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Author: Ross Mounce

  • Why do we rejoice in rejecting perfectly valid research?

    This has done the rounds on Twitter a lot recently, and justifiably-so but just in case you haven’t seen it yet… I thought I’d quickly blog about this excellent graph published on a FrontiersIn blog late last year (source/credit: http://blog.frontiersin.org/2015/12/21/4782/ ) With data from 570 different journals, it appears to demonstrate that rejection rate (the percentage of…

  • When is an ‘extinct’ plant actually extinct?

    I’ve written 29 blog posts this year! Still time for one more… This work relates to my new postdoc at the University of Cambridge in Sam Brockington’s group. I’ve been closely examining IUCN RedList data for plant taxa and found some rather odd things. Out of the 100 or so plant species that the IUCN…

  • Traditional Publishers: please stop blocking research

    OpenCon 2015 Brussels was an amazing event. I’ll save a summary of it for the weekend but in the mean time, I urgently need to discuss something that came up at the conference. At OpenCon, it emerged that Elsevier have apparently been blocking Chris Hartgerink’s attempts to access relevant psychological research papers for content mining.…

  • Anecdata On Sharing Science

    [This is my competition entry for the ARCS2015 essay competition hosted at The Winnower. I’m using their excellent WordPress plugin to automagically transfer this post from my blog to their site at the click of a button.] There’s a 1,000-word limit for this competition, so forgive my brevity. I could easily write ten thousand! These…

  • Using the NHM Data Portal API

    Anyone care to remember how awful and unusable the web interface for accessing the NHM’s specimen records used to be? Behold the horror below as it was in 2013, or visit the Web Archive to see just how bad it was. It’s not even the ‘look’ of it that was the major problem – it was…

  • Who actually has access to paywalled research?

    Yesterday, I tried to read a piece of research, relevant to my interests that was published in 1949. Sadly as is usual, I hit a paywall asking me for £30 + tax to read it (I didn’t pay). Hincks, W. D. 1949. IV.—systematic and synonymic notes on passalidae (col.). Annals and Magazine of Natural History 2:56-64. …