I and Matt published our paper “Why is vertebral pneumaticity in sauropod dinosaurs so variable?” at Qeios, we were bemoaning how difficult it was to get anyone to review it. But what a difference the last nineteen days have made!
In that time, we’ve had five reviews, and posted three revisions: revision 2 in response to a review by Mark McMenamin, version 3 in response to a review by Ferdinand Novas, and version 4 in response to reviews by Leonardo Cotts, by Alberto Collareta, and by Eduardo Jiménez-Hidalgo.
Taylor and Wedel (2021: Figure 2). Proximal tail skeleton (first 13 caudal vertebrate) of LACM Herpetology 166483, a juvenile specimen of the false gharial Tomistoma schlegelii. A: close-up of caudal vertebrae 4–6 in right lateral view, red circles highlighting vascular foramina: none in Ca4, two in Ca5 and one in Ca6. B: right lateral view. C: left lateral view (reversed). D: close-up of caudal vertebrae 4–6 in left lateral view (reversed), red circles highlighting vascular foramina: one each in Ca4, Ca5 and Ca6. In right lateral view, vascular foramina are apparent in the centra of caudal vertebrae 5–7 and 9–11; they are absent or too small to make out in vertebrae 1–4, 8 and 12–13. In left lateral view (reversed), vascular foramina are apparent in the centra of caudal vertebrae 4–7 and 9; they are absent or too small to make out in vertebrae 1–3, 8, and 10–13. Caudal centra 5–7 and 9 are therefore vascularised from both sides; 4 and 10–11 from one side only; and 1–3, 8 and 12–13 not at all.
There are a few things to say about this.
First, this is now among our most reviewed papers. Thinking back across all my publications, most have been reviewed by two people; the original Xenoposeidon description was reviewed by three; the same was true of my reassessment of Xenoposeidon as a rebbachisaur, and there may have been one or two more that escape me at the moment. But I definitely can’t think of any papers that have been under five sets of eyes apart from this one in Qeios.
Now I am not at all saying that all five of the reviews on this paper are as comprehensive and detailed as a typical solicited peer review at a traditional journal. Some of them have detailed observations; others are much more cursory. But they all have things to say — which I will return to in my third point.
Second, Qeios has further decoupled the functions of peer review. Traditional peer review combines three rather separate functions: A, Checking that the science is sound before publishing it; B, assessing whether it’s a good fit for the journal (often meaning whether it’s sexy enough); and C, helping the authors to improve the work. When PLOS ONE introduced correctness-only peer-review, they discarded B entirely, reasoning correctly that no-one knows which papers will prove influential[1]. Qeios goes further by also inverting A. By publishing before the peer reviews are in (or indeed solicited), it takes away the gatekeeper role of the reviewers, leaving them with only function C, helping the authors to improve the work. Which means it’s no surprise that …
Third, all five reviews have been constructive. As Matt has written elsewhere, “There’s no way to sugar-coat this: getting reviews back usually feels like getting kicked in the gut”. This is true, and we both have a disgraceful record of allowing harshly-reviewed projects to sit fallow for far too long before doing the hard work of addressing the points made by the reviewers and resubmitting[2].
The contrast with the reviews from Qeios has been striking. Each one has sent me scampering back to the manuscript, keen to make (most of) the suggested changes — hence the three revised versions that I’ve posted in the last fortnight. I think there are at least two reasons for this, a big one and a small one.
- The big reason, I think, is that the reviewers know their only role is to improve the paper. Well, that’s not quite true: they also have some influence over its evaluation, both in what they write and in assigning a 1-to-5 star score. But they know when they’re writing their reviews that whatever happens, they won’t block publication. This means, firstly, that there is no point in their writing something like “This paper should not be published until the authors do X”; but equally importantly, I think it puts reviewers in a different and more constructive mindset. They feel themselves to be allies of the authors rather than (as can happen) adversaries.
- The smaller reason is it’s easier to deal with one review at a time. I understand why journals solicit multiple reviews: so the handling editor can consider them all in reaching a decision. I understand why the authors get all the reviews back at once. But that process can’t help but be discouraging: because, once the decision has been made, they’re all on hand and there’s no point in stringing them out. One at a time may not be better, exactly; but it’s emotionally easier.
Is this all upside? Well, it’s too early to say. We’ve only done this once. The experience has certainly been more pleasant — and, crucially, much more efficient — than the traditional publishing lifecycle. But I’m aware of at least two potential drawbacks:
First, the publish-first lifecycle could be exploited by cranks. If the willingness to undergo peer-review is the mark of seriousness in a researcher — and if non-serious researchers are unwilling to face that gauntlet — then a venue that lets you make an end-run around peer-review is an obvious loophole. How serious a danger is this? Only time will tell, but I am inclined to think maybe not too serious. Bad papers on a site like Qeios will attract negative reviews and low scores, especially if they start to get noticed in the mainsteam media. They won’t be seen as having the stamp of having passed peer-review; rather, they will be branded with having publicly failed peer-review.
Second, it’s still not clear where reviewers will come from. We wrote about this problem in some detail last month, and although it’s worked out really well for our present paper, that’s no guarantee that it will always work out this well. We know that Qeios itself approached at least one reviewer to solicit their comments: that’s great, and if they can keep doing this then it will certainly help. But it probably won’t scale, so either a different reviewing culture will need to develop, or we will need people who — perhaps only on an informal basis — take it on themselves to solicit reviews from others. We’re interested to see how this develops.
Anyway, Matt and I have found our first Qeios experience really positive. We’ve come out of it with what I think is a good paper, relatively painlessly, and with much less friction than the usual process. I hope that some of you will try it, too. To help get the process rolling, I personally undertake to review any Qeios article posted by an SV-POW! reader. Just leave a comment here to let me know about your article when it’s up.
Notes
[1] “No-one knows which papers will prove influential”. As purely anecdotal evidence for this claim: when I wrote “Sauropod dinosaur research: a historical review” for the Geological Society volume Dinosaurs: A Historical Perspective, I thought it might become a citation monster. It’s done OK, but only OK. Conversely, it never occurred to me that “Head and neck posture in sauropod dinosaurs inferred from extant animals” would be of more than specialist interest, but it’s turned out to be my most cited paper. I bet most researchers can tell similar stories.
[2] One example: my 2015 preprint on the incompleteness of sauropod necks was submitted for publication in October 2015, and the reviews[3] came back that same month. Five and a half years later, I am only now working on the revision and resubmission. If you want other examples, we got ’em. I am not proud of this.
[3] I referred above to “harsh reviews” but in fact the reviews for this paper were not harsh; they were hard, but 100% fair, and I found myself agreeing with about 90% of the criticisms. That has certainly not been true of all the reviews I have found disheartening!
How can we get post-publication peer-review to happen?
February 20, 2021
Today marks the one-month anniversary of my and Matt’s paper in Qeios about why vertebral pneumaticity in sauropods is so variable. (Taylor and Wedel 2021). We were intrigued to publish on this new platform that supports post-publication peer-review, partly just to see what happened.
Taylor and Wedel (2021: figure 3). Brontosaurus excelsus holotype YPM 1980, caudal vertebrae 7 and 8 in right lateral view. Caudal 7, like most of the sequence, has a single vascular foramen on the right side of its centrum, but caudal 8 has two; others, including caudal 1, have none.
So what has happened? Well, as I write this, the paper has been viewed 842 times, downloaded a healthy 739 times, and acquired an altmetric score 21, based rather incestuously on two SV-POW! blog-posts, 14 tweets and a single Mendeley reader.
What hasn’t happened is even a single comment on the paper. Nothing that could be remotely construed as a post-publication peer-review. And therefore no progress towards our being able to count this as a peer-reviewed publication rather than a preprint — which is how I am currently classifying it in my publications list.
This, despite our having actively solicited reviews both here on SV-POW!, in the original blog-post, and in a Facebook post by Matt. (Ironically, the former got seven comments and the latter got 20, but the actual paper none.)
I’m not here to complain; I’m here to try to understand.
On one level, of course, this is easy to understand: writing a more-than-trivial comment on a scholarly article is work, and it garners very little of the kind of credit academics care about. Reputation on the Qeios site is nice, in a that-and-two-bucks-will-buy-me-a-coffee kind of way, but it’s not going to make a difference to people’s CVs when they apply for jobs and grants — not even in the way that “Reviewed for JVP” might. I completely understand why already overworked researchers don’t elect to invest a significant chunk of time in voluntarily writing a reasoned critique of someone else’s work when they could be putting that time into their own projects. It’s why so very few PLOS articles have comments.
On the other hand, isn’t this what we always do when we write a solicited peer-review for a regular journal?
So as I grope my way through this half-understood brave new world that we’re creating together, I am starting to come to the conclusion that — with some delightful exceptions — peer-review is generally only going to happen when it’s explicitly solicited by a handling editor, or someone with an analogous role. No-one’s to blame for this: it’s just reality that people need a degree of moral coercion to devote that kind of effort to other people’s project. (I’m the same; I’ve left almost no comments on PLOS articles.)
Am I right? Am I unduly pessimistic? Is there some other reason why this paper is not attracting comments when the Barosaurus preprint did? Teach me.
References
Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week 