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Over the years, I’ve accumulated quite a few sauropod-themed mugs, most of them designed by myself and relating to papers that I’ve been involved with.

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This is an important question, and one that is all too easy to overlook. No doubt the editorial board of Lingua assumed that they owned and controlled their journal, right up to the moment they decided to find a different publisher who would help them transition to reasonably priced open access.

Step 1: Include the Share-Alike provision in your Creative Commons license, as in the mysteriously popular CC BY-SA and CC BY-NC-SA. Step 2: Listen to the crickets. You’re done. Congratulations! No-one will ever use your silhouette in a scientific paper, and they probably won’t use your stuff in talks or posters either. Luxuriate in your obscurity and wasted effort.

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Here is your occasional reminder of how very misleading feathers can be in understanding the true shape of an animal.

This tired old argument came up again on Twitter this evening, in light of Elsevier’s me-too announcement of a preprint archive: And elsewhere in the same thread: So what’s the problem? Mendeley and SSRN are still around, right Yes, they are. But they continue to exist only by the grace of Elsevier. At any moment, that could change. And here’s why.

For a long while, there has been a lot of anger among researchers and academic librarians towards the legacy publishers: the big corporations that control access to most of the world’s scholarly output. But what exactly is the problem? Let’s briefly consider several possibilities, and see if we can figure out which ones really matter.