I was reading Stephen Curry’s excellent summary of Monday’s Royal Society’s conference on “Open access in the UK and what it means for scientific research”. One point that Stephen made is: As an analysis of the difficulties of Green OA, this is admirably precise.

{.aligncenter .size-large .wp-image-7904 loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“7904” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2013/02/27/get-down-get-fuzzy-speculative-juvenile-apatosaurus/fuzzy-apato-juvenile-by-niroot/” orig-file=“https://svpow.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/fuzzy-apato-juvenile-by-niroot.jpg” orig-size=“1400,633” comments-opened=“1”

{.size-large .wp-image-7725 aria-describedby=“caption-attachment-7725” loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“7725” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2013/02/26/37-year-old-cold-case-id/living-dead-girl/” orig-file=“https://svpow.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/living-dead-girl.jpg” orig-size=“460,570” comments-opened=“1”

I was cruising the monographs the other night, looking for new ideas, when the humerus of Opisthocoelicaudia stopped me dead in my tracks.

Well, yesterday was insane. In the morning, we had the UK House of Lords report on its inquiry into open access: fearful, compromised, regressive, and representing the latest stage in the inexorable defanging of RCUK’s policy. I happened to be going out yesterday evening; when I left the house it had been the worst day for open access in recent memory.

Here’s a timeline of what’s happened with the RCUK’s open access policy (with thanks to Richard Van Noorden for helping to elucidate it). March 2012: draft policy released for comment. As I noted in my submission, it was excellent.

A while back, I submitted evidence to the House of Lords’ inquiry into Open Access — pointlessly, as it turns out, since they were too busy listening to the whining of publishers, and of misinformed traditionalist academics who hadn’t taken the trouble to learn about OA before making public statements about it. Today the Lords’ report [PDF version] is out, summarised here. And it’s a crushing disappointment.

Matt and I were discussing “portable peer-review” services like Rubriq, and the conversation quickly wandered to the subject of PeerJ. Then I realised that that seems to be happening with all our conversations lately. Here’s a partial transcript. Mike: I don’t see portable peer-review catching on. Who’s going to pay for it unless journals give an equal discount from APCs?

{.size-large .wp-image-7848 aria-describedby=“caption-attachment-7848” loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“7848” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2013/02/20/quick-hits-theses-on-arxiv-teaching-with-peerj-wedel-talks-this-week/fig-1-2x/” orig-file=“https://svpow.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/fig-1-2x.jpg” orig-size=“1200,1083” comments-opened=“1”

If you’ll forgive me a rather self-indulgent post, the neck-anatomy paper that I and Matt recently had published in PeerJ is important to me for three reasons beyond the usual satisfaction of getting a piece of work out in a good journal.

If you found the hypothetical Amphicoelias fragillimus cervical in a recent post a bit too much to swallow, I won’t blame you. But how big do we know Morrison diplodocoid cervicals got? The longest centrum of any specimen of anything, anywhere, is that of the cervical vertebra BYU 9024 that’s part of the Supersaurus vivianae holotype.