Futalognkosaurus was one big-ass sauropod
October 20, 2009
At the 2007 SVP meeting in Austin, Texas, I noticed that the suffix “-ass” was ubiquitiously used as a modifier: where an Englishman such as myself might say “This beer is very expensive”, a Texan would say “That is one expensive-ass beer” — and the disease seemed to spread by osmosis through the delegates, so that by my last day in Austin is was seemingly impossible to hear an adjective without the “-ass” suffix.
All of which is by way of introducing the fact that Futalognkosaurus really was a big-ass sauropod, as this photo of its sacrum (with articulated ilia) shows:
Articulated pelvis (sacrum and ilia) of Futalognkosaurus, in ventral view. Juan Porfiri (175 cm high) for scale. Photo by kind permission of Jorge Calvo.
A version of this photograph (in black and white and with the background chopped out) appeared in Ferdinand Novas’s recent book (Novas 2009) and attracted some discussion on the Dinosaur Mailing List.
Although in the past, we have complained about the lack of measurements in the two papers describing Futulognkosaurus (Calvo et al. 2007, 2008), this photo demonstrates a lower bound on its size: we know that it was, at least, Darned Big. (I would attempt to calculate some measurements from this photo using Porfiri as my scale-bar, but we all know how variable human proportions are, so it’s probably better to refrain.) The great news here is that, as explained by Ruben Juarez Valieri in a comment on an earlier article, a third article is on the way that will contain all the measurements we want.
Anyway, here are some more of Calvo’s awesome Futalognkosaurus photos, all used with grateful permission:
Median or posterior cervical vertebra of Futalognkosaurus in right anterolateral view; Juan Porfiri (175 cm) for scale. Photo by kind permission of Jorge Calvo.
(That is an insanely tall cervical.)
Articulated dorsal vertebrae of Futalognkosaurus in ?ventral view. And there is Juan Porfiri again, still 175 cm tall. Photo by kind permission of Jorge Calvo.
How on Earth did they get that jacket out the ground and back to the museum?!
And finally — if you’ll forgive the flagrant appendicularity:
Right ischium and pubis of Futalognkosaurus in ventrolateral view. Where's Juan? Photo by kind permission of Jorge Calvo.
And now for something completely different:
Open Access Week
I’m pleased to say that this week (October 19-23) is Open Access Week. Get over to the site for statistics about the rise of open access. Particularly impressive is a sequence of institutions that are introducing open-access mandates, i.e. requiring that all research produced by its staff is made freely available to the world. We’re on the way!
References
- Calvo, J.O., Porfiri, J.D., Gonzalez-Riga, B.J., and Kellner, A.W.A. 2007. A new Cretaceous terrestrial ecosystem from Gondwana with the description of a new sauropod dinosaur. Anais da Academia Brasileira de Ciencias 79(3):529-541.
- Calvo, J.O., Porfiri, J.D., Gonzalez-Riga, B.J., and Kellner, A.W.A. 2008. Anatomy of Futalognkosaurus dukei Calvo, Porfiri, Gonzalez-Riga & Kellner, 2007 (Dinosauria, Titanosauridae) from the Neuquen Group (Late Cretaceous), Patagonia, Argentina. Arquivos do Museu Nacional, Rio de Janeiro 65(4):511-526.
- Novas, F. 2009. The Age of Dinosaurs in South America. Indiana University Press (Life of the Past series). 480 pages.
After a completely barren 2008, this year is turning out to be a good one for me in terms of publications. Today sees the publication of Taylor (2009b), entitled Electronic publication of nomenclatural acts is inevitable, and will be accepted by the taxonomic community with or without the endorsement of the code — one of those papers where, if you’ve read the title, you can skip the rest of the paper. (Although on that score, my effort is knocked into a cocked hat by Hulke 1880.)
The message of the paper will be familiar to anyone who’s been following the Shiny Digital Future thread on this site; as indeed will parts of the text, as the paper is basically a more carefully worked and cohesive form of an argument that I’d previously spread across half a dozen blog posts, a similar number of emails on the ICZN mailing list and any number of comments on other people’s blogs. The sequence of section headings in the paper tells its own story:
And that conclusion reads as follows:
While we were looking the other way, the digital revolution has happened: everyone but the ICZN now accepts electronic publication. The Code is afforded legitimacy by workers and journals only because it serves them; if we allow it to become anachronistic then they will desert it – or, at best, pick and choose, following only those provisions of the Code that suit them. Facing this reality, the Code has no realistic option but to change – to recognise electronic publishing as valid.
I have no detailed recommendations to make regarding the recently proposed amendments to the Code (ICZN, 2008). Instead I ask only this simple question: will the Code step up to the plate and regulate electronic publications as well as printed publications? Because this is the only question that remains open. Simply rejecting electronic publication is no longer a valid option.
Which I’m sure is familiar rhetoric to long-time SDF advocates, but which I hope will rattle a few cages in the more conservative ranks of specialist taxonomists. I think it’s a very promising sign that BZN, the official journal of the ICZN, is prepared to publish this kind of advocacy — they didn’t even ask me to tone down the language. I hope it indicates that in high places, they are sensing which way the wind is blowing.
Here’s a reminder of why electronic publishing is so desirable: figure 3 from Sereno et al.’s (2007) paper on the bizarre skull of the rebbachisaurid Nigersaurus:
Sereno et al. (2007:fig. 3): Nigersaurus taqueti, including photographs of cervical, dorsal and caudal vertebrae in left lateral view.
Let me remind you that this was a paper about skulls — vertebrae were not even on the agenda. Yet click through the image (go on, you have to) and you will see them each presented in glorious high-resolution detail. That paper was of course published in the PLoS ONE — a journal that, because it is online only, can provide this quality of figure reproduction, which shames even the very best of printed journals. To see printed-on-paper figures this detailed and informative, you have to right back to Osborn and Mook (1921).
Which is why I recently decided to put my open-access money where my electronic-only mouth is, and submit the forthcoming Archbishop description to a PLoS journal. In response to a challenge from Andy Farke, I rather precipitately made a public commitment to do my level best to get that paper submitted this calendar year; and while that may not actually happen, having that goal out there can only help. Seeing that gorgeous quarry photo of Spinophorosaurus was what tipped me over the edge into wanting to use PLoS. My plan is to describe the living crap out of that bad boy, photograph every element from every direction and put the whole lot in the paper — make the paper as close as possible as a surrogate for the specimen itself. Only PLoS (to my knowledge) can do this.
(Of course, once you start wanting to include other kinds of information in your publications — videos, 3d models, etc. — then an electronic-only venue is literally your only option.)
I leave you with two photos of “Cervical P” of the Archbishop; commentary by Matt. These images are copyright the NHM since it’s their specimen.
Unnamed brachiosaurid NHM R5937, "The Archbishop", Cervical P in right lateral view.
Unnamed brachiosaurid NHM R5937, "The Archbishop", Cervical P in left lateral view.
References
- Hulke, J. W. 1880. Iguanodon Prestwichii, a new species from the Kimmeridge Clay, distinguished from I. Mantelli of the Wealden Formation in the S.E. of England and Isle of Wight by differences in the shape of the vertebral centra, by fewer than five sacral vertebrae, by the simpler character of its tooth-serrature, &c., founded on numerous fossil remains lately discovered at Cumnor, near Oxford. Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society 36:433-456. doi:10.1144/GSL.JGS.1880.036.01-04.36
- International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature. 2008. Proposed amendment of the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature to expand and refine methods of publication. Zootaxa 1908: 57-67, Bulletin of Zoological Nomenclature 65(4): 265-275 and various other places.
- Osborn, H. F. and C. C. Mook. 1921. Camarasaurus, Amphicoelias and other sauropods of Cope. Memoirs of the American Museum of Natural History, n.s. 3: 247-387, and plates LX-LXXXV. [HUGE download, but totally worth it.]
- Sereno, Paul C., Jeffrey A. Wilson, Lawrence M. Witmer, John A. Whitlock, Abdoulaye Maga, Oumarou Ide and Timothy A. Rowe. 2007. Structural Extremes in a Cretaceous Dinosaur. PLoS ONE 2 (11): e1230 (9 pages). doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0001230
- Taylor, Michael P. 2009. Electronic publication of nomenclatural acts is inevitable, and will be accepted by the taxonomic community with or without the endorsement of the Code. Bulletin of Zoological Nomenclature 66(3):205-214.
Not a brachiosaur, but too good to ignore
September 16, 2009
I am not usually one for field photographs — I am not a geologist, and one bit of rock looks the same as any other to me. I suffer from a debilitating condition that renders me unable to see fossils in the ground, and am reliant on other people to dig ‘em out, clean ‘em up and reposit them before I’m able to make ‘em into science.
But this … this blew me away:
Spinophorosaurus nigerensis, holotype skeleton GCP-CV-4229 in situ during excavation in the region of Aderbissinat, Thirozerine Dept., Agadez Region, Republic of Niger. (Remes et al. 2009)
It’s the astonishingly complete and well-preserved type specimen of a new basal sauropod, Spinophorosaurus, that came out today in a paper lead-authored by Kristian Remes, previously best known for his work on Tendaguru diplodocines (Remes 2006, 2007, 2009) and for his work on the awesome remounting of the Berlin brachiosaur.
I’m not going to write the new taxon up in detail, but here are the figures of its vertebrae:
Spinophorosaurus nigerensis GCP-CV-4229 (holotype; C, E-I) and NMB-1698-R (paratype; A, B, D). (A, B)— Mid-cervical vertebra in left lateral (A) and ventral (B) views. (C)— Last dorsal and first sacral vertebrae in left lateral view. (D)— Clavicle in cranial view. (E, F)— Proximal caudal neural spines in lateral (E) and cranial (F) views. (G)— Mid-caudal vertebra in lateral view. (H, I)— Distal caudal vertebrae in left lateral (H) and ventral (I) views. Abbreviations: pcdl, posterior centrodiapophyseal lamina; podl, postzygodiapophyseal lamina; spol, spinopostzygapophyseal lamina. Scale bars = 10 cm. (Remes et al. 2009:fig. 3)
(It’s a shame they didn’t figure more of it, especially as the paper was in PLoS ONE which has no length limits and absolutely stellar figure production, but it would be churlish to complain.)
Finally, here is the skeletal reconstruction: as you can see, it’s a decent size for such a basal sauropod. Note the freaky all-osteoderm tail-club.
Skeletal reconstruction of Spinophorosaurus nigerensis. Dimensions are based on GCP-CV-4229/NMB-1699-R, elements that are not represented are shaded. Scale bar = 1 m. (Remes et al. 2009)
A truly amazing specimen — I am looking forward to sitting down with the paper and giving it the attention it deserves.
Best of all, you can also sit down with the paper — because, like all PLoS articles, it is freely available to anyone who wants it. Follow the link below and enjoy! (Also available from the linked article: super-high resolution images of the figures.)
Timely Discussion From an E-mail Exchange Today
Matt Wedel: That animal is just flat badass.
Zach Miller: It has a goddamn thagomizer!!!
References
- Remes, Kristian. 2006. Revision of the Tendaguru sauropod dinosaur Tornieria africana (Fraas) and its relevance for sauropod paleobiogeography. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology 26(3):651-669.
- Remes, Kristian. 2007. A second Gondwanan diplodocoid dinosaur from the Upper Jurassic Tendaguru Beds of Tanzania, East Africa. Paleontology 50(3):653-667.
- Remes, Kristian. 2009. Taxonomy of Late Jurassic diplodocid sauropods from Tendaguru (Tanzania). Fossil Record 12 (1): 23-46. doi: 10.1002/mmng.200800008
- Remes, Kristian, Francisco Ortega, Ignacio Fierro, Ulrich Joger, Ralf Kosma, Jose Manuel Marin Ferrer, for the Project PALDES, for the Niger Project SNHM, Oumarou Amadou Ide, and Abdoulaye Maga. 2009. A new basal sauropod dinosaur from the Middle Jurassic of Niger and the early evolution of Sauropoda. PLoS ONE 4(9):e6924. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0006924
Ornithischian Limb-Bone Project Of The Decade
September 8, 2009
Matt and I, working with Andy Farke (the Open Source Paleontologist) are delighted to announce a new project that we’re all very excited about. Normally we wouldn’t talk about work that’s only just starting — we prefer to wait until a paper is out, or at least in review, before talking about it — but this one is different, because we want YOU to help write it.
How can this be?
Get yourself over to The Open Dinosaur Project and find out!
In a nutshell, we want to crowdsource the process of gathering a big database of limb measurements from ornithischian dinosaurs. Using the gathered data, we will use statistical techniques to see what can be discovered about the multiple transitions from bipedality to quadrupedality, and write up the results for the open-access journal PLoS ONE. Everyone who contributes to the data-gathering will be an author on the paper, and we’ll make the database freely available to anyone else who wants to use it for other studies.
Can it work? Are we crazy? Who can tell? We’ll find out over the next year. See the project web-site for much more detail!
Coverage
The Open Dinosaur Project is also being discussed by:
- Project lead Andy Farke on The Open Source Paleontologist (“The Big (and Crazy) Announcement“)
- Glyn Moody at Open… (“The Open Dinosaur Project“)
- Bora Zivkovic at A Blog Around the Clock (“Now THIS is Open Science!!!“) [Three exclamations marks already!]
- Darren Naish at Tetrapod Zoology (“I have no time, so here’s this…“)
- Tor Bertin at Thoughts and Ideas From a Paleo Punker (“The most open dinosaurs you’ve ever seen!“)
- Brian Switek at The Smithsonian’s Dinosaur Tracking (“Pulling Back the Curtain on Dinosaur Science“)
- Dave Hone’s Archosaur Musings (“Pssst – wanna be a palaeontologist?“)
- Bill Parker at Chinleana (“These Guys Might Be Crazy“)
- Gavin Baker at Open Access News (“New open project in dinosaur research“)
- A Primate of Modern Aspect (“Open Dinosaurs!“)
- Jeff Martz at Paleo Errata (“The Open Dinosaur Project“)
- Zach Miller at When Pigs Fly Returns (“Go Forth and Do Science!“)
… We’ll add more as they turn up.
Right, that’s it — time for the revolution
September 3, 2009
UPDATE (from Matt): I also bring good news … and bad news.
The good news is that the entire dinosaur issue of Anatomical Record is open access after all. So this post is mainly of historical interest now, and you should get on over to the page for this issue and download all the free dinosaurian goodness.
The bad news is that the representatives from Wiley never told anyone any of this when inquiries were made two weeks ago–if they had, this particular teacup could have stayed storm-free–and that they apparently still want institutions to pay $575 for a single Open Access issue of the journal. Whether those moves are predatory or just clueless, they are not earning Wiley any friends.
—————-
I bring good news … and bad news.
Good news! Tom Holtz reported in a message to the Dinosaur Mailing List that there is new issue of The Anatomical Record out that is concerned entirely with dinosaurs! The online table of contents shows that there’s lots of good stuff.
Bad news! It’s not open access.
Good news! You can buy access to the articles.
Bad news! The price of the articles is NOT STATED. That’s right, folks: you have to register with Wiley InterScience before they will EVEN TELL YOU THE PRICE! Way to go, Wiley! THAT’s the way to make sure important research is widely disseminated!
Good news! B tH wrote to ask the publisher for a price, and got a reply, which he shared in another Dinosaur Mailing List message:
Bad news! This is the reply (which I can’t format better, thanks to totally unnecessary limitations in WordPress):
Date: Mon, 31 Aug 2009 12:48:21 -0700 (PDT)
From: B tH <soylentgreenistrex@yahoo.com>
To: dinosaur@usc.edu
Subject: re: special all-dino issue
I wrote to ask them how much ordering this singl issue was – they wanted to know if I was ordering for an institution or myself. This is the price they quoted me to buy and read it at night with a flashlight under the blankey – and I am totally serious:
$575.00 US
That’s right, five HUNDRED and seventy-five buckeroos. I assured them they were quite mad, and have to face the fact I won’t get to see it. Waaah.
Good news! B tH realised that Wiley had quoted him the institutional rate and wrote to clarify. The exchange is documented in yet another Dinosaur Mailing List message.
Bad news! This is the exchange:
Sent: Monday, August 31, 2009 6:07 PM
To: cs-journals@wiley.com
Subject: RE: wanting to purchase an issue of the magazine [pfCase:1078353,
pfTicket:10108736]
Um, I think you’ve made an error.
Five-Hundred and Seventy-Five dollars for an issue of a magazine? ??
==============
From: <cs-journals@wiley.com>
Dear __________
The Anatomical Record, Volume 292, Issue 9
Thank you for your email.
As we do not have Individual rates for this title, hence the Institutional single issue rate was quoted instead.
Please provide us with a billing and shipping address if you require a proforma invoice for this order and I will happy to assist you.
Kind Regards,
Jacqueline Choong
Customer Services Advisor
Journal Customer Services for John Wiley & Sons
Good news! The revolution is coming, and things like this can only bring it on. And Wiley’s InterScience department are a bunch of mindless jerks who will be first up against the wall when the revolution comes.
Yes, Wiley’s behaviour here is totally absurd and absolutely unethical. No, Wiley didn’t themselves write the articles that they want to charge FIVE HUNDRED AND SEVENTY-FIVE FREAKIN’ DOLLARS for. Neither did they pay the authors to do so. Do you know how it comes to be that Wiley are the owners of these articles, and thus in a position to extort for access? Happily, the reason is right here in the Instructions to Authors:
MISCELLANEOUS
[...]
Upon acceptance of an article for publication, the author will be asked to sign a Copyright Transfer Agreement transferring rights to the publisher, who reserves copyright.
Yes, it’s as simple as that. Like all of us do most times we submit a manuscript, the authors just signed away the ownership of their work. Just like that. Work that was funded, if at all, by public funds, just handed over to a grossly exploitative for-profit commercial enterprise that — quite clearly, from the exchanges above — has no interest whatsoever in the advancement or dissemination of science.
Folks, we have got to stop doing this. I can (just) stomach handing copyright of my work over to professional societies such as the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology (required for the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology) or the Palaeontological Association (required for Palaeontology) [although frankly there is absolutely no good reason for these journals to make that requirement]. But I will NOT give my work to these parasitic commercial publishers, and I strongly urge you not to, either. We should all of us be supporting open-access journals where possible; and failing that, at least those published by non-profit organisations. I am not going to be propping up Elsevier, Wiley and the rest with any of my stuff.
Deep in our heart, we all — Wiley included — know that non-open academic publishing is dead, even if the corpse is still blundering around trying to eat our brains. This sort of extortion (I mean the FIVE HUNDRED AND SEVENTY-FIVE FREAKIN’ DOLLARS kind) is death throes. It’s probably going to get messier before the stakes are finally driven through the hearts of the bloodsuckers. But take heart: morning is coming, and they will all turn to dust.
And finally …
More Good news! I give you NHM 46869, the holotype of Chondrosteosaurus gigas Owen 1876, a badly eroded cervical centrum from some kind of sauropod, in right lateral view:
NHM 46869, holotype of Chondrosteosaurus gigas, a cervical centrum, in right lateral view.
This is the mate of NHM 46870, a specimen that we have already given way too much coverage, and which has sometimes been considered the cotype along with 46869. Unlike its mate, it has not been sliced down the middle, and is — for what it’s worth — “complete” (i.e. not actually complete at all).
References
- Owen, Richard. 1876. Monograph of the fossil Reptilia of the Wealden and Purbeck formations. Supplement 7. Crocodilia (Poikilopleuron), Dinosauria (Chondrosteosaurus), Palaeontographical Society of London [Monographs], 29:15-93.
Yet more uninformed noodling on the future of scientific publishing and that kind of thing
June 16, 2009
Sorry to keep dumping all these off-topic thoughts on you all, but I got an email from Matt today in which he suggested that there should be some system of giving people credit for particularly insightful blog comments. (This came up for the obvious reason that SV-POW! readers tend to leave unusually brilliant comments, as well as having excellent reading taste and being remarkably good looking.) That led me into the following sequence of thoughts, which I thought were worth blogging — not least in the hope that we can learn something from the comments.
But first, here is that photo of another fused atlas-axis complex that you ordered (seriously, what’s up with these things?):
Camarasaurus grandis YPM 1905, fused atlas and axis in right lateral view
And now, on with the uninformed noodling:
As things stand at this point, we have a hierarchy of sciency documents. At the top (which we’ll call level 1) come papers. The reputation of papers is largely determined by formal pre-publication reviews (which we will therefore classify as level 2) — and, increasingly, also by blog posts about the paper, which are also level 2. Classic peer-reviews are only ever seen by the editor and the author of the original paper; once they have been absorbed into the paper they’re critiquing, they disappear forever, which is a crying shame. But the other kind of level-2 literature, the blog post, has a life of its own: and so it gets commented on by blog-comments (level 3). Each level gives validity to the level above.
More important, documents at each level also give validity to each other. The most important case is that when one paper favourably discusses another, or refers to its authority, it gives the latter a credibility boost (which is why it’s such a sod that no-one cites any of my papers); similarly, our SV-POW! posts also get a credibility boost when they’re discussed on Tetrapod Zoology or Blog Around the Clock (and I just repaid the compliment by linking back to them).
(At present, all of this is done in a messy qualitative way, with no numbers attached, except occasionally in the case of pre-publication reviews. That’s a shame: if, for example, blog commenters allocated the posts a score out of ten, then we could use some kind of average score as a quality filter: to ameliorate rigging, I’d suggest discarding the highest and lowest 10% of awarded scores, and averaging the remainder.)
Now the problem: blog comments are right at the bottom of the pile: who is going to rate them? I’m certainly not going to spend any time on that.
OK, so suppose we ignore the arbitrary allocation of levels: papers, reviews, blog posts and comments are all just considered as documents, and all can discuss each other. (Clearly reviews will necessarily discuss papers more often the papers discuss blog comments, but that is a convention added to the system I am about to describe, not a precondition for it.) Each document has a reputation, which we will quantify as a single real number. Documents start with some arbitrary small reputation — probably 0.0 or 1.0, and it probably doesn’t much matter what it is. When any document discusses, cites or links to another — whether it’s paper, a review, a blog post or a comment — that linkee’s reputation is boosted by some proportion: 10%, say, of the linker’s reputation. Now of course this change in linkee reputation causes a trickle-down change of 1% in the reputation of the documents that it links to; and 0.1% in the reputation of the documents they link to, and so on. Reputations will change frequently and irregularly, and will be near impossible to calculate accurately, but that’s fine — they should be easy to approximate, and that’s good enough.
In this way, we get a nice solid score that we can use to decide what’s worth reading and what isn’t — the cream will naturally rise to the top. Hiring committees can throw away impact factors, and instead just add up the reputation scores of their candidates’ publications (either in the strict sense of the word, or including blog posts, reviews and/or comments). By the way, one of the positive effects of this would be that people like Darren and Jerry Harris would get some reward from their sterling reviewing efforts.
Sounds awesome? Here’s something even more awesome: we already have that system, more or less. Yes indeed: the reputation propagation algorithm I described is, in general outline, the same thing that Google does in the algorithm that it calls PageRank(tm)(r)(lol)(ymmv). We can — and already do — use Google’s notion of reputation as a guide to finding what’s worth reading, and we can tell that in works well in practice because SV-POW! posts rank so highly :-)
So that’s it! We can all stop worrying, just Google for stuff we’re interested in, and read whatever pops up at the top of the list!
Are you convinced? I hope not, because this idea has at least three huge problems.
1. What counts? (Yes, that again.) Google-ranking works well for blog posts, because they are web pages, and Google can spider web pages. But that leaves out reviews, because they are typically not published at all, let alone as web pages. And it leaves out comments, because they are appended to the end of blog posts rather than being pages in own right, with their own PageRank. And, worst of all, it pretty much leaves out the papers themselves — because there is, in general, no one single web-page which is The Place a particular paper lives. For non-open papers that aren’t hosted on the author’s page or elsewhere, there is no page. In short, reviews are not published, comments are not whole pages and papers are not single pages, so none of them is properly page-rankable.
2. All links count as positive reputation — there are no negative citations. So a document that says “Taylor, Wedel and Naish 2009 was talking a lot of nonsense about sauropod neck posture” would still be a score in our favour, even though it meant the exact opposite. Of course, this is not a new problem: both PageRank and Impact Factors suffer from the same problem, but it doesn’t seem to be a killer for either of them. The only fix for this would be to invite authors (of papers, reviews, blogs and comments) to explicitly score some or all of the other documents they mention — and I doubt people are going to be keen to do that unless the mechanism can be made very non-intrusive.
3. And here’s the killer: we wouldn’t, or shouldn’t, want Google to do this, even if they could overcome problems #1 and #2. Google is a private corporation, and we don’t want to hand over reputation management to any private commercial venture with an obligation to shareholders rather than scientists, and with a proprietary secret algorithm. If you doubt me, consider Thompson’s ownership of the Impact Factor and see where that’s got us. No doubt when Eugene Garfield came up with the idea of the Impact Factor, he was pretty excited about how — at last! — we would have an objective, reliable way to evaluate science. But IF is not run by scientists, it’s run by a corporation. With hilarious results.
I have no idea what the conclusion to all this is. I didn’t have a clear idea where it was headed when I started writing it. But, much in the manner of Dirk Gently when employing his usual method of navigation, I may not have ended up where I intended to, but I’ve arrived somewhere interesting.
Your move: what have I failed to take into account?
I have a much less realised view of the digital future than Matt does, so I won’t be making a lot of predictions here. But I do have some questions to ask, and — predictably — some whining to do.
What counts, what doesn’t, and why?
Assuming you have made some science (e.g. a description of fossil, a palaeobiological hypothesis supported by evidence, a taxonomic revision), there are plenty of different ways you can present it to the world. I may have missed some, but here are the ones I’ve thought of, in roughly descending order of respectability/citability/prestige:
- Peer-reviewed paper/book chapter
- Unreviewed paper/book chapter
- Peer-reviewed electronic-only paper
- Published abstract (e.g. for SVP)
- Conference talk
- Conference poster
- Dissertation
- Online supplementary information
- Blog post
- Blog comment
- Email to the DML (which is archived on the web)
- Personal email
- Chat over a beer
How many of these are Science? Where is the line? Is the line hard or fuzzy? Why is it OK to cite SVP abstracts but not so much SVPCA abstracts? And other such questions. I think a very good case can be made that dissertations — provided they are made available — are better sources than conference talks, posters and abstracts; and a pretty good case can be made that blog posts are (especially when webcitation’ed — see below). Both dissertations and (good) blog posts have the advantage over talks and posters that they have a permanent existence, and over abstracts the simple fact that they are substantial: a 200-word abtract cannot, by its very nature, say anything much.
Zoological nomenclature
Unfortunately, for nomenclatural purposes, the ICZN’s Article 8 currently says that only publications on paper count, period, which counts out dissertations. I say unfortunately because were it not for this rule, then at least part of Aetogate would never have happened: the ramifications of Bill Parker’s case would not have been so awful if the perfectly good description of Heliocanthus in his (2003) dissertation had been allowed priority over Lucas et al.’s (2006) rush-job which attached the name Rioarribasuchus to the same specimen. Happily, the ICZN is as we write this considering an amendment to recognise nomenclatural acts in electronic-only publications. There has already been some published discussion of the pros and cons of this amendment, and the Commission is actively soliciting further comments, so those of you with strong feelings should put them in writing and send them to the Executive Secretary. (I will certainly be doing so.)
Self-scooping
We all know that blog entries are Not Sufficiently Published to be citable, at least in most journals; but are they Too Published to let you re-use the same material? When you submit to most journals, they ask you to formally state “this material has not previously been published” — is that true if we’ve blogged it? I am guessing different editors would answer that differently. For what it’s worth, we’ve been reasonably careful up till now not to blog anything that we’re planning to make into a paper — which is why we were so mysteriously silent on the obviously important topic of sauropod neck posture during the first 19 months of SV-POW!. We’ve not been 100% pure on this: for example, I have a paper on Brachiosaurus in press that mentions in passing the spinoparapophyseal laminae, absence of an infradiapophyseal laminae and perforate anterior centroparapophyseal laminae of the 8th dorsal vertebra of the Brachiosaurus brancai specimen HMN SII — the features that I have blogged here in detail, with illustrations that would certainly never have been given journal-space. Since the relevant passage in my paper accounted for half a manuscript page (of a total of 75 pages), I’m assuming no-one’s bothered about that. In a case like this, I guess the SV-POW! posts are best thought of as pre-emptive and unofficial online supplementary information.
Counts for what purpose?
We’ve already mentioned that dissertations, blog entries and suchlike don’t count for nomenclatural purposes. Whether they count in the sense of being citable in published works is up for debate right now (and again, see below on webcitation). It seems pretty clear that these forms of “grey publication” do count in establishing people’s reputations among their peers — dissertations are obviously important in this regard, and Darren’s ridiculously broad knowledge of tetrapods extant and extinct is near-universally recognised largely because of his blogging efforts (although you could argue — and Matt and I often have argued — that he might have been able to enhance his reputation even more if he’d taken some of that blogging time and invested it in formal publications). Conversely, it’s clear that blogs, however rigorous and scientific, count for squat when it comes to committees. The world of dinosaur palaeontology is probably just as aware of Matt’s series of Aerosteon response articles here on SV-POW! as it would be if he’d put those together into a paper that was published in PLoS ONE; but when his tenure committee comes to count up the impact factors of the journals he’s published in, those articles will count for nothing. One day that might change, but not while impact factors still exert their baleful influence.
Deciding what to blog and what to write up as a “proper paper”
Matt posted his response to the Aerosteon paper as a sequence of three blog entries even though he knew that what he had to say was substantial enough to make a paper. Why throw away a potential publication that would look good on the CV? Because he wanted to get it out there ASAP, and didn’t want to wait until all the media dust had settled. So he fought people off when they pestered him to publish it as a paper. He doesn’t really need to do it now, and he doesn’t really have time (especially since I keep badgering him about all the papers we’re supposed to be collaborating on). If we were starving for publications, we could turn a lot of SV-POW! posts into LPUs — but we’re not starving.
Let me explain this by taking a digression though the economics of file-sharing and the way labels persistently — maybe deliberately — misunderstand them. Let’s imagine for the sake of an example that a while back, I sent Matt the MP3s that make up Blue Oyster Cult’s awesome Fire Of Unknown Origin album. Now anyone with their brain switched on can see that the net effect of this on his music-buying pattern would be positive: if he really liked Fire, there is a fair chance that he would then have gone and bought a BOC album or two, or three — just as I’ve been buying Dar Williams albums like crazy since someone slipped me MP3s of Mortal City. The labels’ perception, however, is that instead I would have denied them a sale: that if I’d not sent the Fire of Unknown Origin MP3s, Matt would of course have bought his own legitimate copy, and so I’ve stiffed them out of $6.99 less whatever tiny slice they pass on to the artist. The misunderstanding here is that they think — or would like to think, who knows if they really believe this themselves? — that people’s music consumption is limited by the time we have available to listen to music, and that one way or another we will obtain enough music to fulfil that need: for free if possible, but by paying for it if necessary. But the truth is completely different: there would be zero chance of Matt’s ever buying any BOC album, since he’d never even heard of them (beyond Don’t Fear The Reaper, I guess) whereas in the hypothetical universe where I sent him the Fire MP3s, there is a non-zero chance. And the labels’ failure to understand that is because of a wholly incorrect model of what factor limits music listening.
Digression ends. Its relevance is this: in the same way, we are used to thinking that our ability to get papers published is limited by the number of publication-worthy ideas we have — so that every paper idea we “waste” on a blog entry is a net loss. In truth, ideas are cheap, and our ability to get papers published is actually limited by our throughput — our ability to find time to actually write those ideas up with sufficient rigour, prepare high-resolution figures, format the manuscripts for journals, wait through the review period, deal with the reviews, revise, resubmit, handle editorial requests, and so on and on. (That is especially true when the journal takes six months to come up with a rejection.) This is why Matt and I, like everyone else I know in palaeo who I’ve discussed this with, have huge stacks of POOP that we’ve not yet found time to convert into papers. So when we spend a paper-worthy idea on a blog entry, we’re not wasting it: we’re putting it out there (in an admittedly inferior format) when otherwise it would never have made it out there at all. The remaining issue is whether the time we spend on blogging an idea would have been better spent on moving a paper further towards publication. Maybe, sometimes. But you have to stop and smell the roses every now and again. So the real cost of SV-POW! for us is not the “waste” of paperable ideas, but the time we spend on writing it. I am guessing that in the time I’ve put into SV-POW! so far, I could have got two more papers out — certainly one. Has it been worth it? I think so, but it’s not a no-brainer. On the other hand, SV-POW! probably acts as a reader-funnel, so that when I do get a paper out, more people read it than otherwise would. How big that effect is, I don’t know, and I can’t think of a way to measure it.
How to cite blog entries: WebCite
One of the great things about writing for SV-POW! is that you can learn some really useful stuff from the comments; and the most useful comment I’ve seen so far is the one in which Cameron Neylon pointed us at WebCite (http://webcitation.org/). This is a superbly straightforward site that makes permanent archive copies of web-pages, and mirrors them around the world. In doing so, it deals with the problems of web pages being vulnerable to disappearance and prone to change. (In off-list emails with Matt, I had suggested that I might build something like this myself, as I am software engineer in my day job; I am delighted that these guys have done it properly instead.) So if you ever want to cite Matt’s second Aerosteon post in a journal, use the archive URL http://webcitation.org/5hPYTmWpW — and if you want to cite any other SV-POW! article, just submit its URL to WebCite yourself, and get back an archive URL which you can use. And tell all your friends about WebCite!
Oh, and by the way …
Here’s that photo of a monitor lizard getting its arse kicked by an elephant that you ordered:
Monitor lizard postcranium, aerial, strongly inclined. Photograph by Hira Punjabi, downloaded from National Geographic
References
- Lucas, S. G., Hunt, A. P. and Spielmann, J. A. 2006. Rioarribasuchus, a new name for an aetosaur from the Upper Triassic of north-central New Mexico. New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science, Bulletin 37: 581-582.
- Parker, W. G. 2003a. Description of a new specimen of Desmatosuchus haplocerus from the Late Triassic of Northern Arizona. Unpublished MS thesis. Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff. 315 pp.
First off, thanks to everyone for reading, commenting on, and discussing the previous post. Seeing the diversity of opinions expressed has been interesting and gratifying for us, and we’ve learned a lot from you about how the blogosphere is changing science already. My own thoughts follow, Mike chimes in at the end, and Darren will probably have something to add soon, too.
The Intolerable Problem
Sometimes people push back on posts of mine they don’t like by telling me I’m out of bounds. Somehow, they say, I’ve crossed the boundary of what I’m allowed to write about. They are angry that I’m now writing about something outside my defined area.
I’m usually taken aback by this, because I didn’t realize I’d actually agreed to any boundaries.
Seth Godin, 2009, “Out of Bounds”
Several commenters have brought up what I call the Intolerable Problem, which is that people online can critique papers and present new evidence and arguments in a format that is impermanent and not peer-reviewed. It’s intolerable because on one hand such material is not currently (operative word) citable in most outlets, and on the other hand repeating it sans citation in peer-reviewed literature smacks of plagiarism (to some, but not to all). Although this material is potentially valuable it “doesn’t count” professionally (see exceptions below), which some professionals (not necessarily those who have commented here) regard as a fatal argument against posting it in the first place. But–and this is crucial–it’s only a problem for the tiny fraction of the audience who might want to cite the freely exchanged material. If you’re in that fraction, we value your attention and comments, but don’t assume we’re writing only for you, or to further our professional standing. We blog because we love this stuff, and even at a technical niche blog like SV-POW! the majority of readers probably don’t care at all whether the information is peer-reviewed or “counts” for professionals; they mostly care whether it’s right or not.
One obvious solution to the Intolerable Problem is to simply let people cite anything they want, including blog posts and DML posts. This is already starting to be implemented–see examples here and here and more discussion here. This runs into two problems: one is permanence (there is no guarantee that the cited post will be up forever, or that the author won’t revise it later in response to criticism [as I have done with this very post!]), which can already be solved using tools such as WebCite (thanks to Cameron Neylon for bringing this to our attention in a comment on the previous post).
The other problem is that citations serve two functions, which are to establish priority and to lend authority to an argument. Citing a blog post may establish priority, but some researchers will cavil at the idea that a blog post is an authoritative source (for varying combinations of researchers and blog posts). Whether they would be right to cavil I don’t know; in the end the market will decide. The market–that is, the desire to attain professional respect and avoid censure–will also dissuade authors from larding up their papers with citations to trivial or worthless online sources.
Those who are troubled by the free discussion of papers, evidence, and hypotheses online need to realize that:
- it’s been going on for a long time (15 years for the Dinosaur Mailing List);
- it’s only going to accelerate in the future;
- it’s not a problem for the vast majority of people participating in the discussions;
- any solution must involve accommodation to the reality of how people exchange information online (immediately, freely, globally, without prior filtering).
These discussions are not going to stop, and ignoring the output of such discussions (because they “don’t count”) will eventually become prohibitively expensive as those workers who insist on playing only by the old rules are outmaneuvered by others who find ways to use all available information regardless of its provenience or “respectability”.
Paper journals will die when online journals stop sucking
Most online publications are hampered by having to be identical to the dead-tree versions (no links, no embedded video, no rotating 3D PDF images, etc.). Eventually people will realize that it is counterproductive to keep hobbling the new medium to make it as slow, flat, and inefficient as the old medium. Once one journal takes the hobbles off, others will do the same rather than lose contributors to cutting-edge outlets. A few boutique journals may still produce flattened, gutted versions of the online publications on paper. People still fly biplanes, too. Paper-based journals will never be popular again and their existence will not stop people from doing whatever technology allows them to in the online venues.
Note that this does not even refer to the economic argument against dead-tree publishing, which has already relocated encyclopedias and newspapers from ubiquity to marginality or extinction.
I’m surprised that the revolution isn’t farther along already. The cage is open.
Whither peer review and editing?
This is all part of the Big Flip in publishing generally, where the old notion of “filter, then publish” is giving way to “publish, then filter.” There is no need for Slashdot’s or Kuro5hin’s owners to sort the good posts from the bad in advance, no need for Blogdex or Daypop to pressure people not to post drivel, because lightweight filters applied after the fact work better at large scale than paying editors to enforce minimum quality in advance.
Clay Shirky, 2003, “The Music Business and the Big Flip”
PLoS ONE is already going gangbusters, without peer-review prior to publication in many cases. The only holdup there is that the post-hoc review by commenters is not working out quite like they’d hoped, because few people are commenting. Not everyone agrees that there is a dearth of commenting at PLoS ONE; the larger point is that people publish there a lot and the community treats those pubs like they count, even though in many cases they are essentially un-reviewed.
[Update: I misunderstood peer review at PLoS ONE. Papers may be reviewed externally by people unconnected to PLoS, or by one or more unpaid Academic Editors, or by a combination. I had thought of the review by Academic Editors only, which accounts for 13% of papers, as a form of internal review, but according to Bora (down in the comments) it should count as external review. If you're happy with that--and the system is not without its critics--then all papers at PLoS ONE are externally reviewed prior to publication; even if you're not, pre-publication review by someone is still in place across the board at PLoS ONE, and 87% of papers are externally reviewed by people unaffiliated with PLoS. Post-publication commenting supplements rather than replaces pre-publication review.]
People do comment on blogs, all the time. Post-hoc review will work, in fact already does work, just fine on blogs. I predict that PLoS ONE clones of the future (PLoS TWO?) will emulate whatever features of blogs make people willing to comment on them but not on PLoS ONE v1.0.
Alternatively, the paucity of post-hoc commenting at PLoS ONE could be taken as further evidence that journal-mediated peer review, whether before or after publication, is dying just off to a slow start. I think that editorial control is not far behind. Both are locally extinct in some parts of the science publishing ecosystem, since people are already citing blogs.
Q: But–but–but? What about protecting the sanctity of the process? What about about guaranteeing respectability? What about prestige?
A: Hey, those questions would make a terrific opinion piece for your local newspaper–oops, too late.
I don’t deny that editors and peer reviewers often make significant contributions to the quality of published work. I just think that people will learn to get along without them if doing so allows faster and easier exchange of information. That was never possible on paper; it’s long been possible here.
A priori peer review and editorial control were invented because publications were scarce (in the Econ 101 sense of being limited) and there needed to be a barrier to entry. Now publication is instant, free, and global. Error correction and the assignment of value will still happen, but they’ll happen after publication rather than before, and they’ll be distributed rather than centralized.
Creeping blogification
Clay Shirky described the problem for newspapers and the recording industry as the existence of “cheap perfect copies”. An expanded but by no means exhaustive list for science publication includes:
- cheap perfect copies
- editable (but also archivable)
- sharable
- linkable (both incoming and outgoing)
- globally distributed
- instantly
- for free
- without pre-publication filtering
- with multimedia embeds (as opposed to including video etc. separately in the suppl. info.)
Online open-access journals currently take advantage of all of those capabilities except the last two. Newsgroup posts cover all the bases except the last one (so do tweets, despite the severe length limitations).
What covers everything? Blog posts. Which have the added advantage that people will comment on them without being asked.
But that’s not the whole simple story.
The center cannot hold–or can it?
So we’re looking at total chaos, right–a world where anyone posts anything they want, no one has any control, and no one knows how to find the good stuff? Well, two out of three, at least. I’m not worried about that last point, for two reasons.
First, thanks to search engines, aggregators, tags, tweets, links, etc., we already have pretty good tools for finding the good stuff. Those direction finders will get better even as the map gets more complicated.
Second, prestige will always be a motivator, so people will always compete to get into exclusive venues. Nature is not going away, although I think that in the near future they will decouple their online and print publications so that the former can take advantage of all the possibilities the web offers.
If I have a really good idea backed up with lots of data, I’ll keep trying to get it into the most prestigious outlet I can. I won’t put my best stuff on a blog just because it’s faster and less encumbered. Blogs probably won’t replace journals, at least not anytime soon. Rather, the spectrum of publishing possibilities will expand; below the category of Least Publishable Unit we’ll add Most Bloggable Unit and so on down to Least Tweetable Unit, and the new categories will interpenetrate with the old over time.
How nice for me
Well, what a striking coincidence that Mr. Paleo Blogger looks into the ole digital crystal ball and sees “bloggy with a 90% chance of exactly-what-he’s-already-doing”.
I can’t claim to be either uninterested or unbiased in all of this. But I am new to actually thinking about the implications. I hadn’t been to most of the above links or had any of these thoughts as of a week ago. When Casey first e-mailed me six days ago, I replied:
If you’re curious, here’s the short short version of my thoughts: science bloggers critique published papers and blog about unpublished observations all the time. Our post-paper run of posts might be an extreme or even vulgar example, and it might fire more discussion about “what counts?”, but I don’t see it as being different in kind from what many science bloggers do. Papers are papers and blogs are blogs, and I never intended to blur the lines. If people feel that all the blog posts only count as “crap some guys wrote on the internet” and that they can be safely ignored, that’s fine with me. If they think the blog posts deserve some higher level of recognition a la “what counts?”, then I’m honored, but that’s extra value that others are investing in our blog, and not anything that we’ve knowingly sought. I suppose you could turn around and say that I’m trying to have my cake and eat it, too, first with all the pro-paper blogging and now with this “I’m innocent” schtick. I don’t know what the answer is, but I know that I’m too tired to figure it out tonight. All the more reason to have an open conversation about this stuff.
Now I realize that the lines between papers and blog posts are blurring, and whether we mean to or not, we SV-POW!sketeers are contributing (Darren’s doing double duty thanks to Tet Zoo). I still think that the investment of blog posts with respectability, value, citability, or whatever rests entirely with readers, and always will. Options range from treating posts like papers to treating them like bar conversations to treating them like spam. You decide.
Also, I tried to keep the writing above value-neutral but probably failed. It’s hard not to get a bit evangelistic about the potential advantages of online publication and online everything else, a tendency I call DISSUADE: Da Internet Shall Save Us All Dead-trees Excepted. Getting published in science hasn’t always been easy up until now, but the process has been relatively clear and familiar. And stable, on decadal and even centennial timescales. Everything about scientific publication is about to get much more fluid and much less clear, and it will probably stay that way for a long time, and it may stay that way forever. Not all of the changes will be for the better, and it may be hard to decide what’s better and what’s worse until we look back with some perspective. Mechanical looms were bad for weavers but good for everyone else. I think many of the changes discussed in this post and the previous comment thread are likely, and some are inevitable.
Set against the shiny digital future is the inertia of the academy and those of us who roost there. I’m not going to stop publishing papers in dead-tree journals (although I will never publish in a journal that doesn’t provide PDFs to authors). Heck, I’m not even going to stop publishing in closed-access journals, some of which are run by societies I admire and want to participate in (after all, everything is open anyway). At the same time I will keep blogging, and while I will frequently bring up technical stuff I don’t want to publish more formally (at least not yet), I will try not to deliberately blur the lines any more than I already have. I don’t need to; the web is already blurring them faster than most of us can keep up.
Hang on.
Oh, about that mystery vert…
Metapophyses, I haz them
…at the end of the post Necks Lie. Nima called it–good spot on the split neural spine. It’s a mid-cervical of Barosaurus, AMNH 6341, in the big bone room (well, one of many big bone rooms) at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. A cast of this vertebra makes up part of the neck in the awesome mounted skeleton in the museum rotunda. Here’s that skeleton, with Mike for scale.
Thanks for slogging through all this. We’ll get back to perforated postcentrodiapophyseal laminae, sacralized caudal transverse processes, and the air space proportions of pneumatic vertebrae soon.
Addendum (from Mike)
Matt is much more ready than I am to throw away peer-review, editorial control, and journals in general. Sometimes, the reasons that things are the way they are, are good ones; it’s not in the interests of professional iconoclasts like Clay Shirky and Cory Doctorow to point that out or to discuss the strengths of how things are today, but that doesn’t mean we have to accept their arguments as uncritically as (say, to pick a name out of the air completely at random) Matt.
Anyway, happily, G. K. Chesterton foresaw the abolition of journals in favour of blogs, and commented thus:
Suppose that a great commotion arises in the street about something, let us say a lamp-post, which many influential persons desire to pull down. A grey-clad monk, who is the spirit of the Middle Ages, is approached upon the matter, and begins to say, in the arid manner of the Schoolmen, “Let us first of all consider, my brethren, the value of Light. If Light be in itself good–” At this point he is somewhat excusably knocked down. All the people make a rush for the lamp-post, the lamp-post is down in ten minutes, and they go about congratulating each other on their unmediaeval practicality. But as things go on they do not work out so easily. Some people have pulled the lamp-post down because they wanted the electric light; some because they wanted old iron; some because they wanted darkness, because their deeds were evil. Some thought it not enough of a lamp-post, some too much; some acted because they wanted to smash municipal machinery; some because they wanted to smash something. And there is war in the night, no man knowing whom he strikes. So, gradually and inevitably, to-day, to-morrow, or the next day, there comes back the conviction that the monk was right after all, and that all depends on what is the philosophy of Light. Only what we might have discussed under the gas-lamp, we now must discuss in the dark.
- Heretics (1905).
What heads tell us about necks, redux
June 5, 2009
I Cannot Brain Today, I Have the Dumb
Man, I hate making mistakes. The only thing worse than making mistakes is making them in public, and the only thing worse than that is finding them in published papers when it’s too late to do anything about them. About the only consolation left–if you’re lucky–is getting to be the one to rat yourself out (we have to do this a lot). So here goes.
Neck angle FAIL
In our figure 4 (from Taylor et al. 2009) we showed the skulls of three sauropodomorphs, Massospondylus, Camarasaurus, and Diplodocus, posed with horizontal semicircular canals (HSCCs) level, angled 30 degrees above horizontal, and angled 20 degrees below horizontal, as it is written (by Duijm 1951). We also showed the angle of the occipital condyle when the HSCCs are level; if the craniocervical joint was in osteologically neutral pose (ONP), that line would indicate the angle of the anterior cervicals.
Trouble is, we put the neck lines for Diplodocus and Camarasaurus in the wrong places.
As any idiot can see from Sereno et al. (2008: fig 1), the brain, brainstem, and occipital condyle form a line that runs from roughly the upper part of the orbit (in lateral see-through view) out the back of the head. Now if you look at our fig. 4 you’ll see that the ONP lines for Camarasaurus and Diplodocus are much too inclined, so that if the brain was in line with the anterior neck–which it should be, in ONP–it would be sticking out the back of the head.
If that doesn’t make sense, just look at the above illustration, imagine the brain and spinal cord in a straight line parallel to the black neck line but also dorsal to it, and you’ll see that the brain would be outside the skull. Those incorrect neck lines don’t represent impossible postures, but they don’t represent ONP, either.
Taxonomic variation WIN!
Here’s a corrected up version of the figure to show what I mean. The black lines are still the ONP neck lines, and now I’ve put in shadowy necks at +30 and -20 to go with the shadowy heads. The 50 degree spans marked out by the shadowy necks are the ranges within which the neck could articulate in ONP with skulls stuck in the 50-degree “Duijm window”.
Caution: it is very easy to misread the shadowy necks as showing a range of movement within an individual; in fact, the neck lines are ‘anchored’ to the skulls in ONP as the skulls rotate through the 50 degrees allowed by the HSCCs. They are not individual movement but the possible range of taxonomic variation in HSCC orientation according to Duijm (1951).
Worth noting here is the likelihood that Massospondylus had a more elevated neck than any of the neosauropods studied so far–certainly a finding at odds with the traditional depictions of basal sauropodomorphs. (It is just a likelihood, though, since the top, neck-wise, of Massospondylus’s Duijm window overlaps with the windows of the other taxa a bit.)
Nigersaurus, buddy, why so down?
In this version I’ve gone one step farther and included Nigersaurus (modified from Sereno et al. (2008: fig 1). Nigersaurus differs from Diplodocus in the angle of the face from the HSCCs and occipital condyle, not in the angle between the HSCCs and the occipital condyle, which is remarkably similar in Camarasaurus, Diplodocus, and Nigersaurus. This suggests that Nigersaurus held its head differently than other sauropods, but not necessarily its neck.
Keep in mind, though, that the difference in facial angle between Diplodocus and Nigersaurus is less than 50 degrees, and that some of the head postures in the respective Duijm windows of the two taxa are identical. So we can’t say for certain that Nigersaurus held its head differently than Diplodocus; it is possible that they held their heads at the same angle and that Nigersaurus just carried its HSCCs at a different angle. If that were the case, the neck of Nigersaurus would have been more inclined than that of Diplodocus. I’m not arguing that that’s likely–it seems perfectly plausible that the two taxa might have held their necks similarly and their heads differently, as suggested above–I’m just pointing out the very wide range of possibilities allowed by the data. To reiterate one of the points of the paper, HSCCs aren’t useless for determining habitual head posture, they just can’t narrow things down very far on their own.
Also note that some of the neck postures allowed by the Duijm window have the anterior cervicals running down, below horizontal, not up. And many of the allowed neck postures for the neosauropods are close to horizontal. So, we were wrong and HSCCs + occipital condyles show that most sauropods held their necks close to level and not strongly elevated after all, right?
Onward and Upward, or Down in Flames?
Not so fast. Remember that all of the neck lines in the above figures show the angle of the anterior neck if the neck was in ONP with the skull. But Vidal et al. (1986) found that the skull is habitually flexed on the neck, even in lizards, and we have since verified this for salamanders, turtles, and more. And sometimes the flexion is dramatic.
Our figure 1 (from Taylor et al. 2009) shows the cranium, cervicals, and first few dorsals from a hare in ONP and in the posture shown by Vidal et al. (1986: fig. 4b). The difference between the anteriorly-directed ONP pose and the backward-leaning Vidal-compliant pose is striking. I measured the angle between the cervical column and the maxillary toothrow to be ~110 degrees in the ONP pose and ~70 degrees in the Vidal-compliant pose (try it yourself with Paint or Photoshop, or download some free image manipulation software). That means the head is flexed on the neck by 40 degrees! That is a big angle. If sauropods did the same, you could take the neck lines shown above and crank them down by 40 degrees (remember that the heads are “fixed” into the 50-degree Duijm windows allowed by the HSCCs), which would make Mike’s elevated Diplodocus look not just achievable, but perhaps even conservative.
Where does all that leave us? In sauropods for which HSCC orientation is known, putting the HSCCs level the anterior neck is still inclined, and even with the HSCCs angled 20 degrees down the ONP neck would only be slightly below horizontal, and if the head was Vidal-compliant (strongly flexed on the neck), the neck would have to be above horizontal. So heads still tell us about necks, and in particular they tell us that the necks angled up. Our neck lines for Camarasaurus and Diplodocus are not correct for ONP, but probably represent attainable postures. My first head ‘n necks post has the angles too exaggeraged for ONP, too, but again all of those poses are not just possible but likely if the head was flexed on the neck.
Miscellanea
We owe mad props to Brian Engh, a.k.a. The Historian, who burst on the paleo-rap scene with a rap video about crocodilian predation and almost certainly the first ever kung-fu rap video to name-check titanosaurs. Brian stumbled across Mike’s extra goodies page for the new paper about week before the paper was due out, and kindly suppressed the information until after D-Day. You can and should download his entire album, Earth Beasts Awaken (open access, yo), and kick it old school.
Congratulations to Francisco “Paco” Gasco, who just got funding for a PhD to do a complete morphological and paleobiological workup on the giant Spanish sauropod Turiasaurus. You’ll be hearing more about Paco in the not-too-distant future, we promise.
Finally, here’s that video of an elephant grabbing an ostrich by the neck that you ordered.
The End of the Beginning?
This brings us to the end of ten solid days of new posts, which is a new record for us and one not likely to be broken for a long time, if ever. We never planned to do all this; in the beginning we each were going to contribute one post and that would have been that. But we kept finding things that we felt needed to be discussed.
As all of us have been saying in every available medium, this is not the end of anything. The sauropod neck posture debate is not over; in a few years we may look back and see that in 2009 we were still stumbling to the real starting line. We don’t think this stuff is unimportant or unknowable, and we’re going to keep working on it, and we hope lots of others do as well.
We’ll see you out there.
Up, boy, up! Heyaaah!!
References
- Duijm, M. 1951. On the head posture in birds and its relation to some anatomical features. II. Proceedings of the Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen, Series C 54: 260–271.
- Sereno, Paul C., Jeffrey A. Wilson, Lawrence M. Witmer, John A. Whitlock, Abdoulaye Maga, Oumarou Ide and Timothy A. Rowe. 2007. Structural Extremes in a Cretaceous Dinosaur. PLoS ONE 2 (11): e1230 (9 pages). doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0001230
- Taylor, M.P., Wedel, M.J., and Naish, D. 2009. Head and neck posture in sauropod dinosaurs inferred from extant animals. Acta Palaeontologica Polonica 54 (2): 213–220.
[Disclaimer: in this post, I am unavoidably critical of certain aspects of particular journals. Please take this in the spirit it's intended: I'm not out to get anyone, but I need to illustrate my points with real examples.]
When we started blogging our recent neck-posture paper (Taylor et al. 2009, for those of you who’ve been chatting in the back row and not paying attention), we expected to make two posts, maybe three. Yet here we are in post six, and I know Matt has another up the barrel for tomorrow, so it looks like we’re going to end up having written a whole week’s worth of daily posts, just as we did for Xenoposeidon.
One of the questions a lot of people have asked me is why we published in a Polish journal (Acta Palaeontologica Polonica). Although APP is published in Poland and edited by a primarily Polish board, it’s more accurate to characterise it as an international journal — the papers in the issue where our work appeared had lead authors based in Poland (4 papers), USA (3), Italy (2), and England, France, Japan, Spain and Sweden (1 each). Still, that question is a nice jumping-off point to discuss something of relevance to all academics that doesn’t get a lot of coverage: how to choose a journal.
From another sauropod paper in Acta Palaeontologica Polonica: Schwarz et al. (2007: fig. 1), showing CT scans of a Diplodocus cervical
Criteria for choosing a journal
There are plenty of criteria that come in to play in picking a journal, and people will vary in how much weight their place on each. We’ll take a look at some of them (in no very convincing order), and then I’ll explain what I think is the unifying principle.
Impact factor. I’ll deal with this first, because it’s easiest to dismiss. The impact factor is a stupid, irrelevant number attached to journals by a private corporation with its own agenda and with no responsibility to actual scientists. Its use is particularly dumb in palaeo, a field in which it’s near impossible to get a paper written, submitted, reviewed and published in time to hit the two-year window during which citations are counted for impact-factor purposes — which is why even the best palaeo journals (JVP, Palaeontology, APP) have impact factors close to 1.0. All scientists should ignore impact factor whenever possible.
Prestige. Now we’re getting somewhere. Prestige is what impact factor is a (wholly inadequate) proxy for. Of course, it’s impossible to define or quantify satisfactorily, but we all know what we mean by it. Sadly, top of the tree for prestige — by a long way — are the “tabloids”, Science and Nature. It’s considered a huge deal to publish in these, very good for your career — which is a shame, as the super-short format makes it nearly impossible to do decent science in these venues. As Exhibit A, I give you Sereno et al. (1999). In five pages, Sereno and his ten co-authors presented descriptions of not one but two new sauropod genera, plus a time-calibrated phylogeny and an analysis of rates of morphological change through time. It is not intended as a criticism of Sereno and his colleagues when I say that for scientific purposes, the descriptions in this paper are essentially worthless — it’s simply not possible to do anything like justice to two genera, both represented by nearly complete remains, in that amount of space. Lest I seem to be picking on this particular team, which I honestly assure you is not my purpose here, I could equally point to Curry Rogers and Forster’s (2001) description of Rapetosaurus, Rauhut et al. (2005) on Brachytrachelopan or indeed the original DinoMorph paper (Stevens and Parrish 1999). The publication of important work in the tabloids is not such a disaster when conscientious authors such as John Hutchinson follow up a high-prestige extended abstract such as Hutchinson and Garcia (2002) with a full-length study elsewhere (Hutchinson et al. 2005), but sadly this seems to be more the exception than the rule — after all, if you’ve already got all that credit for a short paper, why bother doing all the extra work involved in getting the full-length paper done? That said, I am assured that Curry Rogers’s long-awaited Rapetosaurus osteology is on the way RSN. At the risk of sounding sour-grapesy (I’ve never been published in either tabloid myself), I do think that the existence of these journals is a net negative for actual science. I won’t go so far as to say that I’ll never publish in S‘n’N if I get the chance, but I do right here and now undertake that if ever that chance should come my way, I will do my level best to get the full-length study out as soon as possible thereafter.
Hmm, that seems to have turned into a tangential rant about the tabloids, which really wasn’t my intention, but so it goes. More generally, there is a sense that general-science journals are more prestigious than specialist palaeo journals: notable ones include PNAS and the various Royal Society journals. An exception to this rule is the PLoS journals: because it’s more selective PLoS Biology is considered more prestigious than the general-science PLoS ONE. Among palaeo journals, there’s a feeling that Paleobiology is particularly well regarded, with Palaeontology, the Journal of Paleontology, JVP and Acta Pal. Pol. up on its shoulders. Other journals are a little further down the great chain of being.
How much does prestige matter? Quite a lot (especially if you need your CV to look good) but rather less than a few years ago, I think — for reasons that will become apparent later on.
Turnaround speed. The importance of this will vary at different times. I’ve had a couple of my papers published in PaleoBios, the journal of the University of California Museum of Paleontology — which is not particularly high-profile — for one main reason: they turn papers round really quickly. That was particularly important to me when I was starting out, and really needed to get something on my CV quickly. Now that my publication list is a little less feeble, I can afford to let my manuscripts marinate for longer in order to get them into more recognised journals. But sometimes that goes to ridiculous extremes: a while back, Matt and I sent a paper to Paleobiology. The editors sat on the manuscript for more than a month before even sending it out to reviewers. When I asked two months later, then again a month after than, then again a month after that, reviews were still not in. In the end, we didn’t hear back until more than six months after submission — and when we finally saw the reviews, one of them consisted only of filling in a one-page form. We weren’t impressed, and won’t be submitting there again, despite the journal’s high prestige. (We know others who have had even longer waits. Sadly, we didn’t know this at the time we submitted; if we did, we’d have made other plans).
At the other end of the scale, Acta Pal. Pol. did a very fast job: just under one month elapsed after our initial submission of the neck-posture paper before we got back two detailed and helpful reviews accompanying a provisional acceptance. It took us a fortnight to make the revisions, and only one further week for the revised manuscript to be accepted and in press — seven weeks from start to end, and then a wait of only two and a half months before publication.
Figure reproduction. This varies in importance depending on what kind of paper you’re submitting: for a description, I think it’s really important (which is why Darren and I argued, successfully, with the Palaeontology editor to get full-page reproduction for the Xenoposeidon photographs and interpretive drawings); for a biomechanics paper or similar, it’s maybe not so important, provided the figures are legible. In terms of electronic figure reproduction, the hands-down winner is the PLoS series of journals: for example, the individual elements surrounding the skeletal reconstruction in the full-sized figure 3 of Sereno et al.’s (2007) description of the skull of Nigersaurus are exquisite. At the other end of the scale, one of the big disappointments with Palaeontologia Electronica is the figure quality: for example, Rose’s (2007) description of Paluxysaurus has really tiny online images of the figures — something there’s no real excuse for in an online-only journal.
Length restrictions/page charges. Some journals charge the author per printed page; some charge per page after a certain number of free pages. The charges, and the number of free pages, vary wildly between journals. Some, maybe most, journals will waive these fees for authors with no institutional support. Need I say that you want to find a journal that won’t charge, or will charge only a little?
(For journals that take away your copyright and restrict your use of your own work, I think that charging as well adds insult to injury.)
Reprint costs. Before the advent of ubiquitous PDFs, the main way to disseminate your work apart the journal issue itself was by buying reprints from the journal and handing them out to colleagues at conferences. Reprint costs also very wildly between journals. This used to be more important than it is now, as we have other ways of letting people see our work.
Wide distribution of physical issues. If your article is in Science or Nature, then a zillion copies will be printed and sent all over the world. If you publish in The Biennial Newsletter of the South Yorkshire Lepidopterists’ Society, eight copies will be photostatted and sent as far afield as North Yorkshire. So you might think that wide distribution correlates strongly with prestige, but that’s not always true. A nice outlier here is PaleoBios: copies are sent to libraries all over the world, in exchange for copies of other institutional journals, which means that anything published in PaleoBios can be found in hardcopy in a surprising number of places. This is nice; but as with reprints, less important than it was even a few years ago. And the reason is …
Existence of PDFs. Finally we get to the bit that we’ve all known was coming. In this enlightened day and age, most of us have several metric shedloads of papers in PDF form on our hard drives, meaning that whenever we go to a musuem with our laptops and want to compare an alleged basal titanosauriform median caudal with those of Brachiosaurus brancai, we have only to pull up the PDF of Janensch (1950) and we’re done. Lugging around great stacks of actual paper seems not merely unnecessary but passé, like wearing flared trousers or listening to the Spice Girls. Everyone needs PDFs, and everyone knows that this is the case. So every publication venue provides authors with them … right?
Amazingly, no. Things may have changed since 2007, but back then authors had to PAY $100 to the Journal of Paleontology to get a PDF of THEIR OWN PAPER. Oh, and money orders were only accepted from the USA and Canada, so good luck if you’re a European author. These facts hurt so much I am going to have to go and lie down before continuing.
… later … Here’s one that hurts even more: Brusatte et al.’s (2008) osteology of the stinkin’ theropod Neovenator DOES NOT EXIST as a PDF, except for a crappy scan. Apparently the Palaeontographical Society doesn’t give the authors PDFs at all, at any price. For me, that is a simple, non-negotiable Submission Killer: I will never, ever send my stuff to a venue that doesn’t give me a PDF. In 2009, the idea is untenable.
Open access. Assuming that a PDF exists, who can get it and under what terms? Under the classical model, publishers own your work, and can — and do — restrict access to it. To see what you wrote, other scientists, and interested amateurs, have to either have an institutional subscription or pay some ludicrously inflated fee like $30. (I wonder whether anyone in world history has ever done this?) See Scott Aaronson’s rather brilliant article for more on this extraordinary state of affairs.
In contrast, an increasing number of journals are now open access, which means that anyone, anywhere can download the PDF with minimum fuss and at no cost. Acta Palaeontologia Polonica is one of these, and was among the first in palaeo. Other notable journals in this category include PLoS Biology and PLoS ONE, and Zootaxa. If you’re prepared to wait a year before your paper becomes open access (i.e. wait until everyone who’s interested has long had a copy and all the buzz has died down so that no-one cares any more), then the list of open access journals grows to include venues like Science and Proc. B, but personally I am inclined to feel that this is stretching the definition well past breaking point. There are good and valid reasons for wanting to publish in these venues, but their open-access-but-not-in-any-way-that-matters policy is not one of them.
There are (at least) two reasons to favour open-access journals: the pragmatic one is that it’s the best way to make sure that anyone, anywhere in the world who’s interested in your work can get it — whether professor, curator, student, interested amateur or vaguely interested high-school kid. The other reason is that it’s just right. We’re talking here about the world’s accumulated knowledge, in many cases acquired by publicly funded research programs. It is simply and plainly wrong that this work should be shut up behind paywalls where the people who paid for it can’t see it.
Copyright retention. Most publishers, including some open access publishers, require the author to sign over copyright as a condition of publication. Even if it doesn’t make much difference in practice, I have to say it rankles that, for example, that the Palaeontological Society has ended up owning my and Darren’s work on Xenoposeidon (Taylor and Naish 2007). This is particularly iniquitous in unashamedly commercial publishers such as Elsevier — guess who owns Darren’s paper on “Angloposeidon” (Naish et al. 2004)? And it’s even more baffling in open-access journals since they let anyone have the work anyway. I assume the real reason for this is that publishers want to be able to exploit any spin-offs such as popular books, but copyright transfer forms usually contain a lot of blurfl about it being for the author’s benefit, as it allows the publisher to pursue infringement claims on the author’s behalf. To which I offer the following rebuttal: “yeah, right”.
Not all publishers do this. Notably, we retain the copyright on our recent paper in Acta Pal. Pol., Zoologica Scripta leaves copyright with the authors, and there are others. Good for them.
… and finally, you do need to be realistic. Despite my whining about Science and Nature above, I don’t deny that we’d have loved to place the neck-posture paper at one of those journals: apart from anything else, it would be useful for Matt as he works towards tenure, and helpful for Darren who — astoundingly — is still without a job in academia. S‘n’N papers help with that stuff. But we know (these journals make no secret of it) that they reject 90% of submissions without even reviewing them, and it would likely just have been a waste of our time and effort to lobotomise our eight-pager down to three and reformat with the ultra-dumb numbered-references format in exchange for a tiny, tiny chance of hitting that jackpot. So we didn’t bother. (Also, while scientists strive to evaluate work on its merits, I can’t help suspecting that a submission to the tabloids with University of Portsmouth and Western University of Health Sciences in the byline would have started with something of a handicap in the selection process.)
What it all means
So apart from having suggested you ignore Impact Factor, I’ve said to consider prestige, reprint costs, distribution of physical issues, existence of PDFs, open access, copyright retention, turnaround speed, figure reproduction and length restrictions/page charges. And the interesting thing is that the first half dozen of these are all about the same thing, which I’d argue is the underlying issue:
Getting the paper read by as many people as possible.
That’s what it’s really about, isn’t it? The reason you want cheap reprints is so you can give them to people who’ll read them; the reason you want wide distribution of physical issues is so they’ll get into libraries where people will read them; and so on.
But both reprints and physical issues are much less important than they used to be, because now we can email our stuff to anyone in the world. So let’s ignore them for now. Prestige is less important than it used to be, because one of its big wins was that it got your article into the hands of potential readers; but it’s still important in other ways. And let’s ignore journals that don’t give you PDFs because they are off the Submission Radar.
Now here’s another thing:
Everything is open.
It just is, and there’s nothing that anyone can do about it. Everything that becomes available as a PDF is quickly passed around the community, and in most cases posted on the author’s web-site (whatever the journal’s Arbitrary And Exploitative Copyright Transfer Form said). So from a purely pragmatic perspective, you could say that in choosing a journal we can also ignore the criterion of whether or not the journal considers itself open access (because it really is anyway) and also copyright retention (since it doesn’t really matter if everyone can read it anyway).
So what criteria are we left with? Of the ten we started with, those left standing in the era of ubiquitous PDFs number just four: prestige, turnaround speed, figure reproduction quality and length restrictions/page charges. And this is excellent, because these are the actual services that journals provide to authors. A journal best serves authors by handling their manuscripts quickly and without charge, by imparting prestige due to the reputation of the editorial board and quality of previous issues, and by reproducing the figures well. I think it’s great that we’re moving inexorably towards an economy where the journals that get the best submissions will be the ones that provide the best services.
And among journals that do these things well, it’s fairer to reward the good buys by bestowing our submissions on those that are deliberately publishing open access rather than those that try to stop people reading what they “publish” (which, of course, is ironically the very opposite of what the word is supposed to mean, i.e. making something available). There are some non-open journals that you sort of have to publish in — I don’t feel my CV would be complete without papers at JVP and Palaeontology — but aside from those society-owned journals (and, OK, museum journals), I am planning to pretty much stick to open access venues from here on.
In Praise of Acta Pal. Pol.
I’ll finish by mentioning that Acta Palaeontologia Polonica does offer a very good blend of the qualities we’re looking for in a publication venue: it’s open access by design (and has been for years), turnaround is very fast, the figure reproduction is good (though perhaps not stellar), and the page charges of 27 Euros per page over the first eight are not unreasonable. (It also has cheap reprints and is widely distributed, but we’re ignoring those factors, remember?) Finally, the journal has a well-earned reputation for publishing good papers and for reviewing them well. So all in all, we’re really pleased with APP and would definitely use it again.
References
- Brusatte, Stephen L., Roger B. J. Benson, and Stephen Hutt. 2008. The osteology of Neovenator salerii (Dinosauria: Theropoda) from the Wealden Group (Barremian) of the Isle of Wight. Monograph of the Palaeontographical Society 162 (631): 1-166.
- Curry Rogers, Kristina and Catherine A. Forster. 2001. The last of the dinosaur titans: a new sauropod from Madagascar. Nature 412: 30-534.
- Hutchinson, John R. and Garcia, Mariano. 2002. Tyrannosaurus was not a fast runner. Nature 415: 1018-1021
- Hutchinson, John R., Frank C. Anderson, Silvia S. Blemker, and Scott L. Delp. 2005. Analysis of hindlimb muscle moment arms in Tyrannosaurus rex using a three-dimensional musculoskeletal computer model: implications for stance, gait, and speed. Paleobiology, 31(4): 676-701.
- Janensch, W. (1950). Die Wirbelsaule von Brachiosaurus brancai. Palaeontographica (Suppl. 7) 3: 27-93.
- Naish, Darren, David M. Martill, David Cooper and Kent A. Stevens. 2004. Europe’s largest dinosaur? A giant brachiosaurid cervical vertebra from the Wessex Formation (Early Cretaceous) of southern England. Cretaceous Research 25: 787-795.
- Rauhut, O. W. M., K. Remes, R. Fechner, G. Cladera, and P. Puerta. 2005. Discovery of a short-necked sauropod dinosaur from the Late Jurassic period of Patagonia. Nature 435:670-672.
- Rose, Peter J. 2007. A new titanosauriform sauropod (Dinosauria: Saurischia) from the Early Cretaceous of central Texas and its phylogenetic relationships. Palaeontologia Electronica 10 (2): 8A.
- Schwarz, Daniela, Eberhard Frey and Christian A. Meyer. 2007. Pneumaticity and soft-tissue reconstructions in the neck of diplodocid and dicraeosaurid sauropods. Acta Palaeontologica Polonica 52 (1): 167-188.
- Sereno, Paul C., Allison L. Beck, Didier. B. Dutheil, Hans C. E. Larsson, Gabrielle. H. Lyon, Bourahima Moussa, Rudyard W. Sadleir, Christian A. Sidor, David J. Varricchio, Gregory P. Wilson and Jeffrey A. Wilson. 1999. Cretaceous Sauropods from the Sahara and the Uneven Rate of Skeletal Evolution Among Dinosaurs. Science, vol. 282, pp. 1342-1347;
- Sereno, Paul C., Jeffrey A. Wilson, Lawrence M. Witmer, John A. Whitlock, Abdoulaye Maga, Oumarou Ide and Timothy A. Rowe. 2007. Structural Extremes in a Cretaceous Dinosaur. PLoS ONE 2 (11): e1230 (9 pages). doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0001230
- Stevens, K. A., and Parrish J. M., 1999, Neck Posture and Feeding Habits of Two Jurassic Sauropod Dinosaurs: Science, 284: 798-800.
- Taylor, Michael P. and Darren Naish. 2007. An unusual new neosauropod dinosaur from the Lower Cretaceous Hastings Beds Group of East Sussex, England. Palaeontology 50 (6): 1547-1564. doi: 10.1111/j.1475-4983.2007.00728.x
- Taylor, Michael P., Mathew J. Wedel and Darren Naish. 2009. Head and neck posture in sauropod dinosaurs inferred from extant animals. Acta Palaeontologica Polonica 54(2): 213-220.
