We keep selling out of books, which is a nice problem to have, but still a problem for people who want books.

The interview that I did for Jisc was conducted via Skype, by the very able Michelle Pauli.

Quick heads up: Mark Hallett and I are both at the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology meeting in Salt Lake City. Tomorrow afternoon (Friday, October 28) at 4:15 PM we’ll be signing copies of our book, The Sauropod Dinosaurs: Life in the Age of Giants.

A few years ago, we started the web-site Who Needs Access? to highlight some of the many ways that people outside academia want and need access to published scholarly works: fossil preparators, small businesses, parents of children with rare diseases, developing-world entrepreneurs, disability rights campaigners and many more. Who Needs Access?

It’s open access week! As part of their involvement with OA Week, Jisc interviewed me. You can read the interview here. A brief taster: Read the full interview here.

Prologue Back when I started writing about issues in scholarly publishing, I would sometimes write about the distinction between for-profit (bad) and non-profit (good) publishers. While I still recognise this as an issue, thinking it through over the last few years has made it clear that this distinction is largely orthogonal to the one that really matters — which is between open and non-open publishers.

Judgmental readers will recall that I have dabbled in mammal skulls, thanks to the corrupting influence of my friend and colleague, Brian Kraatz. At the end of my last post on this sordid topic, I mentioned that Brian and Emma Sherratt were working on a version 2.0 based in 3D morphometrics.

I have before me the reviews for a submission of mine, and the handling editor has provided an additional stipulation: In other words, the first time I mention Diplodocus , I should say “ Diplodocus Marsh 1878″; and I should add the corresponding reference to my bibliography.

Suppose that I and Matt were right in our SVPCA talk this year, and the “ Supersaurus ” cervical BYU 9024 really is the C9 of a gigantic Barosaurus . As we noted in our abstract, its total length of 1370 mm is exactly twice that of the C9 in AMNH 6341, which suggests its neck was twice as long over all — not 8.5 m but 17 m. How horrifying is that?

Long-time SV-POW! readers will remember that three years ago, full of enthusiasm after speaking about Barosaurus at the Edinburgh SVPCA, Matt and I got that talk written up in double-quick time and had it published as a PeerJ Preprint in less than three weeks. Very quickly, the preprint attracted substantive, helpful reviews: three within the first 24 hours, and several more in the next few days.

It’s been interesting seeing the response to my comment on the ICZN petition to establish Diplodocus carnegii as the replacement type species of the genus Diplodocus . In particular, Mickey Mortimer’s opposition to the petition seems to be based primarily on this argument: I find this unconvincing, on the basis that the ICZN was never designed with dinosaurs in mind in the first place.