Misc. Housekeeping & Publication Survey

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The PaleoNet digests and gopher hole are just about here.  It looks like
the digests will be set up to send all subscribers a PaleoNet posting after
100k worth of material has accumulated.  At current rates of consumption
that's about .5 weeks worth of material.  We'll try that and see how it
works.  Adjustments can be made later on if necessary.  Also, the archive
of past PaleoNet postings will soon be available in the ftp site and
through the PaleoNet Gopher.  These will also probably be broken down into
100k segments and dated for reference.

As for the proposal to set up a separate specialty listserver for
publications exchange why don't we use one of the available specialty
listservers (either CommNet or TrainingNet) for this purpose now and see
how much traffic and effort this entails.  If we need to set up a
completely separate listserver for this we can do so at a future date.  The
real work in doing this will be keeping an up-to-date list of available
publications and E-mail addresses of their current owners in the ftp site.
So Tim, if you want to take this on the paleo. community will be in your
debt.  Do I have any volunteers among the current specialty list managers
of CommNet or TrainingNet to host this service on their list for the time
being?

Finally, I found John Alroy's recent summary of paleo. publication rates
very interesting.  But I think it needs some further exploration.  Outlets
for paleo. papers have been proliferating in the past 10 years (e.g.,
PALAIOS, Historical Biology, GSA Today) and it seems counter-intuitive to
me that less has been published about paleo. in the last 10 years than
before.  I'm not doubting John's data but I wonder whether we're justified
in drawing the obvious conclusion that paleo. has been declining for a
decade or more.  Perhaps fewer papers are being published on the whole but
the papers that are published are longer than they used to be.  Perhaps the
journals have larger backlogs now than they did ten years ago.  Or perhaps
we are publishing papers in places not covered by this database.  Is there
any way we can eliminate some of these alternative explanations?

Norm MacLeod


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Norman MacLeod
Senior Science Officer
N.MacLeod@nhm.ac.uk (Internet)
N.MacLeod@uk.ac.nhm (Janet)

Address: Dept. of Palaeontology, The Natural History Museum,
                     Cromwell Road, London, SW7 5BD

Office Phone: 071-938-9006
Dept. FAX:  071-938-9277
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