Et dire qu'on nous raconte que nos photos de cailloux au travail sont protégées par le droit d'auteur justement à cause de ce qui est écrit ici noir sur blanc comme n'entrant pas du tout dans une création artistique : cadrage, lumière, choix de l'objet etc.
Paper now published in the diamond open-access @peercomjournal.bsky.social , in the archaeology section, with tens of other papers! Join us! peercommunityjournal.org/articles/10....
4/3 Now published in the generalist diamond open-access @peercomjournal.bsky.social , for free, without more peer-reviews: doi.org/10.24072/pcj...
It was so interesting to reproduce @benmarwick.bsky.social 's paper and to try to replicate it with openalex.org data. OpenAlex is bigger & more inclusive than commercial databases—but it still lacks many cited references, just like @opencitations.bsky.social. We need to push for more #opencitations
The UCL Institute of Archaeology currently has a vacancy for a Lecturer (Teaching) in Archaeology and Anthropology (Ref.: B03-02939).
Further info & link to application here:
📲 bit.ly/3OKUMdw
1/2
Antoine Souron told me:
Olduvai bed 2 (theropitecus cranium with fracture and cut marks).
Shinfa-Metema 1 (cut marks in monkey in Supp Info p. 15 Kappelman et al. 2024 Nature)
South-East Asia : butchery on primates published.
Pdf, code in quarto document, and data available on Zenodo: doi.org/10.5281/zeno... and on my GitHub.
Re-submitted for 2nd round of free and transparent evaluation at @pciarchaeology.bsky.social (so much improvement thanks to 1st round of reviews)
Figure 1 from the preprint: Comparison of Web of Science (Wos), OpenAlex (OA), and OpenCitations (OC) data for the articles present in the three datasets. A. Number of authors, B. Length of the title, C. Number of pages, D. Attributed year, E. Number of references. For each plot, a dashed-line represents y = x.
Figure 5 of the preprint: Biplot of the first and second principal components of a PCA computed on the means of the five bibliometric variables for each journal in the sample. The arrows represent the correlation between each original variable and the principal components. The direction and length of the arrows indicate how strongly each variable contributes to each component.
Figure 6 of the preprint: Variation in bibliometric indicators of hardness for 25 archaeological journals based on OpenAlex data. The journals are ordered for each indicator so that within each plot, the harder journals are at the top of the plot and the softer journals are at the base. Panel F shows a bar plot that is the single consensus ranking computed from all five variables, using the Borda Count ranking algorithm.
New version of my reproduction and replication attempt of @benmarwick.bsky.social 's paper published few months ago in JAS, but here with #OpenAlex and #OpenCitations data.
You can read it in a interactive html page here: aqueff.github.io/replication_...
🧪🏺
The PCI-PCJ 2025 recap is here! ✨ Dive into the events of 2025 👀: peercommunityin.org/2026/01/07/p... Huge thanks to everyone who contributed to an amazing year! 🙏 #PCI2025 #Highlights
🦴 Des fossiles humains mis au jour près de Casablanca apportent un éclairage inédit sur une période clé de l’évolution humaine - des travaux incluant des chercheurs du laboratoire de la Préhistoire à l’actuel : culture, environnement et anthropologie @pacea.bsky.social
www.pacea.u-bordeaux...
@cnrsaquitaine.bsky.social @pacea.bsky.social @cnrs.fr
Happy to have participated for years in the sedimentological study of Thomas Quarry I which is featured today in @nature.com for having yielded hominin fossils with traits reminiscent of Homo sapiens.
rdcu.be/eX1Pm
@cnrsecologie.bsky.social @univbordeaux.bsky.social @nouvelleaquitaine.bsky.social
@coarassessment.bsky.social and
@dorassessment.bsky.social joint statement to advance global research reform towards qualitative instead of quantitative evaluations
sfdora.org/2025/12/04/d...
I didn't check the review reports yet
I would say there is no clue at all that they were weathered in situ. So yes could be pigment, could be just nice looking rocks collected because they're shiny and/or their nice shape. But should not be "pyrite" everywhere in text and figures and press.
If only the two fragments were made of pyrite Becky. You can find a very short sentence saying the contrary in the text. And then must go to the SI to find the XRD analysis: goethite+hematite. Could have been gathered as pyrite... Or not...
It's not just about label, it's also that no one can assura that it was not already oxidized when the humans gathered these fragments. It could have been pyrite (or even marcassite) by the time the humans brought it, but it could have been already goethite+hematite.
I'm happy I finally find somewhere someone who point our that the two rock fragments *are not* pyrite! Thank you John. But you need to go to the SI to see the XRD analysis of one of the main find of the article. And all along the paper (text figures legends) it's labeled pyrite.
Should we tag all these 42 papers on platforms like @pubpeer.com ? If there is this kind of citation in the paper maybe it's a red flag?
Happy to have been part of this super interesting paper!
Happy to hare that the preprint I was advertising below has been published by the Journal of Evolutionary Biology:
academic.oup.com/jeb/advance-...
Thanks @jevbio.bsky.social for supporting responsible publishing!
The @cnrs.fr is quitting Web of Science (after Scopus last year) to promote Open Alex instead! Great news!
www.cnrs.fr/en/update/cn...
Our paper "Rethinking Caribbean Archaeology: Towards an ethical position for a truly decolonial practice" was published today at
@pciarchaeology.bsky.social
Many thanks to all the authors for this amazing collaboration! 🎊
📎 peercommunityjournal.org/articles/10....
To stop the drain, do not hesitate to engage with #free #openscience, #preprints, @peercommunityin.bsky.social, #diamondOA journals, academia-friendly journals (dafnee.isem-evolution.fr) etc.
THERE ARE SOLUTIONS !
Media Coverage: Retraction Watch "Bug in Springer Nature #Metadata May Be Causing ‘Significant, Systemic’ Citation Inflation" retractionwatch.com/2025/11/11/b...
@retractionwatch.com
A table showing profit margins of major publishers. A snippet of text related to this table is below. 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year.
A figure detailing the drain on researcher time. 1. The four-fold drain 1.2 Time The number of papers published each year is growing faster than the scientific workforce, with the number of papers per researcher almost doubling between 1996 and 2022 (Figure 1A). This reflects the fact that publishers’ commercial desire to publish (sell) more material has aligned well with the competitive prestige culture in which publications help secure jobs, grants, promotions, and awards. To the extent that this growth is driven by a pressure for profit, rather than scholarly imperatives, it distorts the way researchers spend their time. The publishing system depends on unpaid reviewer labour, estimated to be over 130 million unpaid hours annually in 2020 alone (9). Researchers have complained about the demands of peer-review for decades, but the scale of the problem is now worse, with editors reporting widespread difficulties recruiting reviewers. The growth in publications involves not only the authors’ time, but that of academic editors and reviewers who are dealing with so many review demands. Even more seriously, the imperative to produce ever more articles reshapes the nature of scientific inquiry. Evidence across multiple fields shows that more papers result in ‘ossification’, not new ideas (10). It may seem paradoxical that more papers can slow progress until one considers how it affects researchers’ time. While rewards remain tied to volume, prestige, and impact of publications, researchers will be nudged away from riskier, local, interdisciplinary, and long-term work. The result is a treadmill of constant activity with limited progress whereas core scholarly practices – such as reading, reflecting and engaging with others’ contributions – is de-prioritized. What looks like productivity often masks intellectual exhaustion built on a demoralizing, narrowing scientific vision.
A table of profit margins across industries. The section of text related to this table is below: 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year.
The costs of inaction are plain: wasted public funds, lost researcher time, compromised scientific integrity and eroded public trust. Today, the system rewards commercial publishers first, and science second. Without bold action from the funders we risk continuing to pour resources into a system that prioritizes profit over the advancement of scientific knowledge.
We wrote the Strain on scientific publishing to highlight the problems of time & trust. With a fantastic group of co-authors, we present The Drain of Scientific Publishing:
a 🧵 1/n
Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820
Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
Oligopoly: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
The IRN Bipedal Equilibrium team is running an international survey on hominin bipedalism. They aim to better understand how scholars think about bipedalism.
Perspectives from all fields are welcome!
👉 Here is the survey link: questions.huma-num.fr/v4/s/dv57r1 (10 min)
Please share it widely! 🏺🧪🦣
Exactly this!
Author-Paid PublicationFees Corrupt Science and Should Be Abandoned Thomas J. H Morgan & Paul E. Smaldino
As grant money starts drying up, it's more important than ever not to waste it on paying publishers' open access "article processing fees" when we can host PDFs for free. Tom Morgan and I wrote a paper on this, forthcoming at Science and Public Policy. Accepted draft here: osf.io/preprints/os...
Many thanks to Karlstad University for becoming a supporter of PCI this year (www.kau.se/en)%F0%9F%98...!