Open Science

Modern Palaeoanthropology advances towards greater openness and accessibility

In 1912, Charles Dawson, an amateur antiquarian and solicitor, along with Arthur Smith Woodward, the Curator of Geology at the Natural History Museum of London, proclaimed the discovery of the ‘missing link’ bridging the gap between apes and humans. They claimed to have found a fragment of a skull resembling that of a human in Pleistocene gravel beds near Piltdown village in Sussex, England. Additionally, they uncovered mandible fragments that were posited to belong to the same individual.

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The Replication Crisis is not a crisis for researchers - it is a crisis for society

Perverse incentives in research careers lead to poor research practices prevailing. This problem may not necessarily be a problem for researchers as their careers can benefit from questionable research practices. The end users of science (such as government agencies, policy makers and wider society) are the ones who are negatively impacted by poor science and we argue here that the systemic change must come from them and not from within the research community alone.

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Open Science – what’s the way (for Australia)? – Notes from a panel discussion

[This post has been originally posted on ecoevotransparency.org] We all heard about Open Science, and particularly Plan S, which has been announced in Europe last year (read more here). On 14th February 2019, I had an opportunity to be a panelist during discussion on what it all could mean for Australia. The panel discussion was organised by Springer Nature as a part of the ALIA conference, which is the main meeting for the librarians and information specialists in Australia and New Zealand (I realised these are mostly lovely middle-aged ladies, although they said more men are starting to join this profession with the new technologies, closing the “gender gap”).

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EcoEvoRxiv launched!

[This post has been originally posted on ecoevotransparency.org] I am very excited to announce the launch of EcoEvoRxiv – a preprint server where ecologists and evolutionary biologists can upload their forthcoming papers. I am aware that many ecologists and evolutionary biologists already use the preprint service, bioRxiv and that’s great! I have used bioRxiv several times myself. EcoEvoRxiv is a more targeted server, and it is convenient because a preprint at EcoEvoRxiv can seamlessly integrate a project that makes use of the services at the Open Science Framework (OSF).

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