A package!  A package has arrived!

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Two things to briefly report. First, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council has just announced its new policy that “all published EPSRC-funded research articles submitted for publication from 1 September 2011 must be made available on an Open Access basis”.  This policy brings EPSRC in line with other UK Research Councils (EPSRC is one of seven), the Wellcome Trust, and US funding bodies such as the NSF and NIH.

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Just  a quick note to let anyone who’s not on the Dinosaur Mailing List know that the DML has spawned a new list dedicated to the history of palaeontology.  It’s hosted at Google Groups, so you have the choice of subscribing to it as a mailing list or reading it as a forum.

You don’t need to read this. You can read Scott Aaronson’s Review of The Access Principle and Tim O’Reilly’s Piracy is Progressive Taxation and connect the blindingly obvious dots. OTOH, Aaronson and O’Reilly wrote their pieces for the same reason I’m writing this one: some things are not blinding obvious to everyone. And sometimes the situation makes me mad enough to take a swing. So here goes.

A month ago today, George Monbiot’s piece Academic publishers make Murdoch look like a socialist was published in The Guardian.  It stirred up a lot of debate, and has garnered 365 comments so far, most of them strongly supportive.

Preparing a talk is a time-consuming process, and there’s no question that getting the slides ready is where the bulk of that time goes.  But unless you understand exactly what it is that you’re going to talk about, even the best slides won’t rescue your talk from mediocrity, so before you fire up PowerPoint, go and read part 1 of this tutorial, on finding the narrative.  Seriously.

Matt, Darren and I were all in Lyme Regis last week for SVPCA 2011, the Symposium of Vertebrate Paleontology and Comparative Anatomy — an excellent technical conference similar in some ways to SVP, but much nicer because it’s small enough that you can see all the talks and meet all the people.

With our baby’s appearance in National Geographic this week, she’s now been in four mainstream magazines: That’s National Geographic at top left, Macleans next to it; The Scientist at bottom left, and National Geographic Kids next to that.