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If your news sources are anything like my news sources (disclaimer: NPR nerd here!), then you’ve undoubtedly heard about the new human species remains found in South Africa. Homo naledi was a previously unknown early human ancestor, and the amount of skeletal remains found in a South African cave point to the earliest known ritual habit–burial of the dead. Pretty cool, right?
I always nerd-out on science news, in part because in our global, constantly-connected world, it sometimes seems as though we have all the answers. But (happily) we don’t. New discoveries are being made all the time. New knowledge is generated and shared daily. New insights into who we are and how we got here are coming forth. And this latest discovery? It’s huge! But not just because of the sample size (largest at a single African site), or the age (not yet sure, but definitely millions of years), or the backstory (spelunkers tipped off scientists).
It’s huge because the two papers announcing the discovery were published this week in eLife, an open access journal.
That’s right, open access. As in, anyone with internet access can read the scientific papers behind this amazing discovery. Unlike previously monumental scientific discoveries shared in respected, but inaccessible, subscription-based scholarly journals, the 60+ scientists who bring knowledge of Homo naledi to the world are doing it openly, without access barriers.
You can read them. I can read them. High school students can read them. Researchers can read them. Journalists can read them. The spelunkers who initially spotted bones in the Rising Star cave can read them. ANYONE CAN READ THEM!
This, this right here, is evidence of evolution: Homo naledi is evidence of human evolution, and publishing the discovery open access is evidence of knowledge evolution. And it’s huge!
7 Comments on ‘“Rising Star” of Evolution’
Wonderful!
This is fantastic news!
Excellent find. And an excellent way to promote Open Access Resources. Thanks, Molly!
very cool!
Great share, Molly!
Devil’s Advocate: Really? You think this is wonderful? Why? Because as far as I can tell, the details contained in the two papers are far beyond the interest of most people, who are quite content with the blurb of news they got about this in their online or hard copy newspaper, including me. The same blurbs we got when Leakey made his discoveries…
I fail to see why open access online, in which no one seems to profit by all of this hard work to write, maintain and make available juried pieces of writing that can be trusted by other professionals is such a cool thing. Is what they do worth nothing? Why do you think providing free information that only a few people are interested in and even fewer people actually need is such a great thing? It consumes vast amounts of energy to store all of this information and disseminate it. We are flooded with information we do not need now. What would be a great thing would be finding a way to make it stop.
I respectfully disagree that we need to stop the information flood. Manage it more effectively? Perhaps, yes. But not stop it, especially when striving to make research articles more easily and openly available. As you likely know, journal article authors are not paid for their work, at least not directly. Their indirect benefits come by way of citations and further grant funding. The only party that directly profits is the publisher. All of this information is already being stored; making it open does not increase the preservation burden.