Hi folks, Matt here. This is a ridiculously busy week for me, for reasons that will become clear by the end of the post, so I’m bundling some news items.

If you’ll forgive me a rather self-indulgent post, the neck-anatomy paper that I and Matt recently had published in PeerJ is important to me for three reasons beyond the usual satisfaction of getting a piece of work out in a good journal.

If you found the hypothetical Amphicoelias fragillimus cervical in a recent post a bit too much to swallow, I won’t blame you. But how big do we know Morrison diplodocoid cervicals got? The longest centrum of any specimen of anything, anywhere, is that of the cervical vertebra BYU 9024 that’s part of the Supersaurus vivianae holotype.

A couple of years ago, Matt wrote about the conflict between authors and publishers. Yesterday, two offical statements about the FASTR bill showed us with devastating clarity that publishers are opposed to libraries, too.

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There are a lot of things to love about PeerJ, which of course is why we sent our neck-anatomy paper there. I’ll discuss another time how its pricing scheme changes everything for Gold OA in the sciences, and maybe another time write about how well its papers display on mobile devices, or about the quick turnaround or 21st-century graphical design of the PDFs.

In our PeerJ neck-anatomy paper, we speculated on how long individual cervical vertebrae might have grown. Here is the relevant section: Now this speculation is shot through with uncertainty. As we’ve discussed before, at length, all estimates of Amphicoelias fragillimus length and mass are wildly speculative; and Parrish’s allometry result was extrapolated from an unconvincingly small data set.

Today our paper on sauropod neck anatomy is formally published in PeerJ.

Earlier today, Richard Van Noorden pointed out on Twitter that in this video, at about 5:40, the speaker says that “CC BY is essentially a viral licence”. I was surprised to say the least that the speaker — Sue Joshua, Director of Legal Affairs at John Wiley & Sons — would make such a basic mistake. I’d have expected a copyright lawyer to know what the term “viral licence” means. Hence this post.

Hot on the heels of the UK House of Lords’ inquiry into Open Access, the Business, Innovation and Skills Committee of the House of Commons has begun its own inquiry. This morning I submitted my own evidence. Here it is. [It’s not too late to make your own submission. It doesn’t have to be as long as this: just let the government know your attitude regarding the parts of the question that concern you most.

Here are cervical vertebrae 2-15 of Diplodocus carnegii in right lateral view, from Hatcher (1901: plate 3). Click to embiggen, and then just gaze in wonder for a while.