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[ 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.

So sings Dot in Move On , the climactic number of Stephen Sondheim’s Pulitzer Prize-winning music Sunday in the Park with George , which on the surface is about the post-impressionist painter Georges Seurat, but turns out to be a study of obsession and creativity.

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I got in a conversation recently with a friend who is about to have his first paper published. It’s been through review and is now accepted at a well-respected old-school journal owned by a legacy publisher. It’s not an open-access journal, and he asked my advice on how he could make the paper open access. We had a fruitful discussion, and we agreed that I’d write up the conclusions for this blog.

Regular readers will remember Jennifer Raff’s guest post on the PeerJ blog, How To Become Good At Peer-Review ; and my response to it, Three points of disagreement . Today I read a very different take on this piece by Chorasimilarity, who is a frequent commenter here at SV-POW!: Two pieces of all too obvious propaganda . Chorasimilarity starts by taking the original piece to task — fairly, I think — for

Jennifer Raff wrote a useful guest post on the PeerJ Blog: How To Become Good At Peer-Review. Most of its advice is excellent , and I’d heartily recommend it to anyone starting out on reviewing. But there are three points where I disagree with it. Here are the three things Jennifer said, and my counter-points.

It is, truly, excellent news that the US budget passed by Congress on Thursday night includes open-access language that effectively extends the NIH open access policy to many other federal agencies. It’s a huge and important step forward.