Question. I am supposed to be meeting up with Mike Taylor at the conference, but we’ve not met before and I won’t recognise him.  Do you know what he looks like? Candidate Answer #1. He’s a bit overweight and has white hair. Candidate Answer #2. He exhibits mild to moderate abdominal hypertrophy and accelerated ontogenetic degradation in the pigmentation of the cranial integument.

{.aligncenter .size-full .wp-image-6154 loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“6154” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2012/05/05/dimensions-of-the-mounted-rapetosaurus-skeleton/rapetosaurus-mount-at-field-museum/” orig-file=“https://svpow.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/rapetosaurus-mount-at-field-museum.jpg” orig-size=“2272,1704” comments-opened=“1”

The speed that things are happening at the moment is astonishing. Whenever we talk about the economics of open access — when I argue that it costs the community eight times as much to publish a paywalled article with Elsevier as it does to publish it as open access with PLoS ONE — I always hear the same argument in response.  And it’s a good argument.

Yesterday, David Willetts, the UK government’s Minister for Universities and Science, gave a speech at the annual general meeting of the Publisher’s Association.  The full text of the speech is online and very well worth reading, though it’s long.

{.aligncenter .size-full .wp-image-6141 loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“6141” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2012/05/03/mold-a-rama/admit-it-i-just-blew-your-mind/” orig-file=“https://svpow.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/admit-it-i-just-blew-your-mind.jpg” orig-size=“2272,1392” comments-opened=“1”

These are worrying days for barrier-based publishers.  In the few days since I posted part 2 of this series, we have yet another major development in the Open Access world: UK Science Minister David Willetts’ announcement that “we will make publicly funded research accessible free of charge to readers”.

Probably everyone who reads SV-POW! already knows that the manus, or forefoot, or sauropods was very distinctive.  The metacarpal bones, rather than being splayed out horizontally as in the forefeet of most animals, were arranged more or less vertically in a horseshoe shape, hence the characteristic shape of sauropod manus prints.

In the recent post on OMNH 1670, a dorsal vertebra of a giant Apatosaurus from the Oklahoma panhandle, I half-promised to post the only published figure of this vertebra, from Stovall (1938: fig.

Matt and I have been looking in more detail at indications of maturity in sauropod skeletons, as we prepare the submission of the paper arising from our response to Woodruff and Fowler (2012) [part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6].  Here is an oddity.

{.alignright .size-medium .wp-image-6081 loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“6081” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2012/04/28/sv-pow-is-now-finally-open-access/open-access-logo/” orig-file=“https://svpow.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/open-access-logo.jpg” orig-size=“424,600” comments-opened=“1”

It seems the world is conveniently arranging itself for the benefit of this occasional series.  Every time I am about to post an installment, something apposite happens out there.  Just as I was preparing part 0, Bernstein Research’s investment report Is Elsevier Heading for a Political Train-Wreck? came out; just before part 1, Elsevier decided that the solution to their problems was to hire a PR guy;