I’m gathering all seven parts of Tutorial 19 (“Open Access definitions and clarifications”) in one place for easy reference. Here they are: Part 1: what actually is Open Access?

In what is by now a much-reported story, @DNLee, who writes the Urban Scientist blog on the Scientific American blog network, was invited by Biology Online to write a guest-post for their blog.

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The LSE Impact blog has a new post, Berlin 11 satellite conference encourages students and early stage researchers to influence shift towards Open Access. Thinking about this,  Jon Tennant (@Protohedgehog) just tweeted this important idea: Would be nice to see a breakdown of OA vs non-OA publications based on career-stage of first author. Might be a wake-up call. It would be very useful.

Suppose, hypothetically, that you worked for an organisation whose nominal goal is the advancement of science, but which has mutated into a highly profitable subscription-based publisher. And suppose you wanted to construct a study that showed the alternative — open-access publishing — is inferior.

For a palaeontology blog, we don’t talk a lot about geology. Time to fix that, courtesy of my middle son Matthew, currently 13 years old, who made this helpful guide to the rock cycle as Geology homework.

An extraordinary study has come to light today, showing just how shoddy peer-review standards are at some journals. Evidently fascinated by Science ’s eagerness to publish the fatally flawed Arsenic Life paper, John Bohannon conceived the idea of constructing a study so incredibly flawed that it didn’t even include a control.

A few years ago, in my programming day-job, we had a customer who we were providing with software components and a bit of custom development. While this was going on, we had a sequence of meetings with them in which we pitched several possible system designs, explaining how we could help them use our components in various ways. After this had been going on for a while, our contact at the customer had to take us to one side.

Anyone who’s found the SV-POW! Tutorials useful will also like the excellent, detailed osteology posts on Tom Carr’s newish blog Tyrannosauroidea Central. Highly recommended — especially for those, like me, who have a lot to learn about skulls.

I started teaching fifteen years ago, as a graduate student at the University of Oklahoma in the spring of 1998. This document is a summary of everything I’ve learned about how students learn from then up until now. I’m setting it down in print because I found myself giving the same advice over and over again to students in one-on-one sessions—and at least for some of them, it’s made a difference. Here’s the summary.

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