Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Wednesday, September 09, 2009

New open project in dinosaur research

The Open Dinosaur Project is a new project to collect open data en route to an OA publication. From the introduction:

... This blog is part of a wider project, in which we hope — with your help — to make some science. We want to put together a paper on the multiple independent transitions from bipedality to quadrupedality in ornithischians, and we want to involve everyone who’s interested in helping out. We’ll get to the details later, but the basic idea is to amass a huge database of measurements of the limb bones of ornithischian dinosaurs, to which we can apply various statistical techniques. ...

... A huge, virtually untapped resource of skeletal measurements resides in the published scientific literature. In order to put these measurements to good use, it is necessary to place the data into a form that can be analyzed mathematically. Essentially, we aim to construct a giant spreadsheet with as many measurements for ornithischian dinosaur limb bones as possible. ...

In the old days, this would require a lot of time in the library stacks. Some aspects of the project may still require this. But, a number of scientific papers are now freely available to the general public! So, anyone with an internet connection can help out. ...

Just locate the necessary scientific papers, and start entering data into our spreadsheet. If you have access to real specimens, you may enter these data. ...

From the FAQ:

... [Y]ou may [use the data for your own research] – although we ask that you hold off on publication of any results until we have had a chance to complete the initial publication of our own study. ...

We plan on submitting the paper to the on-line, open access journal PLoS ONE. ... In the event of rejection, we will look for another open access journal. At any rate, we will do our best to make sure that the resulting paper is open access. ...