At the Prehistoric Museum in Price, Utah, our host Ken Carpenter invited us to jump right into the Camarasaurus pit and start pulling apart their beautiful specimen. We did.

Today, we were at the BYU Museum of Paleontology, which is in a ridiculously scenic setting with snow-capped mountains on the horizon in almost every direction.

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I love Utah. I love how much of the state is given over to exposed Mesozoic rocks.

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Yesterday we got a treat: the description of a new titanosaur, Sarmientosaurus musacchioi, based on some decent cervical vertebrae and an almost absurdly nice skull from the Upper Cretaceous of Argentina (Martinez et al., 2016). It was published in PLOS ONE so it’s free to the world, including a 3D PDF of the skull and […]

In this short series on the moral dimensions of open (particularly open access), we’ve considered why this is important, the argument that zero marginal cost should result in zero price, the idea that the public has a right to read what it paid for, the very high profit margins of scholarly publishers, and the crucial observation that science advances best and fastest when we can build on each other’s work with minimal friction.

Several drinks later, they all die and somehow become skeletonised, and that’s how they all land up on a table in my office: {.aligncenter .size-large .wp-image-13338 loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“13338” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2016/04/14/a-fox-a-badger-a-pheasant-and-a-monitor-lizard-walk-into-a-bar/2016-04-14-11-12-52/” orig-file=“https://svpow.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/2016-04-14-11-12-52.jpg”

I keep reading pieces about self-plagiarism. the whole idea is idiotic. Plagiarism is “presenting someone else’s work or ideas as your own”. So self-plagiarism is presenting your own work or ideas as your own. Which is nonsense. Can we please abandon this unhelpful and misleading phrase?