Last Tuesday Mike popped up in Gchat to ask me about sauropod neck masses.  We started throwing around some numbers, derived from volumetric estimates and some off-the-cuff guessing.

{.aligncenter .size-large .wp-image-7986 loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“7986” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2013/03/03/the-recapture-creek-sauropod-the-reveal/recapture-creek-comparo-with-measurements/” orig-file=“https://svpow.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/recapture-creek-comparo-with-measurements.jpg” orig-size=“709,900” comments-opened=“1”

The progressive RCUK policy on open access has recently come under fire, particularly from humanities scholars, for favouring Gold OA over Green.

From Jensen (1987, page 604): “In 1985 I found the proximal third of an extremely large sauropod femur (Figs. 8A, 12A) in a uranium miner’s front yard in southern Utah.  The head of this femur is 1.67 m (5’6″) in circumference and was collected from the Recapture Creek Member of the the Morrison Formation in Utah near the Arizona border.

I was reading Stephen Curry’s excellent summary of Monday’s Royal Society’s conference on “Open access in the UK and what it means for scientific research”. One point that Stephen made is: As an analysis of the difficulties of Green OA, this is admirably precise.

{.aligncenter .size-large .wp-image-7904 loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“7904” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2013/02/27/get-down-get-fuzzy-speculative-juvenile-apatosaurus/fuzzy-apato-juvenile-by-niroot/” orig-file=“https://svpow.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/fuzzy-apato-juvenile-by-niroot.jpg” orig-size=“1400,633” comments-opened=“1”

My spouse, Vicki, the other Dr. Wedel, is a physical and forensic anthropologist. And she’s one of a very small number of scientists who have (a) learned something new about the human body, and (b) used it to help identify dead people.

I was cruising the monographs the other night, looking for new ideas, when the humerus of Opisthocoelicaudia stopped me dead in my tracks.

Well, yesterday was insane. In the morning, we had the UK House of Lords report on its inquiry into open access: fearful, compromised, regressive, and representing the latest stage in the inexorable defanging of RCUK’s policy. I happened to be going out yesterday evening; when I left the house it had been the worst day for open access in recent memory.

Here’s a timeline of what’s happened with the RCUK’s open access policy (with thanks to Richard Van Noorden for helping to elucidate it). March 2012: draft policy released for comment. As I noted in my submission, it was excellent.

A while back, I submitted evidence to the House of Lords’ inquiry into Open Access — pointlessly, as it turns out, since they were too busy listening to the whining of publishers, and of misinformed traditionalist academics who hadn’t taken the trouble to learn about OA before making public statements about it. Today the Lords’ report [PDF version] is out, summarised here. And it’s a crushing disappointment.