Malacostraca Podophthalmata Britanniæ 1815–1875 by William Elford Leach and the history of its fragmented publication (Crustacea: Decapoda)

The present study documents the fragmented publication history of Malacostraca Podophthalmata Britanniæ by William Elford Leach, illustrated with coloured figures of all the species by James Sowerby. This work was originally proposed to consist of 12 or 14 numbers. One number was to be published every two months between the years 1815 and 1818. Although this was increased to 19 numbers its publication by James Sowerby halted at number 17 in 1820. In that year Leach had a complete nervous breakdown and, although he eventually recovered, he was retired from his post at the British Museum in 1822. Although Leach was optimistic and set out plans to complete Malacostraca, he died from cholera in 1836 near Genoa, Italy, with the work unfinished. During the early 1870s fortuitous events occurred that would lead to the publication of numbers 18 and 19 and the completion of the work. At that time William Sowerby began negotiating with Bernard Quaritch, a London publisher, for disposal of old stock from the Sowerby publishing house including Malacostraca. George Brettingham Sowerby the younger, an established naturalist and highly skilled illustrator, proposed that the Malacostraca should be updated and he prepared Nos. 18 and 19 for publication. These last two volumes of Malacostraca were finally made available by Quaritch in November 1875. The authorship of Nos. 1–17 has never been in doubt and this is the work of Leach with illustrations by James Sowerby. Among the taxa illustrated in Nos. 18 & 19 however, are species which were not known to occur in British waters when Leach was working and as such the choice of Malacostraca illustrated in 1875 differed significantly from the original proposals. Consequently the 1875 supplement should therefore correctly be credited entirely to G.B. Sowerby II and cited as Sowerby, G.B. II in Leach, W.E. (1875). Finally, because copies of the Malacostraca are not generally available, all the magnificent plates illustrated by James Sowerby and George Sowerby II are reproduced here in full colour.

Who funded the research behind the Oxford–AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine?

ObjectivesThe Oxford–AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine (ChAdOx1 nCoV-19, Vaxzevira or Covishield) builds on two decades of research and development (R&D) into chimpanzee adenovirus-vectored vaccine (ChAdOx) technology at the University of Oxford. This study aimed to approximate the funding for the R&D of ChAdOx and the Oxford–AstraZeneca vaccine and to assess the transparency of funding reporting mechanisms.MethodsWe conducted a scoping review and publication history analysis of the principal investigators to reconstruct R&D funding the ChAdOx technology. We matched award numbers with publicly accessible grant databases. We filed freedom of information (FOI) requests to the University of Oxford for the disclosure of all grants for ChAdOx R&D.ResultsWe identified 100 peer-reviewed articles relevant to ChAdOx technology published between January 2002 and October 2020, extracting 577 mentions of funding bodies from acknowledgements. Government funders from overseas (including the European Union) were mentioned 158 times (27.4%), the UK government 147 (25.5%) and charitable funders 138 (23.9%). Grant award numbers were identified for 215 (37.3%) mentions; amounts were publicly available for 121 (21.0%). Based on the FOIs, until December 2019, the biggest funders of ChAdOx R&D were the European Commission (34.0%), Wellcome Trust (20.4%) and Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (17.5%). Since January 2020, the UK government contributed 95.5% of funding identified. The total identified R&D funding was £104 226 076 reported in the FOIs and £228 466 771 reconstructed from the literature search.ConclusionOur study approximates that public and charitable financing accounted for 97%–99% of identifiable funding for the ChAdOx vaccine technology research at the University of Oxford underlying the Oxford–AstraZeneca vaccine until autumn 2020. We encountered a lack of transparency in research funding reporting.

The Lingua Franca

Whose name is hidden behind the anonymity of the key publication on Mediterranean Lingua Franca? What linguistic reality does the label 'Lingua Franca' conceal? These and related questions are explored in this new book on an enduringly important topic. The book presents a typologically informed analysis of Mediterranean Lingua Franca, as documented in the Dictionnaire de la langue franque ou petit mauresque, which provides an important historical snapshot of contact-induced language change. Based on a close study of the Dictionnaire in its historical and linguistic context, the book proposes hypotheses concerning its models, authorship and publication history, and examines the place of the Dictionnaire's Lingua Franca in the structural typological space between Romance languages, on the one hand, and pidgins, on the other. It refines our understanding of the typology of contact outcomes while at the same time opening unexpected new avenues for both linguistic and historical research.

Anchoring Retro Spirou et Fantasio and Spin-off Albums

Émile Bravo’s Le Journal d’un ingénu inaugurated a growing trend of setting Spirou, Fantasio, and friends in WWII times. Bravo’s acclaimed work was followed by the first instalment of a history of Spirou that also contributed to fuelling the interest in retro settings for new albums related to Spirou’s universe. In this article I consider such retro albums as a whole and argue that WWII is only one of the many anchors used by authors to fill a gap in the publication history of Spirou, that as time passes, authors rely increasingly on Spirou’s recovered history and on new content from retro Spirou albums to anchor their work, and that, ultimately, such works are more interested in Spirou itself rather than in history per se.

A Century of Peer-reviewed Australian Zoological Research: Prominent Authors, Themes and Usage of Papers from Australian Zoologist

ABSTRACT The peer-reviewed Australian Zoologist, first published in 1914, is Australia’s longest-lived zoological journal. Its publication history shows changes in the zoological topics covered over the last 100 years, including the animals studied, characteristics of the authors and readership, and the influence of the databases used to study the journal on information retrieval. Searches in different databases retrieved different numbers of papers; Scopus (including secondary documents not in the database but cited by documents that are in the database) was the most comprehensive. Although authors from 22 countries contributed papers over the history of the Australian Zoologist, over 90% of authors were Australian. Most international authors came from the USA, the UK, Canada and New Zealand. Approximately two-thirds of authors citing Australian Zoologist were Australian-based, but there were still 10 or more authors from each of thirty-four other countries citing Australian Zoologist: while regional, the journal has an international profile. Highly cited papers in Australian Zoologist had high mean Scopus percentile ranks (20th century 83.9, 21st century 73.7), indicating that in comparison to their fields globally, these papers are used well above average. Considering all papers published in Australian Zoologist, over time the proportion of papers in the categories ‘Biodiversity & Conservation’ and ‘Environmental Sciences & Ecology’ rose significantly, reflecting the increased research in these areas. Between 2013 and 2019, when relevant metrics are available in Scopus, Australian Zoologist declined in no metric measured while improving significantly in CiteScore, Highest Percentile, and % Cited, indicating increasing references to Australian Zoologist papers by other peer-reviewed publications. Between 2010 and 2019, 2.1% of Australian Zoologist papers were ranked within the top 10% in their fields globally, based on citation impact. Authors considering publishing in Australian Zoologist should note that longer papers are acceptable, colour imagery (including photographs) is encouraged, the journal is visible in major databases, it is cited internationally and there are no page charges.

An unknown early monthly journal of the Netherlands

This article examines one of the earliest periodicals published in the Dutch Republic, the hitherto unknown Nederlantse Mercurius (1665). Only a single issue of this monthly journal has survived, but its publication history can be enriched considerably thanks to extant newspaper advertisements. This article investigates the Nederlantse Mercurius in the context of the growth of the periodical market in the seventeenth century; in the context of the career and family ties of the man responsible for the journal, the Amsterdam printer Joost Otto Smient, a young publisher launching his first independent venture; and in the context of the European news market.

The impact of assumed translation and the quest for a lost original

The Carta de Jamaica (1815) is considered one of the most important testimonies of the South American liberator Simón Bolívar. When the manuscript vanished, historians were left with an English translation and assumed back-translations into Spanish, which heavily impacted the (Spanish) publication history for almost two centuries. This study of the versions of the Carta de Jamaica and the discourse surrounding the search for the original is carried out by applying Jan Assman’s text production process model. Assman’s model helps identify and understand the motives guiding translation endeavors and the different functions of these versions, which makes it a valuable tool for translation-historical research on key political, cultural, or religious texts. This paper also shows how paradoxical the usage and conception of translation is: it is conceived as a problem, used as a tool of analysis, and finally becomes the solution because through translation the version “closest” to the lost original is created.