This is an exciting day: the new PLOS Collection on sauropod gigantism is published to coincide with the start of this year’s SVP meeting! Like all PLOS papers, the contents are free to the world: free to read and to re-use. (What is a Collection?

It shouldn’t come as a huge surprise to regular readers that PeerJ is Matt’s and my favourite journal. Reasons include its super-fast turnaround, beautiful formatting that doesn’t look like a facsimile of 1980s printed journals, and its responsiveness to authors and readers.

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If the internet has any underlying monomyth, or universally shared common ground, or absolute rule, it is this: People love to see the underdog win. This rule has a corollary: When you try to censor someone, they automatically become the underdog. I say “ try to censor” someone, because on the internet that is remarkably difficult to achieve.

I’m gathering all seven parts of Tutorial 19 (“Open Access definitions and clarifications”) in one place for easy reference. Here they are: Part 1: what actually is Open Access?

In what is by now a much-reported story, @DNLee, who writes the Urban Scientist blog on the Scientific American blog network, was invited by Biology Online to write a guest-post for their blog.

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The LSE Impact blog has a new post, Berlin 11 satellite conference encourages students and early stage researchers to influence shift towards Open Access. Thinking about this,  Jon Tennant (@Protohedgehog) just tweeted this important idea: Would be nice to see a breakdown of OA vs non-OA publications based on career-stage of first author. Might be a wake-up call. It would be very useful.

Suppose, hypothetically, that you worked for an organisation whose nominal goal is the advancement of science, but which has mutated into a highly profitable subscription-based publisher. And suppose you wanted to construct a study that showed the alternative — open-access publishing — is inferior.

For a palaeontology blog, we don’t talk a lot about geology. Time to fix that, courtesy of my middle son Matthew, currently 13 years old, who made this helpful guide to the rock cycle as Geology homework.

An extraordinary study has come to light today, showing just how shoddy peer-review standards are at some journals. Evidently fascinated by Science ’s eagerness to publish the fatally flawed Arsenic Life paper, John Bohannon conceived the idea of constructing a study so incredibly flawed that it didn’t even include a control.