Just a quick post to link to all six (so far) installments of the “necks lie” series. I need this because I want to cite all the “necks lie” posts in a paper that I’ll shortly submit, and it seems better to cite a single page than four of them.

Just a quick post today, to refute an incorrect idea about open access that has unfortunately been propagated from time to time. That is the idea that if (say) PLOS were acquired by a barrier-based publisher such as Taylor and Francis, then its papers could be hidden behind paywalls and effectively lost to the world.

It’s nearly two years since Alexander Brown wrote Open access: why academic publishers still add value for the Guardian, in which he listed ways that he feels publishers make a contribution. I wrote a lengthy comment in response — long enough that it got truncated at 5000 characters and I had to post a second comment with the tail end. At the time, I intended to turn that comment into an SV-POW!

Last night, I did a Twitter interview with Open Access Nigeria (@OpenAccessNG). To make it easy to follow in real time, I created a list whose only members were me and OA Nigeria. But because Twitter lists posts in reverse order, and because each individual tweet is encumbered with so much chrome, it’s rather an awkward way to read a sustained argument. So here is a transcript of those tweets, only lightly edited. They are in bold;

In light of yesterday’s tutorial on choosing titles, here are the titles of all my own published papers (including co-authored ones), in chronological order, with my own sense of whether I’m happy with them now I look back. All the full references are on my publications page (along with the PDFs). I’ll mark the good ones in green, the bad ones in red and the merely OK in blue.

Over on his (excellent) Better Posters blog, Zen Faulks has been critiquing a poster on affective feedback. The full title of the poster is “Studying the effects of affective feedback in embodied tutors”. Among other points, Zen makes this one: I think that’s right on target. Unfortunately, we in palaeo are mired in an ancient tradition of uninformative paper titles.

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After the sheep skull ten days ago, here is Logan the wallaby in all his glory: {.aligncenter .size-full .wp-image-10921 loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“10921” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2014/10/15/heres-that-wallaby-skull-multiview-you-ordered/wallaby-skull-multiview/” orig-file=“https://svpow.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/wallaby-skull-multiview.jpeg” orig-size=“6833,5082” comments-opened=“1”

Remember I picked up those three sheep skulls (and some other bones, including a complete neck) from a shallow pit in a field near where we live? Here is first of the skulls, cleaned up and photographed in orthogonal views.

Just over a year ago, in his write-up of the Edinburgh SVPCA, Matt included a photo of me standing in front of a Giant Irish Elk ( Megaloceros ), positioned so that the antlers seem to be growing out of my head. Matt finished his post with a background-free version of that photo, and commented: It has come to pass.

Just a quick photo-post today. A couple of months ago, walking around the fields near our house, I found a broad shallow pit with a lot of a sheep skeletal elements in it. I took my youngest son out on an expedition, and we rescued the good material. I’ve cleaned up the first two (of three) skulls. Here is the smaller of the two — which is also more complete, and the big one has lost its nasals.