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.

Today’s Guardian has a piece by Graham Taylor, director of academic, educational and professional publishing at the Publishers Association, entitled Attacking publishers will not make open access any more sustainable . It’s such a crock that I felt compelled to respond point-by-point in the comments.

My mind was blown yesterday by a tweet from Stuart Shieber: @bmcmatt: … and $585 to email a copy to a colleague. Someone (@maryannliebert) didn't get the memo on what "#openaccess" means.

{.alignright .size-medium .wp-image-6270 loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“6270” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2012/05/22/open-access-gathers-pace-and-you-can-make-a-difference/barack-obama/” orig-file=“https://svpow.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/barack-obama-007.jpg” orig-size=“460,276” comments-opened=“1” image-meta=“{"aperture":"0","credit":"Photograph: Jewel

Good news! If you want to read research that was funded by the U.S. National Instututes of Health (NIH), you can. Their public access policy means that papers published on their dime become universally accessible in PubMed Central.

[The title of this post is an allusion to Matt’s older post Authors versus publishers.] Following on from yesterday’s rant, I’m moved to write this one by Stephen Curry’s report on the latest Finch Committee meeting.

I just read this in a Times Higher Eduction report on David Willetts’s recent speech: Oh, so publishers “will not accept” Green OA? Where the hell do they get the arrogance to assume that a funding body needs their permission to say how their money is going to be spent?

Here’s where I thought Dave Hone’s Academics on Archosaurs series was going: Be honest: aren’t you just a little disappointed that it’s not? [The actual Tom Holtz article is here.

In the recent post on serial variation in sauropod cervicals, I wrote: Even in ‘adult’ sauropods like the big mounted Apatosaurus and Diplodocus skeletons, the anterior cervicals are less complex than the posterior ones.

In my 2009 brachiosaur paper, I gave rather short shrift to the sacrum of Brachiosaurus — in part because there is no really good sacrum of Giraffatitan to compare it to. Also my own photos of the sacrum, taken back before I figured out how to photograph big bones, are all pretty terrible. Happily, Phil Mannion took some much better photos and gave us permission to use them.

How things have always been Traditional scientific journals ask peer-reviewers to do two things: assess whether a manuscript is scientifically sound, and judge whether it’s sufficiently important to appear in the particular journal it’s been submitted to. So I could have sent my 2009 paper on Brachiosaurus to Nature , and the reviewers would (presumably) have said “this is good science, but not exciting or sexy enough for