Sweet new paper out today by Bibi et al. in Biology Letters, on some awesome elephant tracks from the United Arab Emirates. I’ve known this was coming for a while, because the second author on the study, Brian Kraatz, has his office about 30 feet down the hall from mine.

A very quick note to let you all know that my new article is now up at Discover Magazine’s guest blog, The Crux.  Entitled It’s Not Academic: How Publishers Are Squelching Science Communication , the topic will not be unfamiliar to SV-POW! readers.

An important new paper is out: R. Kent Sanders and Colleen G. Farmer.  2012.  The pulmonary anatomy of Alligator mississippiensis and Its similarity to the avian respiratory system.

Folks, just a short post to let you know that, together with my colleagues in the @access Working Group, I have just launched a new web-site. One of the problems we have in promoting Open Access is getting non-scholars involved.  So the whole enterprise can feel like an ivory-tower issue, one that just doesn’t affect the great majority of people.  But that’s not true. The new site is called Who needs access?

Re-posted with permission.

An interesting conversation arose in the comments to Matt’s last post — interesting to me, at least, but then since I wrote much of it, I am biased.  I think it merits promotion to its own post, though.  Paul Graham, among many others, has written about how one of the most important reasons to write about a subject is that the process of doing so helps you work through exactly what you think about it.

Barrier-based publishers have been shouting and stomping around a lot recently.  Kind of like a Vogon guard.  But we’re trying to see the situation from their point of view.

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In a comment on the last post, an Elsevier employee wrote: Elsevier’s support for the Research Works Act comes down to a question of preferring voluntary partnerships to promote access to research, rather than being subjected to inflexible government mandates like the NIH policy, which seek to dictate how journal articles or accepted manuscripts are disseminated without involving publishers. While we do appreciate that you’re trying

The Elsevier boycott at The Cost Of Knowledge is the most visible sign of the recent uprising against exploitative publishing practices, but it’s far from the only one.

A couple of days ago, we noted that PLoS ONE publishes more open-access articles in a month than all of Elsevier’s 2637 journals put together publish in a year.  This time I would like to consider why that is. I am genuinely interested here, and I’d like to hear from people who have considered publishing their own work as open access in an Elsevier journal.