More from my flying visit to the Harvard Museum of Natural History. I found this exhibition of bird eggs very striking. In particular, it was shocking how much bigger the elephant-bird egg is than that of the ostrich.

Picture-of-the-day post: a couple of days ago I had the chance to spend an hour in a very brief visit to the Harvard Museum of Natural History. Needless to say, that was a pathetically inadequate amount of time to look at even one of the public galleries properly.

I am briefly quoted in Times Higher Education ’s new article about the White House public access petition Since my response had to be quite dramatically cut for space, here is the full text of what I sent the writer, Paul Jump: (They managed to cut that down to 69 words!)

I don’t have time to write about this properly, but a few people have asked me about the new Sellers et al. (2012) paper on measuring the masses of extinct animals — in particular, the Berlin Giraffatitan — by having a CAD program generate minimal complex hulls around various body regions.

Oh dear, this is depressing to watch. The Problem Last year (2011-12-01), Peter Murray Rust of Cambridge University published an article in BMC’s Journal of Cheminformatics — which, like all BMC journals, is owned by Springer.

I just sent this letter to Matthew Cockerill, the co-founder of the open-access publisher BioMed Central, which was acquired by Springer a few years ago. It arose from a mistake on Springer’s part that was discussed on Twitter initially. As I wrote this I didn’t particularly intend it to be an open letter.

An article in Times Higher Education tells of a new report, The Potential Effect of Making Journals Free After a Six Month Embargo , prepared by Linda Bennett of Gold Leaf for the Association of Learned, Professional and Society Publishers [ALPSP] and our old friends The Publishers Association. And this report contains very good news.

1. Publishing economics 101 Although publishing journal articles is now much less costly than it used to be (thanks to machine-readable submissions, paperless electronic distribution, etc.) it still costs some money to get a research paper from manuscript to its published form. So publishers — unless supported by grants, by government agencies or similar — need a revenue stream.

The annual meeting of the Society for Scholarly Publishing is happening right now — May 30th till June 1, in Arlington, Virginia.

Scopus bills itself as “the largest abstract and citation database of research literature and quality web sources covering nearly 18,000 titles from more than 5,000 publishers.” Sounds useful. But it’s useless. Literally.

A brief notice: A while back we set up a page of “open access bio and palaeo” links on this site — links to open-access journals, individual researchers’ pages that contain PDFs, etc. Recently, Matt and I realised that neither one of us had the time or inclination to keep this up to date — fixing broken links, finding new sites, etc.