HEFCE’s new open-access policy for post-2014 outputs
March 31, 2014
This morning sees the publication of the new Policy for open access in the post-2014 Research Excellence Framework from HEFCE, the Higher Education Funding Council for England. It sets out in details HEFCE’s requirement that papers must be open-access to be eligible for the next (post-2014) Research Excellence Framework (REF).
Here is the core of it, quoted direct from the Executive Summary:
The policy states that, to be eligible for submission to the post-2014 REF, authors’ final peer-reviewed manuscripts must have been deposited in an institutional or subject repository on acceptance for publication. Deposited material should be discoverable, and free to read and download, for anyone with an internet connection […] The policy applies to research outputs accepted for publication after 1 April 2016, but we would strongly urge institutions to implement it now.
There are lots of ifs, buts and maybes, but overall this is excellent news, and solid confirmation that the UK really is committed to an open-access transition. Before we go into those caveats, let’s take a moment to applaud the real, significant progress that this policy represents. For the first time ever, universities’ funding levels, and so individual academics’ careers, will be directly tied to the openness of their output. Congratulations to HEFCE!
Also commendable: the actual policy document is very carefully written, and includes details such as “Outputs whose text is encoded only as a scanned image do not meet the requirement that the text be searchable electronically.” It’s evident that a lot of careful thought has gone into this.
Now for those caveats:
The policy will not apply to monographs, book chapters, other long-form publications, working papers, creative or practice-based research outputs, or data.
This is a shame, but understandable, especially in the case of books. I would have hoped that chapters within edited volumes would have been included. But the main document notes that “Where a higher education institution (HEI) can demonstrate that it has taken steps towards enabling open access for outputs outside the scope of this definition, credit will be given in the research environment component of the post-2014 REF.”
Next disappointment:
The policy allows repositories to respect embargo periods set by publications. Where a publication specifies an embargo period, authors can comply with the policy by making a ‘closed’ deposit on acceptance. Closed deposits must be discoverable to anyone with an Internet connection before the full text becomes available for read and download (which will occur after the embargo period has elapsed). Closed deposits will be admissible to the REF.
I would of course have wanted all embargo periods to be eliminated, or at the very least capped at six months as in the old, pre-watering-down, RCUK policy. But that was too much to hope for in the political environment that publishers have somehow managed to create.
More positively, it’s a good sop that deposit must be made on acceptance — not when the embargo expires, or even on publication, but on acceptance. These “closed deposits” are like a formal promise of openness, with an automated implementation. We don’t have good experimental data on this, but it seems likely that this approach will result in much better compliance rates than just telling authors “you have to come back six to 24 months after publication and make a deposit”.
Third disappointment:
There are a number of exceptions to the various requirements that will be automatically allowed by the policy. These exceptions cover circumstances where deposit was not possible, or where open access to deposited material could not be achieved within the policy requirements. These exceptions will allow institutions to achieve near-total compliance, but the post-2014 REF will also include a mechanism for considering any other exceptional cases where an output could not otherwise meet the requirements.
The exceptions encourage weasel-wordage, of course, and some of the specific exceptions listed in Appendix C are particularly weak: “Author was unable to secure the use of a repository”, “Publication is print-only (no electronic version)”, and the lamentable “Publication does not offer a compliant green or gold option”, which really means “HEFCE authors should not be using this publication”.
But when you read into the details, this approach with specific exceptions is actually rather better than the alternative that had been on the table: a percentage-based target, where some specific proportion of REF submissions would need to be open access. Instead of saying “80% of submissions must be open access” (or some other percentage), HEFCE is saying that it wants them all to be open access except where a specific excuse is given. I’d like them to be much less accommodating with what excuses they’ll accept, but the important thing here is that they have set the default to open.
Now for the most regrettable part of the policy:
While we do not request that outputs are made available under any particular licence, we advise that outputs licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Non-Derivative (CC BY-NC-ND) licence would meet this requirement.
I won’t rehearse again all the reasons that Non-Commercial and No-Derivatives clauses are poison, I’ll just note that works published under this licence are not open access according to the original definition of that term, which allows us to “use [OA works] for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers”.
Yet even here, the general tenor of the policy is positive. While it accepts NC-ND, the policy adds that “where an HEI can demonstrate that outputs are presented in a form that allows re-use of the work, including via text-mining, credit will be given in the research environment component of the post-2014 REF”.
One last observation: HEFCE should be commended on having provided an excellent, detailed explanation of feedback they received to their consultations. As always, reading such documents can be frustrating because they necessarily contain some views very different from mine; but it’s useful to see the range of opinions laid out so explicitly.
No open-access policy document I’ve ever seen has been perfect, and this one is no exception. But overall, the HEFCE open-access policy is a significant and welcome step forward, and carries the promise of further positive moves in the future.
Frederik Spindler’s wooly brachiosaur
March 27, 2014
Aitor Ederra drew my attention to this painting by Frederik Spindler:
It’s briefly discussed in a blog-post on changing norms in palaeo-art. (I think the blog is Spindler’s, but I can’t find confirmation — its About page is singularly uninformative.)
As so often when we look at All Yesterdays-style palaeo-art, the initial reaction is “no way!”, but that’s quickly followed by a more thoughtful “… but why not?”
Well, why not? We have bare-skinned African and Asian elephants, but not so long ago we had wooly mammoths. Even assuming that Giraffatitan was as naked as Loxodonta, why would its polar equivalents not have adapted the ancestral dinofuzz into a thick insulating coat?
Rearing titanosaurs of the Egidio Feruglio museum
March 26, 2014
A simple picture post, courtesy of John Hutchinson’s tweets [first, second, third]:
John R. Hutchinson @JohnRHutchinson
@MikeTaylor Abundant in the Egidio Feruglio museum in Trelew, Argentina– almost all their sauropods are rearing
I’ve never seen a rearing titanosaur skeleton before. Here it is again, from in front:
John R. Hutchinson @JohnRHutchinson
FYI: If you get stomped by a rearing titanosaurid dinosaur, this is the last sight you will see.
And here’s the whole exhibit:
John R. Hutchinson @JohnRHutchinson
@MikeTaylor Here’s the wide view of that exhibit, with about-to-be-squished abelisaur and sulking Amargasaurus.
I don’t know what taxon the big rearing guy is — perhaps John can chip in? — but it certainly smells like a titanosaur. It looks very uncomfortable rearing, but I don’t know to what extent that’s because the body shape is wrong, and to what degree that actual pose is off: the hindfeet should be shifted forward to get them under the centre of gravity, as in the rather more convincing rearing Barosaurus at the AMNH.
We need different types of citation: Replicates, Falsifies, DependsOn, Acknowledges …
March 25, 2014
I just read this on Zen Faulkes’ NeuroDojo blog:
How should scientists, and reporters, discuss work that has failed to replicate? The original Barr and colleagues article remains in the scientific literature; failed replication alone is not grounds for retraction.
He’s right, of course: we certainly don’t want to retract every paper whose conclusions can’t be replicated, for all sorts of reasons: they may subsequently be replicated after all; the paper may contain other useful information even if the experiment in question was flawed; the replication studies themselves probably rely on the original’s Methods section; authors should not be punished for unfortunate outcomes unless they were fraudulently obtained.
What we want is for that Barr et al paper, whenever anyone looks at it, to be displayed with a prominent header that says “The following studies attempted to replicate this finding but failed:”, and a list of references/links. And, for that matter, another header saying that the following other studies did replicate it.
For web-sites to automatically produce that kind of annotation, they need articles that cite the original to include an additional piece of metadata, along with the author/year/title/journal/etc. metadata that identifies the cited paper. That additional ingredient is the citation’s type, which should be one of a small set of defined values.
What values are relevant? I won’t try to come up with an exhaustive list at this point, but obvious ones include:
- Replicates — the current paper replicates work done in the cited paper (and so provides evidence, though not proof, that the cited paper’s conclusion is correct).
- FailsToReplicate — the current paper attempts to replicate work done in the cited paper, but fails (and so provides evidence that the cited paper is mistaken).
- Falsifies — the current paper shows definitely that the cited paper is wrong. This is a stronger statement than FailsToReplicate, and would be used for example when the new work shows conclusively that the experimental protocol of the original was critically flawed.
- DependsOn — the current paper depends on information from the cited paper, such as the phylogeny that it proposes or the vertebral formula that it gives. For these purposes, the cited paper is treated as an authoritative source.
- Acknowledges — the current paper uses ideas proposed in the cited paper, and gives credit to the original.
(We discussed the distinction between those last two previously.)
There are all sorts of practical issues that will impede the adoption of this idea (not least the idiot fact that the citation graph is a trade secret rather than a freely available database), but let’s ignore those for now, and figure out what taxonomy of citation-types we want.
Photography and illustration talk, Part 12: Stereo and 3D
March 24, 2014
Here’s a working version of that link.
Working links:
- Falkingham (2012) on photogrammetry for free
- Mallison photogrammetry tutorial 1
- Mallison photogrammetry tutorial 2
- Mallison photogrammetry tutorial 3
- Mallison photogrammetry tutorial 4
Reference
- Powell, Jaime E. 2003. Revision of South American Titanosaurid dinosaurs: palaeobiological, palaeobiogeographical and phylogenetic aspects. Records of the Queen Victoria Museum 111: 1-94.
Behold, the SV-POW! mole!
March 21, 2014
When Fiona checked her email this morning, she found this note from our next-door neighbour Jenny:
Hi
I seem to remember Mike wanting a mole – I do hope so because I’ve left you a body on your patio in a cereal box!Cheers Jen x
What a delightful surprise! And here it is:
The SV-POW! mole, intact
And a close-up of that awesome digging hand:
The SV-POW! mole, right manus
I don’t have time to deal with it properly right now, so it’s gone into a plastic box with some small holes in the lid, where I will trust invertebrates to do my work for me — as they did to great effect with the juvenile baby rabbit whose skeleton I must show you some time.
The end-game here is of course to obtain a complete skeleton; but if not that, then at least the upper-arm bones. I’m on record as saying that next to sauropod vertebrae, mole humeri are the bones that move me most; and elsewhere I nominated mole humeri in response to John Hutchinson’s question, “what are the strangest animal bones (in form & function etc) that have ever been discovered?”
Here’s why:
Left: rat humerus (for comparison), Right: mole humerus. The rat humerus is unfused on top, which is why there is a visible gap between the two parts.
I stole this picture from an Ossamenta post, The strangest animal bone?. Get yourself over there for more wacky rat-vs.-mole comparisons!
That last one really hurts. Here’s the original image, which should have gone in the paper with the interpretive trace next to it rather than on top of it:
Papers referenced in these slides:
- Taylor, M.P., and Wedel, M.J. 2013b. The effect of intervertebral cartilage on neutral posture and range of motion in the necks of sauropod dinosaurs. PLOS ONE 8(10): e78214. 17 pages. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0078214
- Wedel, M.J. 2007a. What pneumaticity tells us about ‘prosauropods’, and vice versa. Special Papers in Palaeontology 77:207-222.
- Wedel, Mathew J., Richard L. Cifelli and R. Kent Sanders. 2000b. Osteology, paleobiology, and relationships of the sauropod dinosaur Sauroposeidon. Acta Palaeontologica Polonica 45(4): 343-388.
A “nuanced” position isn’t always correct
March 20, 2014
In discussion of Samuel Gershman’s rather good piece The Exploitative Economics Of Academic Publishing, I got into this discusson on Twitter with David Mainwaring (who is usually one of the more interesting legacy-publisher representatives on these issues) and Daniel Allingon (who I don’t know at all).
I’ll need to give a bit of background before I reach the key part of that discussion, so here goes. I said that one of David’s comments was a patronising evasion, and that I expected better of him, and also that it was an explicit refusal to engage. David’s response was interesting:
First, to clear up the first half, I wasn’t at all saying that David hasn’t engaged in OA, but that in this instance he’d rejected engagement — and that his previous record of engaging with the issues was why I’d said “I expect better from you” at the outset.
Now with all that he-said-she-said out of the way, here’s the point I want to make.
David’s tweet quoted above makes a very common but insidious assumption: that a “nuanced” argument is intrinsically preferable to a simple one. And we absolutely mustn’t accept that.
We see this idea again and again: open-access advocates are criticised for not being nuanced, with the implication that this equates with not being right. But the right position is not always nuanced. Recruiting Godwin to the cause of a reductio ad absurdum, we can see this by asking the question “was Hitler right to commit genocide?” If you say “no”, then I will agree with you; I won’t criticise your position for lacking nuance. In this argument, nuance is superfluous.
[Tedious but probably necessary disclaimer: no, I am not saying that paywall-encumbered publishing is morally equivalent to genocide. I am saying that the example of genocide shows that nuanced positions are not always correct, and that therefore it’s wrong to assume a priori that a nuanced position regarding paywalls is correct. Maybe a nuanced position is correct: but that is something to be demonstrated, not assumed.]
So when David says “What I do hold to is that a rounded view, nuance, w/ever you call it, is important”, I have to disagree. What matters is to be right, not nuanced. Again, sometimes the right position is nuanced, but there’s no reason to assume that from the get-go.
Here’s why this is dangerous: a nuanced, balanced, rounded position sounds so grown up. And by contrast, a straightforward, black-and-white one sounds so adolescent. You know, a straightforward, black-and-white position like “genocide is bad”. The idea of nuance plays on our desire to be respected. It sounds so flattering.
We mustn’t fall for this. Our job is to figure out what’s true, not what sounds grown-up.
Inspired by Bob Nicholl’s brilliant sketch Failed Ambush, my son Matthew reinterpreted it in this video — also titled Failed Ambush.
NOTE: this video is officially endorsed by Dr. Mathew J. Wedel, who testifies as follows: “it’s awesome”.
Get your relative-lengths-of-sauropod-necks T-shirts!
March 17, 2014
Are you a lover of sauropod necks?
Do you long to demonstrate to your friends and family how much better[1] they are than the necks of other long-necked critters?
Are you crazy for the Taylor and Wedel (2013a) paper on why sauropods had long necks; and why giraffes have short necks, but disappointed that it’s not, until now, been obtainable in T-shirt form?
If so, it’s your lucky day! You can now buy a T-shirt featuring Figure 1 on the front (necks of a human, giraffe, ostrich, Paraceratherium[2], Therizinosaurus, Gigantoraptor, Arambourgiania and Tanystropheus) and Figure 3 on the back (necks of Diplodocus, Puertasaurus, Sauroposeidon, Mamenchisaurus and Supersaurus).
And here it is in real life — sorry I couldn’t get a more photogenic model at short notice.
And here are the original figures as they appeared in the paper. The full captions, as reproduced here, are also on the shirts — just in case you need to check details while you’re out and about.
Figure 1. Necks of long-necked non-sauropods, to scale. The giraffe and Paraceratherium are the longest necked mammals; the ostrich is the longest necked extant bird; Therizinosaurus and Gigantoraptor are the largest representatives of two long-necked theropod clades; Arambourgiania is the longest necked pterosaur; and Tanystropheus has a uniquely long neck relative to torso length. Human head modified from Gray’s Anatomy (1918 edition, fig. 602). Giraffe modified from photograph by Kevin Ryder (CC BY, http://flic.kr/p/cRvCcQ). Ostrich modified from photograph by “kei51” (CC BY, http://flic.kr/p/cowoYW). Paraceratherium modified from Osborn (1923, figure 1). Therizinosaurus modified from Nothronychus reconstruction by Scott Hartman. Gigantoraptor modified from Heyuannia reconstruction by Scott Hartman. Arambourgiania modified from Zhejiangopterus reconstruction by Witton & Naish (2008, figure 1). Tanystropheus modified from reconstruction by David Peters. Alternating blue and pink bars are 1 m tall.
Figure 3. Necks of long-necked sauropods, to scale. Diplodocus, modified from elements in Hatcher (1901, plate 3), represents a “typical” long-necked sauropod, familiar from many mounted skeletons in museums. Puertasaurus, Sauroposeidon, Mamenchisaurus and Supersaurus modified from Scott Hartman’s reconstructions of Futalognkosaurus, Cedarosaurus, Mamenchisaurus and Supersaurus respectively. Alternating pink and blue bars are one meter in width. Inset shows Fig. 1 to the same scale.
No doubt these will be all the rage at SVPCA this year!
Update (the same evening)
As suggested by Kevin, I’ve now made the shirt available in a selection of eight versions: four men’s shirt, two women’s, and two kids. I don’t really understand what the differences are between them all, but they seemed to be the saner choices among those offered by Cafe Press. You can get any or all of them here. The shirt modelled above is the one called simple “White T-Shirt”. Please be aware that unlike all the others, the “Value T-Shirt” has no printing on the back — only Figure 1 on the front.
Notes
[1] i.e. bigger.
[2] Not to be confused with Paramecium.
Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week 