I’m not alone in this, of course.  For example, Tyler Neylon’s bare-bones site The Cost Of Knowledge — registered only six days ago, according to the whois record — is a call to boycott Elsevier in particular.  Researchers are invited to “declare publicly that you will not support any Elsevier journal unless they radically change how they operate”, by signing a declaration to refrain from publishing refereeing, and/or editorial work.  Impressively, this has gone from non-existent to 618 signatures in six days; you should consider whether yours should be the 619th.

So why Elsevier?  Partly, I think it’s just a convenient shorthand to say “Elsevier” rather than “exploitative for-profit non-open scholarly publishers”.  But there are specific reasons why it wasn’t Blackwell, to pick a name at random, that rolled the snake eyes.  As well as the restrictive copyrights, predatory pricing and obligatory bundling that are so ubiquitous, Elsevier is also responsible for the six fake journals that misrepresented sponsored content as legitimate research, involvement in the arms trade, repeated obstruction to the re-use of data, making campaign contributions to representatives to propose the Research Works Act and then feeding those representatives the very words they want them to say in support of it.

But a couple of days ago I learned of yet another reason why my attempts to be gentle and kind to Elsevier are doomed.  It’s not been widely publicised yet, because the reporting has been in German, but Elsevier are now filing lawsuits against their own customers.

You may find it hard to believe — I certainly did — but here is a report in the well respected German-language Swiss newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung.  Google’s automatic translation is pretty good, but David Marjanovic kindly provided this better translation of the key passage:

Almost at the same time, on 19 December 2011, the science publishers Elsevier, Thieme and Springer filed a suit with the Zurich Commercial Court, which is intended to forbid the ETH library to continue its document delivery service in its present form. Through this service clients of the ETH library can request the electronic delivery of articles from scientific journals. The copies may only be used internally and must not be passed on. In addition, the ETH library pays an annual compensation to the copyright-collecting agency Pro Litteris. The publishers that have filed the lawsuit want to prohibit this service on the grounds that they themselves offer these articles online, although usually for about 30 euros per article, a multiple of what access through the ETH library costs.

By their suit, the science publishers want to subvert a provision of Swiss copyright law that explicitly allows the copying of excerpts from periodicals. In comparison e.g. to the situation in Germany, where such copies are forbidden, this provision is an unambiguous advantage for Switzerland as a science site.

I want to add some commentary here, but …  What can I add?  I am lost for words.  How much lower can they go?

(The good news for Elsevier: Springer get to share the blame this time.)

The full article is here, for those with privileges to read it.

[Click through for a much bigger version.]

This is one of the figures from the as-yet last unpublished last chapter of my dissertation, slightly modified for its forthcoming submission to Palaeontologia Electronica.  As you can see, it shows five sauropod cervicals, each one in left lateral and either posterior or anterior view.

But can you tell me what they all are?  Points will be awarded for getting the right taxon, the particular specimen, and the serial position, for an available total of fifteen points.  I will award fractional marks as and when necessary (e.g. right genus but wrong species; serial position close but not quite right).  And I might give bonuses for interesting and relevant historical asides.

Do not look at other peoples’ answers before deciding on your own!

I will leave some blank space at the end of this article, before the comments, so that you don’t see them inadvertently before you make your choices.

Enjoy!

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(Spoiler space ends)

Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week, Volume 6, Issue 8, January 2012, Pages 1-7.
Michael P. Taylor, Mathew J. Wedel, Darren Naish.   View Abstract

Mr. Eisen understates the value added to medical research articles by journals such as ours. Peer review is invaluable in selecting the highest impact medical research and improving its quality before publication.

This is just one more example of a pernicious and persistent assumption.  In the same vein, the AAP’s statement on the Research Works Act mentions peer-review five times in its first four paragraphs despite the fact that the RWA has nothing to do with peer review.  So for example:

The professional and scholarly publishing community thanks Representatives Issa and Maloney for supporting their significant investments that fund innovations and enable the essential peer-review process maintaining the high standards of U.S. scientific research.

People, please.  Publishers do not provide peer-review.  We do.  The same body of researchers that writes the papers for publishers also performs peer-review for publishers.  And we charge exactly the same amount: nothing.  Peer review is just one more gift that we give to the publishers.  It’s a gift that I don’t begrudge when the world can benefit from it, through open-access publishing.  But when the publisher locks up the result of my work — an intolerable thing to do at the best of times — it’s the most bare-faced effrontery for them then to claim that this is justified by the “added value” that my peer-reviewing effort provides.

So: where does the lie that publishers provide peer-review come from?

As described in the SPARC letter of September 6, 2007, AAP publishers commissioned PR “pit bull” Eric Dezenhall in January of that year to develop a campaign against open access.  His advice was (in part) that “the publishers should attempt to equate traditional publishing models with peer review.”  (If you doubt PRISM’s objectivity in recounting this history, it’s also discussed in a Nature article ; but with perfect poetic irony, many of you won’t be able to read it because it’s paywalled.)

So “publishers provide peer-review” is a lie invented by a PR hack who was explicitly commissioned to come up with soundbites to undermine open access.  Please, people: don’t do commercial publishers’ jobs for them by perpetuating this lie.  If you must do their job for them, stick to doing by writing, illustrating, editing and reviewing their articles for them.

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[I know that none of this is news to readers of this blog.  I am posting this article mainly so that I have a single place to point people to when I want to correct this misapprehension which the publishing industry is so assiduously perpetuating.  So please: if you hear people parroting the lie that publishers provide peer-review, direct them here!]

The Nature Publishing Group (with publishes Nature), writing jointly with Digital Science, published this statement:

Nature Publishing Group (NPG) and Digital Science note the concern amongst the scientific and library communities about the Research Works Act (H.R. 3699), currently under consideration by the U.S. federal government, and wish to clarify our position.

NPG and Digital Science do not support the Research Works Act.

And within the last couple of hours, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (which publishes Science), has followed suit with its own statement:

The nonprofit American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the world’s largest general scientific society and publisher of the journal Science, today reaffirmed its support for the current public access policy of the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Contrary to recent news reports, AAAS does not endorse the Research Works Act, which would prevent the NIH from requiring its grantees to make biomedical research findings freely available via the National Library of Medicine’s Web site.

This is excellent and very welcome news.  I have written to the NPG and AAAS to express my thanks for their statements.

I hope and expect to see other publishers following their example: this page on the Harvard cyber-law site is maintaining a list of AAP-member publishers who have done so.

Line drawing and photograph of the axis and third cervical vertebra of Chuanjiesaurus anaensis (LCD9701-I). Bar = 10 cm. From Sekiya 2011:fig. 6. Note the absurdly elongated postzygapophysis.

And remember — it’s not too late for you to make a difference to the RWA’s success or failure.  See the Alliance for Taxpayer Action’s page, Call to action: Oppose H.R. 3699, a bill to block public access to publicly funded research.

(You’re welcome to comment here, of course, but if you post your comments on the Guardian site, they will be much more widely read.  Registration is very quick and free.)

Rebbachisauridae incertae sedis MMCH-Pv 49, anterior cervical vertebra (MMCH-Pv 49/11) in right lateral (reversed) and anterior views (Haluza et al. 2012:fig 2A-B)

• Elsevier: £724m on revenue of £2b — 36%
• Springer‘s Science+Business Media: £294m on revenue of £866m — 33.9%
• John Wiley & Sons: $106m on revenue of $253m — 42%
• Academic division of Informa plc: £47m on revenue of £145m — 32.4%

So it’s evident that profits on the order of 35% are pretty typical for commercial STM publishers, and that Elsevier’s figures are not an aberration.  Not only that, but all four of these companies’ profits as a proportion of revenue are still increasing — by 2.4%, 4%, 13% and 3.3% respectively.  The U.K. Office of Fair Trading noted back in 2002 that “the overall profitability of commercial STM publishing is high, not only by comparison to ‘non-profit’ journals (which is not surprising), but also by comparison to other commercial journal publishing”.

I wanted to be sure that I was assessing this fairly, so I looked through Elsevier’s annual reports for the last nine years — happily, they make them available, if not particularly easy to find.  What I found is that they have been consistently bringing in profits in the region of 33% throughout the last decade.  Specifically:

• 2002: £429m profit on £1295m revenue – 33.18%
• 2003: £467m profit on £1381m revenue – 33.82%
• 2004: £460m profit on £1363m revenue – 33.75%
• 2005: £449m profit on £1436m revenue – 31.25%
• 2006: £465m profit on £1521m revenue – 30.57%
• 2007: £477m profit on £1507m revenue – 31.65%
• 2008: £568m profit on £1700m revenue – 33.41%
• 2009: £693m profit on £1985m revenue – 34.91%
• 2010: £724m profit on £2026m revenue – 35.74%

(I have not been through the same exercise for Springer, Wiley or Informa, but there is no reason to expect that the results would be any different.)

What does it all mean?

Yes, publishers have a right to make a living.  Not only that, but they have a right to make as big a profit as the market can bear (though of course when they form a cartel that distorts the market monopolistically, that changes things).

But here’s what it means to scientists that Elsevier’s profit is 35.74% of revenue:

• When you pay $37.95 to download a PDF from an Elsevier journal, $13.56 of that goes straight into the pockets of Elsevier shareholders.
• When you pay $3000 to have your submission to an Elsevier journal appear as open access, $1072.20 of that goes straight into the pockets of Elsevier shareholders.
• When your library pays $1.7m for a bundle of Elsevier-journal subscriptions, $607,580 of that goes straight into the pockets of Elsevier shareholders.
• When you or your library pays Elsevier $23783 for any reason, that is enough for them fund Representative Caroline Maloney’s $8500 bribe to co-sponsor the evil Research Works Act, out of their profits alone.

You just have to ask yourself whether that’s where you want your money going.

But you may not know about the Research Works Act, a truly vile piece of legislation being proposed by two Elsevier-funded shills in the US Congress, which would make it illegal for funding bodies to impose this perfectly natural requirement.  It may not be surprising that a corporation as predatory as Elsevier wants legal protection for its exploitative business model of stealing publicly funded research; but it shocked me to find that this preposterous Act ever got out of committee (unlike two earlier failed attempts to overturn open-access mandates).

The good news is that there is something we can do.  The Office of Science Technology and Policy (OSTP) has issued a Request For Information — basically, it wants your opinion — on public access to peer-reviewed scholarly publications resulting from federally funded research.  You can read about this in (too much) detail here, but the bottom line is that you should email your comments to publicaccess@ostp.gov, before the extended deadline of 12th January.

Here is what I just sent:

From: Mike Taylor <mike@miketaylor.org.uk>
To: publicaccess@ostp.gov
Date: 9 January 2012 11:26
Subject: RFI: Public Access to Peer-Reviewed Scholarly Publications Resulting From Federally Funded Research

Dear Science and Technology Policy Office,

Thank you for extending the deadline for comments on Public Access to Peer-Reviewed Scholarly Publications Resulting From Federally Funded Research.  The Research Works Act has only very recently come to the notice of scientists, and it is because of this extraordinary proposal that it is now apparent to us that we need to reaffirm what we thought was settled: that OF COURSE scientific work funded by the public should be freely accessible to the public.  I do not understand how this can even be a matter for discussion.  The public pays: the public should benefit in every way possible.

The language in the RWA is highly misleading, attributing to publishers far more input into the scientific process than they really have.  The truth is that scientists (often funded by public money provide the underlying research, the writing and the figure preparation that result in a manuscript submitted for publication.  Other scientists then provide the editorial services and (contra publishers’ claims, as can be easily verified) the peer review.  Publishers’ contributions are limited essentially to typesetting, the provision of web hosting, and sometimes a very limited amount of compensation for senior editors only (usually not the handling editors who actually deal with authors’ works).  The notion that such a minor contribution should suffice to hand publishers, rather than the public, the right to determine how, where and under what regime the resulting works are disseminated, is ludicrous.  It would be laughable if it were not so iniquitous.

Dr. Michael P. Taylor
Research Associate
Department of Earth Sciences
University of Bristol
Bristol BS8 1RJ
ENGLAND

Much more about the Research Works Act here, here, here, here, and all over the Internet.  Please, do your bit today: send your comments to the OSTP.  Don’t let Elsevier and their cartel steal publicly funded science.

UPDATE

Matt here. Emailing the OSTP takes all of 5 minutes and you should do it right away if you haven’t yet. They ARE listening; in my initial message I mentioned that the profits from a handful of the big commercial publishers could fund all scholarly publishing worldwide, and cited this post. Within 19 minutes I received a personal response from someone in the OSTP, saying, “Thank you Mathew. Would you be so kind as to submit your linked evidence in the body of an email to ease processing and ensure it is fully considered?”

So I did. If you’d like the same ammo, see the post linked above and especially updates and comments, and this post on the insane profit margins of the big commercial publishers (hat tip to Mike). You should also include Peter Murray-Rust’s argument that open access saves lives, outlined in this post and more briefly in this comment.

As long as I have your ear, I am curious at the absence of leverage being brought to bear on the politicians to sponsored the Research Works Act: Representatives Darrell Issa (R-CA) and Carolyn Maloney (D-NY).

Issa is a corporate lackey and social policy atavism of the first order, and as long as the publishers keep the campaign funds flowing he’s unlikely to budge–unless his followers start asking why he is sponsoring legislation that would allow a mostly-foreign-based publishing industry to monopolize the results of US-funded research. Maybe someone should. Issa’s webpage is here; in a crowning irony, the big banner at the top currently says, “keep the web #OPEN”.

Carolyn Maloney is a Democrat from New York, she ought to know better. Like Issa, according to her Facebook page Maloney has maxed out on friends and isn’t accepting any more. Not surprisingly, things are dead silent there, and mostly just dead. Fortunately you can reach her at her official House of Representatives webpage. Maloney sponsored the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act; since she cares about health care, it would be worthwhile to point out that open access saves lives. One of the rotating photos on Maloney’s webpage shows her touring a small business incubator, so it would also be a good idea to emphasize the plight of the scholarly poor.

Two things: obviously comments from these politicians’ constituents will carry the most weight, so if you’re in their districts, please take the time to write to them. That said, if you’re a US citizen you are in the legislative footprint of these people, and you should let them know what you think. And if the RWA passes the repercussions would be global, so don’t stay quiet just because you’re outside the US.

Second, if you do write to either politician, please be respectful, on point, and brief. Sure, they may be craven corporate shill morons, but you won’t do our cause any favors by pointing that out in those terms. Don’t soft-pedal the immorality of the proposed legislation, but don’t be a name-calling abusive jerk, either. That’s what blogs are for ;-).

One of my cohort at Berkeley texted me the other day with the following questions:

OK, phylobuddy: can you suck the marrow from a chicken bone? If they have hollow bones, where’s the marrow?!? Google is getting me nowhere.

Short answer: yes, one can get marrow from chicken bones, from those bones that contain marrow rather than air. In most fully mature chickens, the pneumatic bones include the braincase, the cervical, dorsal, and most or all synsacral vertebrae, some of the dorsal ribs, the central portion of the sternum, the coracoids, and the humeri (if you’re not a regular and some of these terms are unfamiliar, check out these handy guides [1, 2] to the vertebrate skeleton). That leaves marrow in everything else, although the only bones with large marrow cavities–as opposed to tiny trabecular spaces, which also house marrow–are the radii, ulnae, femora, tibiotarsi, and tarsometatarsi. So if you want to actually see large amounts of chicken marrow, or suck the marrow out of chicken bones, you’re basically stuck with the big distal bones of the wing, the thigh, and the drumstick (tibiotarsus). If you are boiling chicken bones to get stock for soups or stews, might as well throw them all in; even the pneumatic bones will still have bits of adhering meat, cartilage, and ligaments that will give up molecules and flavor to the stock.

The long answer is that the expression “hollow bones” has caused no end of confusion, because there are at least two ways to interpret hollow: filled with air, or not filled with bone (the former is a subset of the latter). If you mean “not filled with bone”, then the bones of almost all amniotes* are hollow, and the spaces inside are occupied by marrow (most commonly) or air. If filled with air, the bones are referred to as pneumatic, and an accessible introduction to them is here.

* At least; I know less about amphibians and fish, although at least one osteoglossomorph (IIRC) pneumatizes its vertebrae from its swim bladder!

The reasons it gets confusing are twofold. First, sometimes authors describe bones as hollow and mean only that they have chambers inside, but later readers see ‘hollow’ and infer ‘pneumatic’. Not all hollow bones are pneumatic; in fact, the vast majority of them are not, including the long bones of your arms and legs. The criteria for inferring pneumaticity from dry bones are more strict, and are explored in this paper and this one. Anyway, this point is just confusion caused by an ambiguous term.

The second case is more interesting, because it involves real unknowns. In the fossil record we can almost always tell if a bone is hollow, sensu lato, but sometimes it is not possible to say for certain whether the hollow space(s) inside were filled with marrow or air. Particularly vexing and intriguing examples include the humerus of Eotyrannus and the iliac chambers of some sauropods, which are discussed in this paper. My guess is that the iliac chambers of sauropods are genuinely pneumatic, because they only occur in sauropods that already have sacral pneumaticity, and we know from broken ilia of more basal sauropods and sauropodomorphs that large marrow-filled chambers are not present in those taxa. Conversely, I suspect that the humerus of Eotyrannus was apneumatic (marrow-filled), given that humeral pneumaticity is otherwise unknown in non-avian theropods, although the pneumatic furcula of Buitreraptor at least shows that the necessary clavicular air sac was present in some.

Next question! This one came to me on Facebook, from ReBecca Hunt-Foster, whom you may know from her awesome Dinochick Blogs. You should also envy her and hubby John Foster for getting the most awesome wedding present of all time: a 1/12 scale skeleton of Apatosaurus sculpted by Phil Platt, which you can read about here. That’s cool enough that I am stealing it for this otherwise picture-challenged post.

ANYWAY, ReBecca wrote on my FB wall today to ask:

Random question: Have you seen many tooth marks on sauro cervical verts? I am debating on whether something I have is a dessication crack or really some tooth marks. Thanks :)

In all the 15 years that I have spent looking at sauropod remains in the bowels of many, many museums, I have never seen a single tooth mark on a sauropod vertebra.

[Update the next day: Er, except for the bitten Apatosaurus tail on display in the AMNH! Many thanks to reptilianmonster and steve cohen for reminding me about this in the comments. I'm going to go hide for a while now.]

Now, that doesn’t mean that they aren’t there. Truth be told, I’ve never looked for them, and my usual mental search pattern for pneumatic traces (large, irregular) would probably exclude tooth scratches (small, linear) as noise. But I’ve certainly never seen any vertebrae with easily recognizable signs of predation or scavenging or with obvious bites removed.

People also sometimes ask me what kinds of healed traumas I’ve seen in pneumatic sauropods bones. That’s easy: apart from vertebral fusions, most of which probably have nothing to do with trauma, I’ve seen zip. Nada. Null set. The wingspan of the average tadpole. I’ve seen some pretty cool pneumatic bones from extant birds that were broken and later healed, including a eagle femur in the UCMP comparative collection that is now shaped like the letter Z, but nothing in sauropods.

I can think of three possible reasons for this, which sort of flow into each other. The first is that apart from the very solid and blocky centra of apneumatic vertebrae, sauropod verts were pretty fragile, and prone to getting distorted and busted up even when they started out intact, and those verts that started out broken just had a tougher time with the taphonomic lottery.

The second is that pneumatic sauropod bones would been nothing to most predators other than a mouthful of relatively dry bone shards, so either carnivores left them alone, or if they were osteovores like T. rex, they ate the shards and whatever is left over is unrecognizable. I have seen, and mostly ignored, plenty of vert-shrapnel in quarries and in collections, and maybe sharper eyes than mine could have discerned evidence of predation from those bits. To me it mostly looked like trampling, hydraulic transport, erosion, and other mundane ways to explode a vertebra.

The third is that in addition to a preservation bias against half-destroyed verts, there is probably also a collection bias against them. I’m probably not the only one would pass up a few shards of excellence to dig out the complete fibula sitting next to them in the quarry, and I love this stuff. That said, we did get a LOT of blasted vert bits out of the Wolf Creek quarry in the Cloverly, so if you want to pore over sauropod shards looking for tooth marks, visit the OMNH.

And, if you do know of tooth marks on sauropod vertebrae, please let us know in the comments. And consider publishing them, given the apparent vacuum of such things.