Andy Farke has a nice article about open access science at opensouce.com.  His article lists the 36 (nearly 1 a week!) new dinosaurs described in 2014.  Of these 36, 17 were published in open access or free-to-read journals.  That’s not much change from 2013’s 38 new and 16 free to read.  It is, however, a better percentage.  We’ll leave it to the reader to check for statistical significance.

PLOS ONE continues to dominate the world of open access dinosaur species—nine of those 17 were published there. I will be very interested to see if this trend continues into future years, particularly as more open access journals enter publication. Seven other journals hosted open access or free-to-read papers on new taxa. These included publications hosted by professional societies, “big publishers,” museums, and the like.

Overall, 2014 (17/36 new taxa are free-to-read) doesn’t reflect a big change from 2013 (16/38 free to read). I would be interested to see what percentage of the overall paleontology literature (not just alpha taxonomy) is freely available. Anyone up to collating this?

Here’s his list:

Taxon	Freely readable	CC-BY?	Journal
Adelolophus	No	No
Arcovenator	No	No
Augustynolophus	No	No
Changyuraptor	No	No
Daurosaurus	No	No
Eousdryosaurus	No	No
Gobivenator	No	No
Gongpoquansaurus	No	No
Kulindadromeus	No	No
Kulindapteryx	No	No
Laquintasaura	No	No
Mercuriceratops	No	No
Panguraptor	No	No
Pentaceratops aquilonius	No	No
Plesiohadros	No	No
Qianzhousaurus	No	No
Quetecsaurus	No	No
Rhinorex	No	No
Vahiny	No	No
Zaraapelta	No	No
Zby	No	No
Allosaurus lucasi	Yes	No	Volumina Jurassica
Datanglong	Yes	No	Acta Geological Sinica
Dreadnoughtus	Yes	No	Scientific Reports
Fosterovenator	Yes	No	Volumina Jurassica
Rukwatitan	Yes	No	Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology
Huangshanlong	Yes	No?	Vertebrate PalAsiatica
Anzu	Yes	Yes	PLOS ONE
Aquilops	Yes	Yes	PLOS ONE
Chuanqilong	Yes	Yes	PLOS ONE
Leinkupal	Yes	Yes	PLOS ONE
Nanuqsaurus	Yes	Yes	PLOS ONE
Tachiraptor	Yes	Yes	Royal Society Open Access
Tambatitanis	Yes	Yes	Zootaxa
Torvosaurus gurneyi	Yes	Yes	PLOS ONE
Yongjinglong	Yes	Yes	PLOS ONE
Zhanghenglong	Yes	Yes	PLOS ONE
Ziapelta	Yes	Yes	PLOS ONE

The discussions on that blog are about open access to technology, science, books, and information in general, a worthy cause.  Open science is an issue of which we should all be aware.  There are way too many papers published in closed journals.  Which makes it difficult for amateurs to participate.  Read more on that blog to see how the situation is improving.