[The title of this post is an allusion to Matt’s older post Authors versus publishers.] Following on from yesterday’s rant, I’m moved to write this one by Stephen Curry’s report on the latest Finch Committee meeting.

I just read this in a Times Higher Eduction report on David Willetts’s recent speech: Oh, so publishers “will not accept” Green OA? Where the hell do they get the arrogance to assume that a funding body needs their permission to say how their money is going to be spent?

Here’s where I thought Dave Hone’s Academics on Archosaurs series was going: {.alignnone .size-full .wp-image-6223 loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“6223” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2012/05/16/academics-on-archosaurs-tom-holtz/tom-on-a-tyrannosaur-2/” orig-file=“https://svpow.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/tom-on-a-tyrannosaur1.jpeg” orig-size=“1423,1067” comments-opened=“1”

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In my 2009 brachiosaur paper, I gave rather short shrift to the sacrum of Brachiosaurus — in part because there is no really good sacrum of Giraffatitan to compare it to. Also my own photos of the sacrum, taken back before I figured out how to photograph big bones, are all pretty terrible. Happily, Phil Mannion took some much better photos and gave us permission to use them.

How things have always been Traditional scientific journals ask peer-reviewers to do two things: assess whether a manuscript is scientifically sound, and judge whether it’s sufficiently important to appear in the particular journal it’s been submitted to. So I could have sent my 2009 paper on Brachiosaurus to Nature , and the reviewers would (presumably) have said “this is good science, but not exciting or sexy enough for

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.

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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.

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