[This is part 4 in an ongoing series on our recent PLOS ONE paper on sauropod neck cartilage.

So, I’ve been thinking a lot about this interesting situation with Elsevier, which David Tempest’s remarks at the Oxford Evolution or Revolution debate highlighted: they can’t afford (literally or figuratively) to tell us how much they charge different institutions for the same stuff.

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The Scholarly Kitchen is the blog of the Society of Scholarly Publishers, and as such discusses lots of issues that are of interest to us. But a while back, I gave up commenting there two reasons. First, it seemed rare that fruitful discussions emerged, rather than mere echo-chamberism;

As we all know, University libraries have to pay expensive subscription fees to scholarly publishers such as Elsevier, Springer, Wiley and Informa, so that their researchers can read articles written by their colleagues and donated to those publishers.

In his post on Vicki’s new book Broken Bones , Matt told us his twelve-step process for producing stippled illustrations like this one of a crushed skull, which became the cover image of the book: {.aligncenter .size-full .wp-image-9460 loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“9460” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2013/12/18/vickis-book-broken-bones-is-out/skull-drawing-f1-original-on-white/”

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I thought Elsevier was already doing all it could to alienate the authors who freely donate their work to shore up the corporation’s obscene profits. The thousands of takedown notices sent to Academia.edu represent at best a grotesque PR mis-step, an idiot manoeuvre that I thought Elsevier would immediately regret and certainly avoid repeating.

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It’s now widely understood among researchers that the impact factor (IF) is a statistically illiterate measure of the quality of a paper.

Gotta say, I did not see that coming. Today sees the publication of a new paper by Emma Schachner and colleagues in Nature, documenting for the first time that unidirectional, flow-through breathing–previously only known in birds and crocodilians–happens in freakin’ monitor lizards.