Although we like to stay sauropod-o-centric on SV-POW!, I just want to take a moment to acknowledge the most astounding publication I have ever seen, Sterling Nesbitt’s new basal archosaur phylogeny (Nesbitt 2011). Thanks to the wonder of open access publishing, it is freely available, and I urge everyone to check it out, if only to gaze in open-mouthed astonishment at the scale of the thing.
Today is the culmination of a project that I and Matt, and our co-author Rich Cifelli, are very proud of: the publication of the new sauropod, Brontomerus mcintoshi . Go and read the paper — it’s open access, thanks to the good folks at Acta Palaeontologica Polonica . {.size-full .wp-image-3503 aria-describedby=“caption-attachment-3503” loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“3503” permalink=“http://svpow.com/?attachment_id=3503”
In most journals, in-line citations are by author and year. So, for example, if someone writes “ Haplocanthosaurus has been recovered as a non-diplodocimorph diplodocoid (Wilson 2002)”, you know that the paper that recovered Haplo in that position was, well, Wilson 2002. And everyone who works on sauropods is familiar with Wilson 2002.
For anyone who doesn’t already know, Palaeontologia Electronica is an on-line, open-access palaeontology journal — the only one in the world (unless you count Acta Pal Pol , which is freely available online and also published on paper.) PE is sponsored by the Palaeontological Association, the Paleontological Society and the Society of Vertebrtate Paleontology, the big three professional associations, so you
There’s recently been a rash of requests for PDFs on the VRTPALEO mailing list. Or maybe “plague” would be a better word.
Here is an oddity. When the Geological Society sent my the PDF of my sauropod-history paper, their e-mail contained the following rather extraordinary assertions: I think, and I hope you will all agree with me, that the idea of providing a finite number of “electronic reprints” is profoundly misguided and patently unenforcible. But let’s skip blithely around that and focus on the core issue.
By now you’ve probably heard that the entire UC system is threatening to boycott the Nature Publishing Group over unsustainable business practices.* First, a few links to get you up to speed. The original letter, which was an in-house UC document that leaked (possibly deliberately, certainly understandably) and then propagated through academia like the proverbial brushfire.
The big noise on the Dinosaur Mailing List at the moment is this thread about Rob Gay’s newly self-published book Notes on Early Mesozoic Theropods , which you can buy from print-on-demand house lulu.com.
{.aligncenter .size-full .wp-image-2566 loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“2566” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2010/03/02/opening-today-snakes-on-a-pod/snakes-on-a-pod/” orig-file=“https://svpow.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/snakes-on-a-pod.jpg” orig-size=“414,615” comments-opened=“1” image-meta=“{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":""}”
At the 2007 SVP meeting in Austin, Texas, I noticed that the suffix “-ass” was ubiquitiously used as a modifier: where an Englishman such as myself might say “This beer is very expensive”, a Texan would say “That is one expensive-ass beer” — and the disease seemed to spread by osmosis through the delegates, so that by my last day in Austin is was seemingly impossible to hear an adjective without the “-ass” suffix.