Twenty Years Online! A brief history of Palaeontologia Electronica
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This issue marks the 20 th anniversary of Palaeontologia Electronica (PE).From modest beginnings as a series of discussions on the PaleoNet listserver in 1996, it has become a well-recognised venue for publication and dissemination of research, techniques, and resources in palaeontology.The journal has many "firsts" to its credit, from the first species named on the internet, the first scientific journal with a plain-language abstract, and the first PDF "reprints" in palaeontology.Over 20 years PE also tried many new approaches that weren't subsequently adopted by the broader scientific community, such as audio abstracts and animated journal covers.This anniversary issue gives us an opportunity to look back at the beginnings of the journal, its initial aims and aspirations, and to chronicle its evolution.It is as much a reflection of the changing nature of PE as it is a reminder of the larger scale changes that have taken place in the world of palaeontology, the internet, and our community over the past two decades.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.008 | 0.010 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.018 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.306 | 0.215 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".