I was struck by this bit of prevarication in Richard Van Noorden’s new piece on open access. First the set-up: So far, so good. And then we have this: What does the weasel-word “appropriate” mean here? Is Alicia saying that she doesn’t think what Eisen’s saying is correct ? No, if that’s what she meant, she would have said so. “I don’t think it’s right to say X” is a much stronger statement.

My thanks for Richard Van Noorden for drawing my attention to his new piece Open access: The true cost of science publishing in Nature . I wrote a detailed comment on this article, but when I went to post it, I was told “This account has been banned from commenting due to posting of comments classified as inappropriate or other violations of our Terms of Service”: {.aligncenter .size-full .wp-image-8169 loading=“lazy”

There’s a good, balanced piece by Stephen Pincock in the new Nature , on the question of whether early-career researchers should publish their work in open-access journals.

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Here’s an update from the road–get ready for some crappy raw images, because that’s all I have the time or energy to post (with one exception). {.aligncenter .size-full .wp-image-8148 loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“8148” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2013/03/24/omnh-1331-is-my-new-hero/omnh-1331/” orig-file=“https://svpow.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/omnh-1331.jpg” orig-size=“2272,1704” comments-opened=“1”

As I noted in a comment on the previous post, titanosaurs have stupid cervicals. As evidence, here is as gallery of titanosaur cervicals featured previously on SV-POW!. 1. From Whassup with your segmented lamina, Uberabatitan ribeiroi ?, an anterior cervical of that very animal, from Salgado and Carvalho (2008: fig. 5). As well as the titular segmented lamina, note the ridiculous ventral positioning of the cervical rib.

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The problem I find myself reading a lot recently about “portable peer-review” — posts like Take me as I am, and my paper as it is? by scicurious at Neurotic Physiology , which excellently diagnoses a terrible, wasteful problem in scientific publishing : What a waste! What a drag on the progress of science! What a ridiculous situation we’re got ourselves into, with our chasing-after-prestigious-journals games.

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