Stop what you’re doing and go read Cameron Neylon’s blog. Specifically, read his new post, Improving on “Access to Research”. Regular readers of SV-POW! might legitimately complain that my so-called advocacy consists mostly of whining about how rubbish things are.

{.aligncenter .size-full .wp-image-9695 loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“9695” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2014/02/08/photography-and-illustration-talk-part-2-taking-good-photographs/illustration-talk-slide-9/” orig-file=“https://svpow.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/illustration-talk-slide-9.jpg” orig-size=“1280,960” comments-opened=“1”

In a recent comment, Doug wrote: If I want to be a truly educated observer of Tyrannosaurus rex mounts, what 5 things should I look for in a reconstruction to assess if it is true to our current scientific understanding? I’m not talking tail dragging/upright at this point…we are well past that I hope.

Recently I had the opportunity to give a talk on photographing specimens and preparing illustrations in Jim Parham’s phylogenetics course at Cal State Fullerton. Jim is having each student (1) write a description of a specimen, (2) run a phylogenetic analysis, and (3) do some kind of calibration on their tree. I think that’s rad.

From the files of J. K. Rowling. Publisher #1 Dear Ms. Rowling, Thank you for submitting your manuscript Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. We will be happy to consider it for publication. However we have some concerns about the excessive length of this manuscript. We usually handle works of 5-20 pages, sometimes as much as 30 pages. Your 1337-page manuscript exceeds these limits, and requires some trimming.

Lost in the stacks bills itself as “the one-and-only research-library rock’n’ roll radio show”. Every Friday, they broadcast a one-hour show on WREK Atlanta, where they chat about research-library issues and play tenuously relevant songs. The week’s show features Matt and me chatting about open access (and a bit about sauropods), interspersed with dinosaur-themed songs.

{.aligncenter .size-full .wp-image-9652 loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“9652” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2014/01/31/pathological-mammal-skulls-from-the-california-academy-of-sciences/calacad-skulls-wall-of-voodoo/” orig-file=“https://svpow.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/calacad-skulls-wall-of-voodoo.jpg” orig-size=“2272,1704” comments-opened=“1”

[ Introduction from Mike. I’m on the OKFN’s open-access mailing list, where we’re currently embroiled in a rather tedious reiteration of the debate about the merits of the various open-access licences.

Following on from Matt’s post about the difficulty of photographing big specimens without distortion, I thought I’d have a play with our best Sauroposeidon C8 photo, which I think is this one: {.aligncenter .size-full .wp-image-9635 loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“9635” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2014/01/30/playing-with-sauroposeidon-photos/sauroposeidon-c8-alone/”

Here are two photos of what I infer to be C8 of OMNH 53062, the holotype of Sauroposeidon . The top one was taken by Mike during our visit to the OMNH in 2007. If you’re a regular you may recognize it from several older posts: 1, 2, 3. The bottom one was taken by Mike Callaghan, the former museum photographer at the OMNH, sometime in 1999 or 2000.

My thanks to Steve Wang for pointing out that The Paleontological Society (in the USA, not to be confused the UK’s Palaeontological Association) has a new open access policy. The highlights are: Positives It’s good to see this real step forwards, and a lot of people are going to be particularly pleased that both Gold and Green are on offer.