The 2010 Paleo Project Challenge

Everyone has an unfinished project. Most of us have at least a half dozen. Those partly finished manuscripts, paintings, data sets, and preparation projects. Oh, we started out with good intentions. Maybe we even poured a productive week into it. But then, the honeymoon glow faded. Something else got in the way. The field season, or teaching duties, or another more pressing project, or a grant deadline, or just plain old life circumstances, interrupted us.

Luckily, all of that work doesn't have to go to waste. Why not finish up that project? What are you waiting for? Heck, what am I waiting for?

Regular readers of this blog may remember that Dave Hone and I instituted the "Paleo Paper Challenge" (PPC) last year, in an effort to shame all of us into cleaning our (figurative) research plate. We had pretty remarkable success - although not everyone (including ourselves) were able to finish everything we wanted to, most folks made some major progress. Some papers even made it into publication, in venues like Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology and PLoS ONE. Not too shabby.

Not wanting to rest on our laurels, it's time to kick things off for 2010. This year, Dave and I want to pursue a "bigger tent" approach. Why limit the PPC to just academic research? Let's open it up to all paleo enthusiasts! Preparators, artists, researchers, bloggers. . .after all, paleontology does not survive on publication alone. Thus, we are happy to kick off:

The Paleo Project Challenge
Do you have a paper that just needs the finishing touches before it heads off to publication? Is there some half-prepped fossil sitting in a cabinet in the lab? Have you started and finished a big blog post half a dozen times, but never pulled the trigger? Is that masterpiece rendering of a live Tylosaurus still sitting on the easel? Stop sitting around, and finish it!

Here are the rules:
1) Indicate your willingness to participate in the Paleo Project Challenge (PPC) in the blog comment section. You should at a minimum indicate the category it falls under (paper, blog, art, or whatever), and the project (if you can - we totally understand the need for secrecy in some cases!).
2) Do the work! You have until December 31, 2010. Remember, we're all watching.
3) Once you're done, celebrate!

You can read more about it from Dave's perspective here. Now, let's get to work!

My Commitments
1) Write up the ODP results.
2) Finish a long-running paper on ceratopsian anatomy.

What are you going to do? Chime in below in the comments section!

Horned Dinosaurs: When It Rains, It Pours

2010 will surely go down as the annus mirabilis of horned dinosaur research. Between the publications of the horned dinosaur symposium volume (with its myriad new taxa and other exciting pieces of research), a "bagaceratopsid" in Europe, a true ceratopsid in Asia, the hypothesis that Torosaurus and Triceratops are growth stages of the same taxon, and more, it's really tough for a "ceratophile" (to borrow Peter Dodson's term) to keep up!

Today continues the embarrassment of ceratopsian riches. With my co-authors Scott Sampson, Mark Loewen, Cathy Forster, Eric Roberts, Alan Titus, and Josh Smith, I'm pleased to introduce you to Utahceratops gettyi and Kosmoceratops richardsoni (at top and bottom, respectively, in the image at right), freshly published in PLoS ONE. Although it's been a long time coming, our hope is that these new critters will really knock your socks off!

So what's so special about these two animals? Well, for one they're new dinosaurs. And new horned dinosaurs at that. On a broader note, our new critters (along with careful radiometric dating of the Kaiparowits Formation, the rock unit in southern Utah from which they originated) provide important evidence for dinosaur provincialism during the Late Cretaceous. In other words, these big, elephant-sized dinosaurs weren't traveling far. They're the same age as dinosaurs known from much further to the north, yet represent a very different part of the horned dinosaur family tree. This is strange, especially when you consider that today there is only one (or maybe two, depending on whom you ask) elephant species in all of Africa! 75 million years ago, there were three or four closely related species of horned dinosaur living simultaneously on that little strip of beachfront property that comprised western North America. And that's not counting a few more less closely-related horned dinosaurs (centrosaurines) that lived at the same time! Truly weird.

There's been a lot said more eloquently elsewhere about these animals, so I'm just going to close with an answer to the question that should be at the top of many people's minds. Given the possibility that Torosaurus and Triceratops might be growth stages of a single species, how do we know that Utahceratops and Kosmoceratops aren't just growth stages of one species? After all, they lived at the same time in the same place, and end up somewhat close together on the phylogenetic analysis. Well, we certainly haven't done much in the way of histology yet, which would lay the issue completely to rest. However, as readers of the paper will note, we have obvious juveniles (based on sutural fusion and cranial element size) of both species. Although these remain to be published, in my opinion they pretty firmly demonstrate that both species of dinosaur were very different very early on in their development.

So, go read the paper!

Full disclosure: I am a section editor at PLoS ONE, the journal at which this new paper was published. However, I had absolutely no involvement in the handling of the manuscript (assigning the academic editor, selecting reviewers, making a publication decision, etc.).

Image credit: Lukas Panzarin

Citation
Sampson, S., Loewen, M., Farke, A., Roberts, E., Forster, C., Smith, J., & Titus, A. (2010). New horned dinosaurs from Utah provide evidence for intracontinental dinosaur endemism PLoS ONE, 5 (9) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0012292

Crossing the Finish Line for the Dissertation

Well, it's done.

All of the chapters of my dissertation have been published as papers in peer-reviewed journals.

It's been two years and four months since I submitted the final draft of my dissertation to my university, and wow, is it ever nice to finally lay the thing to rest. As a bit of a celebration, I wanted to pontificate share some musings on the whole process, and offer some hope for those who might be working on their dissertation right now. So, how did this all come to fruition? What did I do right (in my opinion), and what might I have done differently?

Start Early
Basically, I knew from the get-go that I didn't want to write one of those perpetually unpublished dissertations. You all know the ones I'm talking about. That really ground-breaking, highly citable, novel piece of research that's been sitting around completely unpublished since the person got his or her Ph.D. back in 1976. I can't really blame them - maybe they dropped out of the field. Maybe they decided research wasn't their thing. Maybe bigger and better projects happened along. These are all legitimate reasons (life happens!), but it doesn't make an unpublished dissertation any less annoying. As anyone in the field knows, journals (and reviewers) sometimes look askance at a reference listed as "unpublished thesis" or "unpublished dissertation."

So, I made a mental commitment early on to strive to get my dissertation published as quickly as possible. This was key in achieving the eventual goal.

Get Your Committee On Board
My dissertation committee wanted to see my stuff published, too. In fact, they specifically requested that I frame each of my dissertation chapters as discrete, publishable units. This was good advice. The days of creating a book-length narrative, which is retroactively turned into publishable manuscripts, are over. If you have the dissertation chapters framed as discrete, submission-ready papers, you can save a lot of time! This is a much more common practice than it used to be, which is a good thing (in my opinion).

So, before I had even finished writing the dissertation chapters, I had decided what journals I was going to submit to. Then, I formatted all of the figures, text, and references appropriately. This saved a ton of time in the end!

Git 'er Done
Once the dissertation is written, the congratulations received, and the diploma framed, the real work begins. Get those chapters submitted for publication. Take a week to rest on your laurels, and then get back to work. Every day you procrastinate is another opportunity to completely forget about submitting the papers for peer review. In fact, maybe even consider submitting some chapters before you graduate, if you can.

In the end, though, the only way I managed to get this done as quickly as I did (not that two years is that quick!) was to guilt-trip myself into doing it. Maybe that's what will work for you, too. And as I tell many people - don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Your work will never be perfect. There are always more data. There's always another specimen to measure. But at some point, you just have to call it "good enough."

Submit that paper. Because chances are, there's someone else out there who wants--perhaps even needs--to cite you. And I'm sure they would much rather cite a peer-reviewed paper than an unpublished (if excellent) dissertation or thesis. And for every day delayed, there's just another little way in which you have to revise the manuscript before submission. Science marches on, with or without us.

Regrets?
Not many, on my part. All in all, I'm happy with how my dissertation chapters have turned out. I might have had a few more figures in the ceratopsian one. Maybe a slightly longer discussion in the goat head FEM one. Perhaps I might have pushed to get the ZJLS paper published a little sooner. Oh well. They're done, they're published, and I can clear my plate for new projects.

Speaking of clearing plates, isn't it about time to relaunch the Paleo Paper Challenge?

Return to the Blogosphere

I'm back! Let's just say that a global circumnavigation, two months away from home, and a move in the middle, don't leave a lot of time for blogging. It was a fun and productive summer, but now it's time to settle back in for the fall.

For this re-inaugural post, I wanted to touch on a few highlights from the past few months, particularly in the world of open access and paleo research. I'll cover a variety of topics in more detail in future posts, hopefully.

Big Happenings at PLoS ONE

The online, freely accessible journal PLoS ONE hit a variety of important milestones this summer, including:

• For the first time, the journal received an official impact factor from Thompson-Reuters. The result: a respectable 4.351. Although this value certainly exceeds that for your typical paleontology journal (e.g., Paleobiology has an IF of 2.985, and JVP has an IF of 2.536), it is more properly compared to other general interest journals. For instance, Naturwissenschaften has an IF of 2.126 and Proceedings B an IF of 4.857. Thus, PLoS ONE is doing pretty well in the whole impact factor "game." Although impact factor has come under a lot of fire lately, we still face the reality that many scientists need to publish in journals that have an IF. Thus, the assignment of an official IF is a big step forward for the journal.
  
• PLoS ONE launched a new (and hopefully more user friendly) manuscript submission system. Read all about it here.
• PLoS launched a new blog network.
• Full disclosure: I am a section editor at PLoS ONE.

Happenings Around the Blogosphere

• The venerable ScienceBlogs had a major sea change, with a number of respected bloggers jumping ship. I'm still working on updating my personal blog feeds. But, don't forget that notables such as Tetrapod Zoology remain!
• WitmerLab launched a great new blog, chock full of goodies from all of the folks there.
• The spam filters at Blogger are horrible. I'm seriously considering transferring over to WordPress.
  

Research Happenings

• The long-awaited proceedings volume of the Tyrrell ceratopsian symposium is finally out. The first review, by Hans-Dieter Sues, is available here. Seriously, if you are a dinosaur enthusiast or researcher, you need to get a copy of this book (and no, I don't get royalties).
  
• The final unpublished chapter of my dissertation (on ceratopsian sinuses) is now officially in press - look for it to come out in JVP within the next few weeks!
• Another major paper should be out in two weeks. Stay tuned for details.
• I had my first publishing experience with PalArch's Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, with a paper on dinosaur skin from Utah. Brian Switek had a nice write-up of this over at Dinosaur Tracking. Hopefully I'll have a chance to blog more about this later - for now, I'll just say that you should consider the journal as a publishing venue! In the meantime, you can learn more about the journal in this two-part interview with editor Brian Beatty.
  
• And much more. . .too much to mention here, in fact!

That is all for now.

Interview: Ricardo Araújo on Journal of Paleontological Techniques

Fossil preparators are the unsung heroes of paleontology. For every paper on a spectacular Archaeopteryx skeleton, or an exquisite new ceratopsian skull, there is at least one talented preparator who freed the fossil from its rocky tomb. Despite the importance of preparators for paleontology, there are surprisingly few formal publications devoted to the trade (beyond the occasional symposium volume). Even rarer are open access publications on fossil preparation. Thus, it is a real pleasure to share this interview with Ricardo Araújo, the executive editor for Journal of Paleontological Techniques.

Tell us a little about Journal of Paleontological Techniques. How did the journal get started?
The Journal of Paleontological Techniques got started due to the difficulties that we felt in the Museu da Lourinha (in Portugal) to get access information relative to preparation. Unfortunately it is extremely hard for a peripheral country to have access to the know-how developed in the great centers of knowledge, namely central Europe and the US. So, we had to find an economical way without detriment of scientific rigor; publishing and editing articles using an open access philosophy seemed the right solution. Furthermore, the lack of a systematic compilation of paleontological techniques is evident in the literature.

What makes Journal of Paleontological Techniques unique?
There are a few things that make our journal unique:

1. There is no other journal focused on the practical side of paleontology. Some typical paleontological journals publish sporadically on paleontological techniques, and there are a handful of printed publications. However, there is an immense quantity of knowledge acquired by generations of preparators that is hard to access if you cannot go to the main conferences or workshops.
2. Also, preparation is practical in its essence. Thus, our papers can include videos and as many photos as necessary to make a technique easily perceptible. Most of the time it is difficult to express these techniques in words.
3. Our publications are edited in volumes. Each article is published by itself as a volume, which decreases the total amount of time for publication. This flexibility allows us, for example, to publish annals of congresses or symposia.
4. Our journal is totally open access and double-blind peer-reviewed. This doesn’t make our journal unique but certainly a “rare specimen.”

What advice would you give to authors who are interested in submitting their manuscripts to JPT?
Write! The preparation community is not used to writing about their findings, some of which are extremely important and can save thousands of euros for paleontological institutions. To spread paleontological techniques is to advance paleontology as a whole. Preparation is a science as well, in its most Popperian essence. To test and refute paleontological techniques is possible, and in fact, is done by all preparators everyday when we use different products, methods and tools, striving for the best way to do something efficiently.

What kind of difficulties, if any, have you encountered in editing JPT? How have these been solved?
When we embraced this project we quickly realized that the challenge was not to create the space to publish practical-paleontological ideas, but almost to change the status quo that preparators face nowadays. Institutions hire preparators to prepare fossils, not to write scientific articles. However, to my eyes, that is a rather limited view about the role of preparation. Preparation is the technical side of paleontology, and like any other science paleontology has its own methods—methods that are publishable. Actually, methods that are required to be published. Moreover, thinking strictly in an economic perspective, by spreading this sort of knowledge, preparator’s employers will quickly realize that they can save money by KNOWING and SHARING their knowledge.

In order to circumvent this problem, we are trying to present at as many events related to preparation as possible, not only to publicize the journal itself but also to spread the ideas behind it. We are part of mailing lists, groups of geosciences journals, and a gazillion things like that. For every preparation-related paleontological event that we know, we try to contact the organizers in order to publish the abstracts or edit a volume with selected papers. We are currently trying to organize an opinion paper that will be submitted in a mainstream paleontological journal, about the underestimation of the importance of preparation/paleontological techniques as a legitimate science. We recently got a wave of papers submitted, and hopefully it will be sustainable.

What has been the best part of editing a journal like JPT?
What I enjoy most about this project is actually the spirit of the journal and the challenge it represents. I believe the actual scenario is difficult, but not impossible to surpass. Ideally we would like to get help and cooperation from various areas of the preparation community, starting from the preparators themselves, up to the heads of departments, and paleontologists.

Image credit: courtesy Ricardo Araújo, originally published at Palaeontologia Electronica.

Interview: P. David Polly on Palaeontologia Electronica

This blog has been hosting a sporadic series interviewing the editors from various open access journals for paleontologists. This time around, I am very pleased to highlight Palaeontologia Electronica (PE for short). PE has a special place in my heart for two reasons. First, it was the earliest open access paleo journal around (that I know of). It began publication in 1998, before "open access" was even a part of the scientific vocabulary! Second, one of my first peer reviewed publications graced the pages of the journal, back in 2004.

PE's executive editor, P. David Polly, was kind enough to answer a few questions. As is only fair, he has asked me to remind readers that any opinions stated here are his alone, and do not necessarily represent official views of the journal.

How did you get involved with PE?
I got involved with PE in 1996, just after its inception and before the first issue was published. As I recall, the idea of an electronic journal of paleontology had been the idea of Norman MacLeod, Tim Patterson, and William Riedel in 1995, who then enthused the group of people who made up the first editorial board. Mark Purnell, my co-executive editor, Peter Roopnarine, the special issue editor, and Jennifer Rumford, our production editor, were all part of that group. So there are four of us who have been with PE for more than 14 years.

Given your long history with PE, have there been any particular surprises for you in how the journal has developed?
The main surprise was how hard it was to get people to publish with PE in the early days. Younger scientists were the ones most attracted by the idea, but they were also the ones to whom "impact factors" were the most important. The journal wasn't indexed by Thomson-Reuters until a few years ago and has only had an official "impact factor" since 2007. Before then we often struggled to get enough submissions to fill an issue, but since then the number of papers that come in is similar (or greater) than many other paleo journals.

Within the growing ecosystem of open access journals, what makes PE unique?
PE is unique in that it is completely sponsored by professional societies so that neither readers nor authors have to pay. Many so-called "open access" journals allow readers to have free access, but charge authors a steep fee. In my opinion, that funding model is even worse than high subscription fees for readers because funds for publication are not equally distributed among fields (paleo as a field has far few funds available for publication costs than does, say, medicine), nor are they equally distributed among researchers, institutions, or countries within a field. Publication is a fundamental part of science, or any academic discipline for that matter-- it's imperative that reserachers be able to publish their work and that others be able to read it.

In my mind, it is an obligation for anyone involved in a professional academic field to donate their time to reviewing papers, serving on editorial boards, paying dues to professional societies, and working for those societies to help facilitate and subsidize scientific publication. Sadly it is becoming increasingly difficult to get people to review papers, serve as editors, or otherwise commit time to these activities, which increasingly leaves academic publishing in the hands of corporate publishers, much to the detriment of fields like paleontology. No service that is offered by corporate publishing houses couldn't be offered by the academic community. The goal of PE is to publish quality science at the least possible cost, without taking a profit, and to reach the greatest possible audience.

What advice would you give to authors interested in submitting their research to the journal?
Format their papers correctly and, regardless of whether you submit to PE or another journal, to be willing to review at least five papers for every one you publish.

Are there any myths about PE that you'd like to see busted?
The main myth about PE that should be busted is that publication is instant. Once papers are accepted to PE, they come out in the next issue, which is faster than most journals, but the process of review and revision happens at the same speed as for any other paper. The thing that slows papers down the most is finding reviewers. I probably have two or three people decline to review for every one who says yes.... it can sometimes take a couple of months to find two suitable reviews for a paper. But once reviews have been found, revisions have been made, and proper formatting done, the papers come out quickly in PE.

Thank you, David!

Tony Martin Interview, Part 2

Yesterday, I ran the first part of this two-part interview with Anthony (Tony) Martin, senior author on a new paper in PLoS ONE. The research details a rare trace fossil (figured below) left behind by a bottom-feeding fish over 50 million years ago. Yesterday's questions focused on the science - in the final installment, we'll learn more about the publishing process. (Full disclosure: I am an editor for PLoS ONE, and was the editor who handled this manuscript.)

Why did you choose PLoS ONE as a venue for the manuscript?
All three of us really liked the fact that by publishing in PLoS ONE we could better share our research with both our colleagues and the general public. All too often I’ve published papers that were read by maybe two or three dozen of my colleagues (if I’m lucky), rather than a broader audience that might also find the work really interesting. I’ve also published in journals with “pay walls” erected to prevent non-subscribers from seeing articles. I know this really frustrates some science bloggers who want to write about the original research instead of just relying on press releases or news articles. So I am becoming more enamored with making sure all science enthusiasts have free access to original research results. PLoS ONE also has published some top-notch paleontological articles in the past few years, so it’s become a high-profile place to publish, while also permitting laypeople to learn from our science.

We also thought this research made for an interesting “fish story” combined with a “detective story,” sort of Sherlock Holmes-meets-fishing-meets-paleontology-meets-spatial analysis. The study also has some visually interesting elements, which through publishing in an electronic journal we could better share through our new (and very cool) application of the Deep Zoom™ software (link here). Now anyone with an Internet connection can check out the same trace fossil analyzed in the study through the pan-and-zoom function of the software.

Was there anything about the PLoS ONE process (good or bad) that surprised you?
Not really. One of my coauthors, Gonzalo [Vazquez-Prokopec] had previously published in one of the PLoS journals and said it was a straightforward process, with timely peer review and good, thorough feedback from the reviewers and editors. I’m pleased to say that our experience was the same, and it encourages me to consider PLoS ONE for future contributions.

Which of the Green River fish would have tasted best?
I would have loved to try Priscacara liops, either pan-fried or steamed with ginger, garlic, scallions, and soy. I’m not so sure that Notogoneus osculus [the focus of the current paper] would have been nearly as tasty, especially considering that we’re even more certain now it was a bottom feeder.

A big thank you to Tony, for taking the time for this interview. Don't forget to check out the paper, if you haven't already!

Reference

Martin, A., Vazquez-Prokopec, G., & Page, M. (2010). First known feeding trace of the Eocene bottom-dwelling fish Notogoneus osculus and its paleontological significance PLoS ONE, 5 (5) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0010420

Image credits: Image of the ichnofossil modified from the original paper at PLoS ONE.