DOIs and an ISSN for SV-POW!

TL;DR: This blog now has an ISSN (3033-3695), and each new post gets a DOI, usually a day or two after it’s published. Read on for the details.

Over the years, we and others have cited a lot of SV-POW! posts in the formal literature. To quote from a sampling in a long-delayed in-press manuscript:

Many science blogs are now recognised as carrying scientifically significant material, often long before it sees formal publication, and this recognition is increasingly conveyed through citation in more formal publications. For example, our own blog, Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week or SV-POW! for short (https://svpow.com/) has been widely cited in the formal literature on subjects as diverse as open access, publication costs, study design, the moral dilemma presented by Sci-Hub, media distortions of dinosaur science, zoological nomenclature and the evolution of palaeo-art (e.g., Notton et al. 2011, Anderson 2014, Cross 2014, Heller et al. 2014, Rinaldi 2014, Witton et al. 2014, Bhatia 2015, Pennington 2016, Hoy 2017, Köklü 2017, Curry 2018, Pagnac 2018).

I’ve been pleasantly surprised at how little pushback I’ve had from editors when citing SV-POW! posts. But from time to time an editor has objected to citing something that looks like, well, a blog-post.

One thing I’ve been doing to ameliorate this recently is to ensure that the posts I want to cite are archived at The Internet Archive, and give the archived URL as well as the canonical URL in the reference. For example, my short paper I don’t peer-review for non-open journals, and neither should you (Taylor 2022) contains this reference:

Taylor, M.P. (2017). Declining a review request for a non-open journal. Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week, 24 April 2017. Retrieved from https://svpow.com/2017/04/24/declining-a-review-request-for-a-non-open-journal/. Archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20210509074657/https://svpow.com/2017/04/24/declining-a-review-request-for-a-non-open-journal/

(Infuriatingly, it seems that at some journals, the in-house style results in editors removing these archive links. For example, our recent paper on pneumaticity in the ribs of Brachiosaurus (Taylor and Wedel 2023) was submitted with an Internet Archive link in the reference for Gilles Danis of P.A.S.T on the Chicago Brachiosaurus mount, but that doesn’t appear in the published version.)

Anyway, to further ease the path of SV-POW! posts into the formal literature — I have an in-prep manuscript that cites five of our posts — I’ve taken two legitimization measures.

The simpler is that Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week now has an ISSN (International Standard Serial Number) — 3033-3695. I got it by emailing the British Library’s ISSN registry service at ISSN-UK@bl.uk, but if you’re thinking of doing the same for your own academic blog there may be other routes that work better depending on where you live. This ISSN now appears at the top right of every post, as part of the site’s subheading.

More complex, and I suspect more important, is that each new SV-POW! article now gets its own DOI. These are allocated by Martin Fenner’s excellent Rogue Scholar project, which also provides several other benefits including archiving SV-POW! posts and making them available in Markdown, ePub and PDF formats. You can see the list of SV-POW! article DOIs at https://rogue-scholar.org/blogs/svpow — these usually turn up an hour or two after a new article is published, and I manually add them to the bottom of each post at some point, usually within a day or two. (I wish there was a way to automate this, but I don’t think there is.)

Anyway, the result is that now if you want to cite (for example) Matt’s post on Fossils of Jimbo the Supersaurus on exhibit, you can now do so as follows:

• Wedel, Mathew J. 2024. Fossils of Jimbo the Supersaurus on exhibit. Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week, 14 June 2024. doi:10.59350/jp61r-esb50 — https://svpow.com/2024/06/14/fossils-of-jimbo-the-supersaurus-on-exhibit/ archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20240615052552/https://svpow.com/2024/06/14/fossils-of-jimbo-the-supersaurus-on-exhibit/

References

• Taylor, Michael P. 2022. I don’t peer-review for non-open journals, and neither should you. Journal of Data and Information Science 7(2):1-3. doi: 10.2478/jdis-2022-0010
• Taylor, Michael P., and Mathew J. Wedel. 2023. Novel pneumatic features in the ribs of the sauropod dinosaur Brachiosaurus altithorax. Acta Palaeontologica Polonica 68(4):709-718 doi: 10.4202/app.01105.2023

doi:10.59350/7nh5v-dzp76