We’re starting the new year with a new feature, in which we answer questions that have come our way. We never had a policy about not answering questions, it’s just that previous ones have tended to arrive in the comments section and have been dealt with there. But suddenly in the last few days I’ve gotten two questions from extrabloggular sources, and rather than hide the replies I thought I’d make them available to all.

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And so we come, rather belatedly, to the fourth and final part of this series on preparing and giving talks at scientific conferences.  If you’ve followed the previous installments, you should have figured out a clear, compelling story that you want to tell from your research; you should have clear slides with striking, relevant images and no visual distractions;

Hot on the heels of PLoS ONE -like open-access megajournals such as BMJ Open , Nature’s Scientific Reports , the Royal Society’s Open Biology and SAGE’s SAGE Open , now the king of evil predatory price-gouging publishers-whose-business-model-is-to-prevent-papers-being-read Elsevier are — you won’t believe this — launching their own PLoS ONE clone, FEBS Open Bio . So please join me in giving a

This year, I missed The Paleo Paper Challenge over on Archosaur Musings — it was one of hundreds of blog posts I missed while I was in Cancun with my day-job and then in Bonn for the 2nd International Workshop on Sauropod Biology and Gigantism .  That means I missed out on my annual tradition of promising to get the looong-overdue Archbishop description done by the end of the year.

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I’m just back from a three-day conference in Bonn, Germany, which I unhesitatingly nominate as the best I’ve ever been to.  To begin with, the subject was a guaranteed winner: sauropod gigantism.  I can hardly overstate how awesome it was to hear 43 talks about or relevant to sauropod gigantism (sixteen on the first day, fifteen on the second and twelve on the third).

As previously reported, the lot of us are in Bonn for the sauropod biology workshop. Last night we met up at the welcome reception at the Goldfuss Museum.