Long, long ago — back in 2010! — Gordon Dzemski of the University of Flensburg, Germany, sent me a copy of a miniposter that he had prepared, and invited me to share it on SV-POW!. Somehow, it fell through the cracks, and I never did so. Time to fix that!

As is now well known, Edwin Mellen Press sued librarian Dale Askey for posting a negative review of their products. Now they have threatened to sue the Scholarly Kitchen for writing about this, and also to sue one of the commenters on that site. I, of course, am not a librarian, and so have no opinion of my own regarding Edwin Mellen Press.

I was struck by this bit of prevarication in Richard Van Noorden’s new piece on open access. First the set-up: So far, so good. And then we have this: What does the weasel-word “appropriate” mean here? Is Alicia saying that she doesn’t think what Eisen’s saying is correct ? No, if that’s what she meant, she would have said so. “I don’t think it’s right to say X” is a much stronger statement.

My thanks for Richard Van Noorden for drawing my attention to his new piece Open access: The true cost of science publishing in Nature . I wrote a detailed comment on this article, but when I went to post it, I was told “This account has been banned from commenting due to posting of comments classified as inappropriate or other violations of our Terms of Service”: {.aligncenter .size-full .wp-image-8169 loading=“lazy”

There’s a good, balanced piece by Stephen Pincock in the new Nature , on the question of whether early-career researchers should publish their work in open-access journals.

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Here’s an update from the road–get ready for some crappy raw images, because that’s all I have the time or energy to post (with one exception). {.aligncenter .size-full .wp-image-8148 loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“8148” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2013/03/24/omnh-1331-is-my-new-hero/omnh-1331/” orig-file=“https://svpow.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/omnh-1331.jpg” orig-size=“2272,1704” comments-opened=“1”

As I noted in a comment on the previous post, titanosaurs have stupid cervicals. As evidence, here is as gallery of titanosaur cervicals featured previously on SV-POW!. 1. From Whassup with your segmented lamina, Uberabatitan ribeiroi ?, an anterior cervical of that very animal, from Salgado and Carvalho (2008: fig. 5). As well as the titular segmented lamina, note the ridiculous ventral positioning of the cervical rib.

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The problem I find myself reading a lot recently about “portable peer-review” — posts like Take me as I am, and my paper as it is? by scicurious at Neurotic Physiology , which excellently diagnoses a terrible, wasteful problem in scientific publishing : What a waste! What a drag on the progress of science! What a ridiculous situation we’re got ourselves into, with our chasing-after-prestigious-journals games.