Monthly Archives: July 2024

PalArch’s Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology has been hijacked

Back in our annus mirabilis of 2013, one of the Wedel-and-Taylor papers was Neural spine bifurcation in sauropod dinosaurs of the Morrison Formation: ontogenetic and phylogenetic implications (Wedel and Taylor 2013). We this published in PalArch’s Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, which we chose because it was a small, open-access journal in our field that was obviously mission-driven and did not charge an APC.

We were pretty happy with our experience at PalArch, and it remained on our will-probably-go-back-this-journal list.

Until a couple of weeks ago, when Skye McDavid pointed out on the Dinosaur Mailing Group that the journal has been hijacked. Journal hijacking is a pretty new phenomenon, and needless to say a contemptible one. The idea seems to be  to obtain access to a journal’s website — for example, by snaffling the domain when the true owners let the DNS registration expire — then use it to publish a bunch of low-quality or straight-up fake papers, lending them the appearance of legitimacy because they’re associated with a recognised journal.

In the case of PalArch’s JVP, this meant that the Current Issue page was stuffed with a bunch of new papers that have nothing to do with vertebrate palaeontology, and the Editorial Board page was replaced with “coming soon” text that had no contact details. Our own paper remained up on the site, presumably to help lend that site credibility (it’s been cited 48 times) but who knows how long it will remain there? (This kind of thing is why we always keep our own copies of our papers on our websites, too.)

But in the last few days, that Current Issue page has gone away — not a 404, just a blank page — and in fact even the home page is similarly blank.

I don’t know what can be done about this. I can’t contact the site’s true owners, because nothing on the site says who they are. I’m posting this mostly in the hope that one of the PalArch people stumbles across it and can do something to rescue what was a nice little journal.

References

 

doi:10.59350/ya1g1-zse50

DOIs and an ISSN for SV-POW!

TL;DR: This blog now has an ISSN (3033-3695), and each new post gets a DOI, usually a day or two after it’s published. Read on for the details.

Over the years, we and others have cited a lot of SV-POW! posts in the formal literature. To quote from a sampling in a long-delayed in-press manuscript:

Many science blogs are now recognised as carrying scientifically significant material, often long before it sees formal publication, and this recognition is increasingly conveyed through citation in more formal publications. For example, our own blog, Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week or SV-POW! for short (https://svpow.com/) has been widely cited in the formal literature on subjects as diverse as open access, publication costs, study design, the moral dilemma presented by Sci-Hub, media distortions of dinosaur science, zoological nomenclature and the evolution of palaeo-art (e.g., Notton et al. 2011, Anderson 2014, Cross 2014, Heller et al. 2014, Rinaldi 2014, Witton et al. 2014, Bhatia 2015, Pennington 2016, Hoy 2017, Köklü 2017, Curry 2018, Pagnac 2018).

I’ve been pleasantly surprised at how little pushback I’ve had from editors when citing SV-POW! posts. But from time to time an editor has objected to citing something that looks like, well, a blog-post.

One thing I’ve been doing to ameliorate this recently is to ensure that the posts I want to cite are archived at The Internet Archive, and give the archived URL as well as the canonical URL in the reference. For example, my short paper I don’t peer-review for non-open journals, and neither should you (Taylor 2022) contains this reference:

Taylor, M.P. (2017). Declining a review request for a non-open journal. Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week, 24 April 2017. Retrieved from https://svpow.com/2017/04/24/declining-a-review-request-for-a-non-open-journal/. Archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20210509074657/https://svpow.com/2017/04/24/declining-a-review-request-for-a-non-open-journal/

(Infuriatingly, it seems that at some journals, the in-house style results in editors removing these archive links. For example, our recent paper on pneumaticity in the ribs of Brachiosaurus (Taylor and Wedel 2023) was submitted with an Internet Archive link in the reference for Gilles Danis of P.A.S.T on the Chicago Brachiosaurus mount, but that doesn’t appear in the published version.)

Anyway, to further ease the path of SV-POW! posts into the formal literature — I have an in-prep manuscript that cites five of our posts — I’ve taken two legitimization measures.

The simpler is that Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week now has an ISSN (International Standard Serial Number) — 3033-3695. I got it by emailing the British Library’s ISSN registry service at ISSN-UK@bl.uk, but if you’re thinking of doing the same for your own academic blog there may be other routes that work better depending on where you live. This ISSN now appears at the top right of every post, as part of the site’s subheading.

More complex, and I suspect more important, is that each new SV-POW! article now gets its own DOI. These are allocated by Martin Fenner’s excellent Rogue Scholar project, which also provides several other benefits including archiving SV-POW! posts and making them available in Markdown, ePub and PDF formats. You can see the list of SV-POW! article DOIs at https://rogue-scholar.org/blogs/svpow — these usually turn up an hour or two after a new article is published, and I manually add them to the bottom of each post at some point, usually within a day or two. (I wish there was a way to automate this, but I don’t think there is.)

Anyway, the result is that now if you want to cite (for example) Matt’s post on Fossils of Jimbo the Supersaurus on exhibit, you can now do so as follows:

References

 

doi:10.59350/7nh5v-dzp76

Five million hits!

It’s pretty amazing to realise we’ve been running SV-POW! for nearly seventeen years now, since 1st October 2007. And it’s astonishing, and gratifying, and even a tiny by humbling, to see how popular it’s been in its niche. That niche has turned out to be a bit bigger than we could have imagined, and I am delighted to say that earlier today we notched up our five millionth view! (See the bottom of the sidebar for a live count.)

In this time, we’ve posted 1,622 articles (as well a 70 non-blogpost pages), and y’all have added 21,720 comments.

So on Matt’s and my behalf, I thank you all for joining us on this wild ride. Your comments are a huge part of what makes this fun to do. We’ve always loved writing this blog, and we still do — and we have no plans to stop any time soon!

6th dorsal vertebra of the Tokyo Apatosaurus described by Upchurch et al (2005), in posterior view. Kindly supplied by Yukimitsu Tomida.

Thank you all! I hope you enjoy the next seventeen years.

 

doi:10.59350/r71e1-0e137