Skeletal Biology Research Centre (SBRC) PhD student Jessica Dolding-Smith has been awarded a Pollitzer Student Travel Award from the American Association of Physical Anthropology (AAPA). The funds will help Jessica attend the AAPA Annual Meeting in Cleveland, Ohio later this month.
The competition runs each year and awards are made based upon an essay written by applicants. This year’s essay topic was on whether the American Journal of Physical Anthropology (AJPA) should go open access and the costs and logistics of this. Jessica is very much for open access journals, and fully believes scientific knowledge should be available to both scientists and the general public.
Her critical stance on the subject was that a system of either charging scientists to publish or levying high costs for access was not feasible in the long-term, and that free access websites of dubious legality, such as Sci-Hub, were bound to come about in an economy such as there is at present. Jessica’s solution was for open access publishers to follow the business model of companies such as YouTube has at present, that allows open access for non-paying members with the caveat that content will be interrupted by advertisements to bring revenue to the platform, and then have an ad-free, premium section that has added perks, such as seeing published papers first, before they’re released as open access.
At the conference in March, Jessica will be presenting a poster authored by herself, fellow SBRC PhD student Rosie Pitfield and her supervisors, Dr Chris Deter and Dr Patrick Mahoney, that looks at the link between puberty and microscopic changes in bone growth in archaeological human remains. The poster is titled The application of histomorphometry to puberty in the archaeological record.
Combining their PhD research, Jessica and Rosie have found that there is a relationship between puberty stage and bone remodelling. The poster is a side project from Jessica’s PhD research, but also complements it as she is looking at maturation and puberty in human juvenile skeletons.