As we all know, University libraries have to pay expensive subscription fees to scholarly publishers such as Elsevier, Springer, Wiley and Informa, so that their researchers can read articles written by their colleagues and donated to those publishers.

In his post on Vicki’s new book Broken Bones , Matt told us his twelve-step process for producing stippled illustrations like this one of a crushed skull, which became the cover image of the book: {.aligncenter .size-full .wp-image-9460 loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“9460” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2013/12/18/vickis-book-broken-bones-is-out/skull-drawing-f1-original-on-white/”

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I thought Elsevier was already doing all it could to alienate the authors who freely donate their work to shore up the corporation’s obscene profits. The thousands of takedown notices sent to Academia.edu represent at best a grotesque PR mis-step, an idiot manoeuvre that I thought Elsevier would immediately regret and certainly avoid repeating.

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It’s now widely understood among researchers that the impact factor (IF) is a statistically illiterate measure of the quality of a paper.

Gotta say, I did not see that coming. Today sees the publication of a new paper by Emma Schachner and colleagues in Nature, documenting for the first time that unidirectional, flow-through breathing–previously only known in birds and crocodilians–happens in freakin’ monitor lizards.

Many thanks to everyone who played pin-the-skull-on-the-carnivore. The answers are down at the bottom of this post, so if you’ve just arrived here and want to take the challenge, go here before you scroll down. To fill up some space, let me point out how crazy variable the skulls of black bears, Ursus americanus , are.

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Lots of researchers post PDFs of their own papers on their own web-sites. It’s always been so, because even though technically it’s in breach of the copyright transfer agreements that we blithely sign, everyone knows it’s right and proper. Preventing people from making their own work available would be insane, and the publisher that did it would be committing a PR gaffe of huge proportions. Enter Elsevier, stage left.

Reading the Government’s comments on the recent BIS hearing on open access, I see this: Following the link provided, I read: I’m completely, completely baffled by this.