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.

New goodies out today in PeerJ: Tschopp and Mateus (2017) on the new diplodocid Galeamopus pabsti, and Mannion et al. (2017) redescribe and name the French ‘Bothriospondylus’ as Vouivria damparisensis. Both papers are packed with interesting stuff that I simply don’t have time to discuss right now.

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This morning, I was invited to review a paper — one very relevant to my interests — for a non-open-access journal owned by one of the large commercial barrier-based publishers. This has happened to me several times now; and I declined, as I have done ever since 2011. I know this path is not for everyone.

One of the many nice things about getting to help name new taxa is that once you let them out into the world, other people can unleash their considerable talents on ‘your’ critters.

I’ll be signing copies of The Sauropod Dinosaurs: Life in the Age of Giants at regional events the next two weekends. This this coming Saturday, April 22, I’ll be at the Inland Empire Science Festival, which will run from 10 AM to 4 PM at the Western Science Center in Hemet, California.

I was fortunate to get to visit some pretty cool places last year, and to photograph some awesome critters, many of which I had never seen so well before. Here are the best of the lot.

Back in 2012, in response to the Cost Of Knowledge declaration, Elsevier made all articles in “primary math journals” free to read, distribute and adapt after a four-year rolling window. Today, as David Roberts points out, it seems they have silently withdrawn some of those rights.